Why has only a minority of SE moderators indicated their support for the "strike"?

Question

As of the time of writing, 113 out of 538 total Stack Exchange network moderators have signed the open strike letter, a percentage of 21%, and this number continues to grow."

This is claimed here, and the current number is 125, which is still nothing more than a minority. So can this be interpreted as the majority of moderators does not support the strike? Or do they choose not to voice their support out of fear of reprisal? Is there any valid reason for a moderator to abstain? Like having better side deals so only the ones not getting a cut are protesting?

If most moderators do not see the merit of the strike, why should any other persons take them seriously? Do people not learn anything from Reddit blackouts?

Is there any inconvenient information that certain individuals backing the strike (possibly with vested interests) are not sharing with the average SE user?

Are the participating moderators truly acting on "community consensus" when they could not even get half of SE moderators on board? Should they be subjected to the electoral process again, in their respective SEs, to establish if they still command the community support to serve as moderators on "strike"?

Answer 1

Well, we are not exactly 'organised'—a lot is being done off site on SE's request and knowledge of the strike is word of mouth. There's also moderators who support the goals of the strike, but are not striking.

So can this be interpreted as the majority of moderators do not support the strike?

It means a significant number of moderators are not striking. However, several sites, such as Stack Overflow and Super User, have fairly high numbers of moderators striking. There's a distinction between 'not striking' and 'do not support the strike'.

Or they chose not to voice their support out of for fear of reprisal

Stack Exchange hasn't threatened us with reprisals of any sort.

If most moderators do not see the merit of the strike, why should any other persons take them seriously?

Well—without the strike, it would have been a quiet, internal dispute and chances that this and other changes could have been railroaded over us.

We have press coverage as part of other issues.

There are many references to our strike in the article, but this is especially important:

"This is the same complaint identified by Stack Overflow’s mods: that AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible. It’s fluent but not grounded in real-world experience, and so it takes time and expertise to unpick. If machine-generated content supplants human authorship, it would be hard—impossible, even—to fully map the damage."

People should take it seriously, because it affects the quality of the content here—and broadly the usefulness of the Internet. People should take us seriously, because it’s the right thing to do for the long term good of the network and of the Internet.

Do people not learn anything from Reddit blackouts?

That a company can be toxic, and try to bully moderators into doing what they feel is best for their bottom line, even if the community is hurt? And folks finding creative ways to get around it?

It’s a great object lesson on how to rapidly get bad media coverage and mess up badly.

It’s a lesson that good community relations is good business and trying to force a community to do your will is a little like trying to catch a clowder of greased cats that don't want to be caught.

That there's been more than one blackout, and they're trying the route of trying to crush the resistance of the very people who provide value to the site to changes that adversely affect the site by removing community volunteers who've put time and effort into their communities... yeah, people really are not learning anything from these things.

You can't write/run community software without a community.

Answer 2

I didn't join the strike; this doesn't imply I don't support the strike.

Firstly, I simply don't tend to join strikes (it's just not something I personally do). But I also feel there's a lot of nuance to this: I don't want to nail my colours to the mast, but rather retain the flexibility to change my opinion as the situation develops. And, honestly, the sites I moderate would barely notice—they're fairly quiet on the moderation front. And I don't think I have the personality to to deliberately ignore someone harming the sites I moderate. Besides, joining a strike may result in leopards eating my face: I fully intend to use AI to improve my posts (as I did moments ago here) and I don't want to be flagged for it.

I believe Stack Exchange has a point, and we need more clarity in how AI is detected, and under what circumstances AI posts needs moderation. Judging from some of the flags I've seen, I'd argue we need better communication with the userbase as to what is banned and where. But I also believe Stack Exchange overreacted in their strong ruling against AI moderation. And on top of this, there's a bunch of pragmatic matters that come into play (sustainability, AI detection, AI accuracy, improvements in AI, workarounds, plagiarism, etc.). I hope we can find a middle ground and move forward.

I also believe Stack Exchange staff are fairly open and reasonable (how many staff members of YouTube have you ever spoken to? What about Reddit? Twitter?), and also have a vested interest in keeping crap off of Stack Exchange. I'd rather just discuss all this with Stack Exchange and figure out a way forward, and it looks like strike negotiations are happening. Hopefully the AI-moderation pendulum will stop somewhere most people find agreeable.

(Although, I must admit, it's rather interesting seeing what happened with spam.)

Answer 3

Are you actually asking a question? It is starting to feel like you're using this entire "just asking questions" spiel as a rhetorical device to make outlandish statements and cast thinly veiled aspersions.

Summarizing your "question" and subsequent comments, you're insinuating that:

• The majority of moderators don't support the strike.
• Moderators who don't support the strike have "side deals" in place and striking moderators are "not getting a cut".
• "Certain individuals" backing the strike are doing so because of "vested interests" that can't see the light of day.
• Some participants are astroturfing because they stand to gain financially from the strike.
• Some of the Stack Exchange staff are colluding with volunteers to undermine its business interests.

We can easily turn all this JAQing off around:

• Since almost no moderators are speaking out against the strike, could we conclude that the majority of moderators is actually supporting it?
• Can we assume that people who are voicing opposition to the strike stand to gain financially from moderators continuing to provide their free services to Stack Exchange Inc.?
• Is it possible that people speaking out against the strike on Meta are astroturfing because they have a vested interest in the AI market?

See how that works? We're getting nowhere.

If you have actual evidence demonstrating clear opposition to the strike from moderators, or evidence supporting claims that moderators and/or employees stand to gain financially or otherwise from supporting or opposing the strike, please present that. As long as you don't, you're just stirring the pot, and your motivations to do so remain unclear at best. Or, to quote you directly:

Quite often what is not being said is the real answer to the question

Answer 4

I have not actively joined the strike. That said, I think it is pretty obvious from my recent Meta posts and comments where I stand. I'm leaving an answer here because I do want to contribute a somewhat different perspective of why I'm not on strike

On the site I moderate, there is an alarmingly high possibility of getting a well written, well-formatted, seemingly reasonable answer, that can lead a poster astray into making decisions that can literally ruin their life (and the lives of ones they love). I just don't know if I could handle the guilt of letting something like that slip by. I've been highly active on forums on the same topic (immigration) where I have seen that tragically play out.

It is my hope that eventually, the leadership at StackExchange realize:

1. They have a reputation to protect, and allowing swathes of deceptive, untested, and entirely incorrect, information to be on their site is a threat to the sustainability of the business. A business which is entirely dependent on the trust and name it is built upon, by users around the world.

2. That they are inviting severe liability, especially from sites that may have a large percentage of sensitive topics that rather critically need correct, verifiable information.

3. That they have a limited, and probably shrinking, supply of free labor in reviewers and curators. And that they should do everything they can to support not only the labor they have, but have policies that can perhaps even grow that labor force.

4. That this is yet another well marketed technology aimed at machines doing computer programming so that humans don't have to. Those of us who are older have seen this ship sail in before, possibly even a couple of times in their career. And by all indications from the looks of things, we're going to watch this one sail on away just like the others.

Eventually, it is my hope that StackExchange takes the side of the moderators. This position is the strongest for the future of the business on several fronts.

I personally don't have a big issue with the chat LLM's. In fact, the technophile in me thinks some of them are kind of cool in some ways. Sure, there are some persistent issues but, like any technology, I do think these can be worked out to fit well into certain confined contexts.

It is always my hope after these big schisms (been through a few of these as well), that some things get better. Better communication between SE and the moderators/reviewers/curators/active users. Better forethought on how they proceed with the business. Better tools for us all to work with. That hope is still rather unfulfilled. Maybe this time will be different....

Answer 5

Many sites in the Stack Exchange network have their own community (including moderators) that is rather independent from the rest of the network. These communities have their own issues and discussions on moderation standards, and SE Inc. does not interfere in this.

For example at my main site TeX.SE we have an unofficial 'no downvote policy', and we answer simple questions in comments and then close them with the custom close reason 'answered in comments'. Both of these policies work well for the scale and topic of the site. Similarly, the issues of the strike (ChatGPT, data dumps, SE talking to the press) are not very relevant for the community at TeX.SE, and neither are previous issues like pronouns, toxicity, or technical issues like the review workflow or the Ask Question Wizard.

The independence of the communities and the lack of relevance for most issues leads to a more neutral stance regarding all things 'political', such as the strike. The attitude often is something like "let those folks at the big sites do their thing and we will run our little corner of the network in peace". This also means that the support for a strike will be lower.

When I asked the TeX.SE moderators in chat about the strike (see https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63731728#63731728), one of them replied that he wanted to "err on the side of caution" and not delete suspected ChatGPT posts because it might be a false positive, and instead deal with them using normal moderation. As the moderator mentioned, this is only possible if the number of such posts is low. Another moderator remarked that he understood the position of moderators on other sites, that have to deal with a large influx of ChatGPT content. This illustrates my point above: the sites are perceived (also by moderators) as largely disjoint, so there is no automatic 'strike solidarity'. As an analogy, if public bus drivers are striking this does not mean that school teachers will join the strike, because the issues of the bus drivers are not the same as those of the school teachers, even if they are paid and regulated by the same government.

There are no repercussions from SE, but of course a strike does affect the community, because flags are not handled, there may be more spam, etc. This can be a reason not to strike, i.e., not wanting to harm your own community for goals that don't really apply to your site.

Personally I feel that it does make sense for moderators on smaller sites to join the strike, because the actions of SE management are detrimental for the network as a whole. But I do see the reasons for not striking as outlined above. In that light, a participation of 23% of all moderators is actually rather substantial I think.

Answer 6

Answering the update (last paragraph) of your question:

Yes, the participating moderators are obviously acting in the interest of the community. I don't share their opinion, but reading their statements I have no doubt about their intention. We elected them because we trust that they serve the community, not because of their behavior in a given subject.

It's like we elect politicians. We don't know everything that will have to be decided during the next years, but we trust that certain people will represent our interest. Think of some unexpected situation: Would you suggest to have a re-election for those parts of the parliament that vote opposed to your opinion? Surely not!

Going on strike when SE Inc. is in danger of destroying this place is exactly what I expect from a moderator I vote for.

Suggesting to have a re-election for just those moderators that act differently than you expect is completely absurd. One could as well suggest to put all others through a new electoral process because they seem to remain passive in such a situation. No, that's not how elections work.