> We know that people who contribute by asking have a harder time earning privileges than people who focus on answering. Independent research suggests this disproportionately affects women:
> > We also see that women contribute differently to building the community’s knowledge base: they are asking more questions. Stack Overflow’s current system strongly incentivize answering by rewarding upvotes on answers twice as much upvotes on questions.
True. Worth noting that this is coming up because the volunteers are being mistreated and people were looking for laws that could protect them, and may have found more than they were looking for.
- Stack Overflow illegally changed the content license without permission from authors (Creative Commons allows such license changes for adaptations but not collections such as Stack Exchange) and refuse to clarify their legal justification (do they feel they have the right to change to any license they choose?): https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...
FWIW every job I've had in my 7-year career came from connections that stated though Stack Overflow. No one's hiring on the basis of reputation score, but many employers do reach out to users who have repeatedly demonstrated their technical communication and knowledge.
Some context, although really this is the culmination of a five year breakdown in community trust and there's way too much background to sum up briefly.
When I replied to their survey that I wanted "tech articles written by other developers", I was imagining a platform for Stack Overflow authors to contribute longer-form work -- an idea that's been floated by staff for most of the life of the site! I wasn't expecting random cross-promotional content.
> She made it clear talking to a journalist from The Register
I'm not sure what you're referring to: Monica didn't talk to anyone at The Register..? Only Stack Overflow knew that article was coming.
If there was a formal policy in place, Monica would not violate it. If the differences were unresolvable, she would have resigned, but only after looking for a compromise.
Under no circumstances would she have broken with policy and needed to be forcibly removed. We have eight years of character evidence from her, including several posts from Stack Exchange employees over the years commending her reasonableness and contributions. Sara Chipps' actions ignore all of that and assumed the worst.
There are a lot of very toxic moderators on the network.
As far as I recognize, none of them are among the resigned. They'll probably be more prominent now that reasonable kind people like Monica have been removed.
I agree it should have been clarified, but the initial intended audience was meta users who would be familiar. Elected moderators need to accept the https://stackoverflow.com/legal/moderator-agreement agreement before they're giving their privileges, and they have to agree not to disclose any information that they get obtain using their mod access, such as the private discussions between moderators and staff here.
It might not be legally binding, but Stack Overflow could plausibly delete their account as punishment.
> We know that people who contribute by asking have a harder time earning privileges than people who focus on answering. Independent research suggests this disproportionately affects women:
> > We also see that women contribute differently to building the community’s knowledge base: they are asking more questions. Stack Overflow’s current system strongly incentivize answering by rewarding upvotes on answers twice as much upvotes on questions.