Update the Terms of Service to reflect the established community consensus on shared accounts

Question

In this recent question the issue came up as to whether shared accounts were permitted on Stack Exchange. I remember this having been discussed many times over the years, and the consensus has always been something like (my paraphrasing):

Yes, you can share an account if you want. It's not like we can tell who's using it, so it wouldn't be practical to enforce a rule to the contrary. But by doing so, you assume the implied risks: misbehaviour from one user could ban all of you, or they could steal the account. You won't get any special support if this happens.

From "What is the view on accounts shared by multiple users on Stack Overflow?" (2011), by jjnguy (former SO moderator):

Why not? Just because more than one user may manage this account doesn't devalue their contributions.

Do you really want to force people to verify that their account is used by the same person every time? I'm not sure if that is even possible.

This same thread has a post from Shog (current community manager) explaining why we don't need to treat this as a distinct case from individual accounts.

In 2012, Korneel Bouman (then a Stack Exchange Product Manager) gave a user instructions on how to share their account with coworkers.

We have several existing high-reputation accounts that identify as company names, not individuals (example, example), and I am in no hurry to ban them.

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However, Stack Exchange's Terms of Service have apparently been written to contradict this:

Subscriber certifies to Stack Exchange that Subscriber is an individual

Stack Exchange Inc. should update the Terms of Service to reflect the preexisting community consensus, instead of overriding it.

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There are many recent posts citing the Terms of Service to say that users can't share accounts, but that's putting the problem backwards. If Stack wants to restrict users of Talent, they may, but the community's decision should be respected with respect to general participation.

Answer 1

A lot of project teams ask, "Can we just use one big central account?"

This would be a very poor idea — to allow this by design would be a breaking change in how Stack Exchange works and builds trust. Here are just a few examples as to why (there are many many more, I'm sure):

• Reputation is a proxy for "SE experience"
  There are a lot of features which users are unable to access until they gain enough experience to use them properly. A new employee/group member gaining access to the "shared account" on day one breaks that entirely.
• Reputation implies expertise
  Gaining a lot of reputation in a particular tag give that user almost Moderator-level abilities. When folks award a lot of reputation to someone providing good content in a tag, that at least implies that the recipient probably knows what they are talking about. In a shared account, you don't actually know who is answering any particular question. Giving instant reputation with Moderator-like abilities to anyone with access to that shared account is a bad idea.
• Users are responsible for their own actions
  Our Moderators⬥ will appreciate this one — a user is caught red-handed doing something inappropriate, so the Mod contacts the user (for a suspension or warning) and the user responds: "Oh, that wasn't me. Must have been someone else using my account."
• The Inbox: Users are expected to follow-up on inquiries
  A user answers a question; another asks something else; and yet a third person on that account comments elsewhere and so on — and throughout that process, any 'inbox' messages asking for clarification or follow-up go… to yet someone else. When a user asks for help or writes something on this system, they incur at least some modicum of responsibility to answer questions or follow-up. Yet once you receive that inbox notice, the primary notification is gone, and nobody's going to routinely crawl back through old notifications to make sure someone else didn't clear something meant for them. That's going to make the content folks write feel somewhat more detached and anonymous.