Stack Exchange used to be able to function like a smaller company...until they couldn't. They don't seem to know how to be a bigger company yet, so sometimes they step in it badly. This time they not only stepped in it badly but they then reached for the shovel to dig even deeper.

Background: If you visit any site on the network you'll see, partway down the right column, a list of random-seeming questions from other network sites. These are called "hot network questions", and the communities have been asking for years for SE to tune the algorithm that chooses questions. (It responds to velocity, not quality, and thus optimizes for controversy.) People complained; nothing happened.

In mid-October somebody who turned out to be a troll complained on Twitter about two such questions, seen on Stack Overflow, from the site Interpersonal Skills. The title of one of them was not great (which is what edits are for); the other one was fine. But this person got a rant on and has followers. Within 40 minutes, an employee responded with something like "that's not ok; I've just removed that site from the hot list and we'll look into what's going on with that site". Great way to throw a community under the bus there. (The community wasn't notified until hours later.) Meanwhile, one of the moderators on that site, who I know to be a clueful and thoughtful person, responded to the tweet (in retrospect a bad idea) and tried to help. Other people responded too because, hey, that's how Twitter works.

So then our Twitter troll (twoll?) ranted some more because people were responding, and accused the moderator and others by name of "sealioning" (apparently a form of trolling) and generally spouted outrage, and a different employee jumped in and said something like "if those messages came from mods we'll fire them" -- without even asking first what these allegedly-trolling messages said. (The employee thought they were direct messages, meaning you'd have to ask because DMs are private.) So the employee jumped to a faulty conclusion and validated the troll without seeming to consider that maybe the facts were not as presented. Read more…

In response to Dear Stack Overflow, we need to talk, Jon Ericson, then a community manager at SO, wrote Chaos, Lost Trust, Grief, and Restoration. His post begins:

Over the weekend, one of our most respected users and moderator extraordinaire, Monica Cellio, wrote a post that shook me up. Please read it if you haven't. Come back, if you like, but please read that post first.

I'm not going to detail what happened or why; that story belongs to others. I'm going to venture a guess from knowing Monica for years that her words reflect a sense Stack Overflow, my employer, betrayed her. As operators of the Stack Exchange network, it was our responsibility to protect the volunteers who make it run from outside threats and we failed to do that job. It doesn't much matter that the action we took was minor in the grand scheme of things or that our intentions were to protect the community from a different sort of harm. We broke trust and our relationship will never be the same.

He said a lot more in the post. I wrote the following in comments: Read more…