> Sara Chipps, Director of Public Q&A, left responses on various moderators' resignation posts maligning my character. You can see an example on my Mi Yodeya post. The cut-and-pasted message included, specifically referring to me: "When a moderator violates [inclusion and respect], we will always do our best to resolve it with them privately." Both halves of that statement are false. [1]
Let's call publicly talking about an observant Jewish ex-mod on Rosh Hashana a lagniappe.
This pretty strongly seems StackOverflow saying use personal pronouns and don't question our policy, or GTFO.
Which is of course fine -- their house, their rules -- and frankly something I generally support. But given both the willingness to de-mod Monica, ghost her, and then (again, per Monica) lie about it in public, and (2) be far more responsive to a random twitter message than multiple longstanding mod requests, SO's position is quite clear.
So yes, mods saving SO millions of dollars of paid employee time per year should certainly re-evaluate their relationship with their corporate beneficiary.
And the more points you have, the upper you stay in the ranks and you can always embed their badge in your website.
So, yes, they don't earn money, but they receive visibility
SO also has a jobs site, which I suppose can be linked to your profile if you want it to.
A company I consulted at one time was trying to improve it's profile for job applicants so they wanted people to put up their github profiles and SO profiles in some advertisements or whatever they were doing - I think it was on linkedIn they were doing this. Anyway I think they stopped because nobody had a particularly high impressive number so why would you even want to do that (but they did it)
Given both that suspicion, and how they seem to behave about prominent github profiles and such, I think that being in the top 20th percentile or so on SO and a strong focus on the tags that correlate to the terms in a job announcement might be a big draw to some HR people/managers who just really don't want to mess up one more time! After the fifth complaint or so of programmers we hire don't know how to code or whatever - it might be soothing.
I think some sympathy is due for the working-for-free workers on stack exchange, at least from us, Hacker News' unpaid content authors.
In return they get points.
Points allow for showing how important they are to the community.
Points that have zero cash value.
Disgruntled volunteers are not going to be easy to replace.
This probably won't continue to feel satisfying if SE doesn't show respect for its volunteers. The force multiplier only exists because the moderators keep the site clean and well-organized. It sounds like SE both explicitly and implicitly showed gratitude for this effort, but now they are failing to do so.
if you want to start assigning a dollar value to subjective experiences like that, the argument goes both ways. you should pay more to people who experience more emotional distress from their jobs. but in that case a majority of companies would probably go bankrupt, since most people despise their jobs.
Agree. Maybe it should cease exploiting the good will of its users and either pay them, or wither away.