Responding to the Lavender Letter and commitments moving forward

Question

I want to start by acknowledging the hurt and exhaustion that the members of the LGBTQIA+ community and their allies have experienced in our community as moderators and users. We have read the Lavender Letter internally and repeatedly discussed how we can support you in the future. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with some of the authors of this letter in a call and in chat, for which I am grateful. They were gracious enough to share specific experiences and struggles to help me understand the letter and how we can better support their needs.

We want to apologize to the LGBTQIA+ community members for the hurt they endured from our inactions or actions in the past. There are numerous members of the LGBTQIA+ community and a network of allies (among which I count myself) at every level of the company, and we all want to better support you going forward. I am sorry that this letter took so long to respond to publicly. We have been working behind the scenes to understand the needs of the LGBTQIA+ community and to be able to get to a place where we can schedule and commit to timeframes for these responses. We have had a lot to work through internally to better support our entire community, but this topic is important to us.

In the Code of Conduct, we state “We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples.” To clarify, this includes discussion questioning or debating the legitimacy of someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Further, the debate or discussion of whether or not you want to or should use a person’s pronouns is both offensive and alienating.

Based on the letter and subsequent conversations, we are making these commitments to address the concerns raised:

• All members of the Community Team and selected members of the Public Platform Team have already taken 13 hours of Diversity & Inclusion Training. This training has been coordinated and advised by our own internal diversity & inclusion expert. We’ve also been provided with resources for best practices in using pronouns and to help us better identify microaggressions specifically towards our LGBTQIA+ users.

• Teachers’ Lounge moderation tools are on the roadmap for the Public Platform team for Q4 of this year. This will allow the room to be moderated like other chat rooms. The second module of Moderator Training will focus on Diversity & Inclusion, and will be launched by the end of the year.

Clarifications on the Code of Conduct and our commitment to enforcing it:

• We’ve established a new procedure for handling CoC violation reports: If the CM looking at it deems that it’s completely not actionable (meaning it can, without a doubt, be dismissed outright), they must ask a second CM to confirm. If the second believes it should trigger an investigation, one has to happen. In a case where the complaint is against a moderator, this will trigger the Moderator Conduct Review Process - any CM can opt out of the investigation if they feel biased and the remaining CMs are randomly assigned.

• Where appropriate, we commit to reviewing and revising the Moderator Conduct Review Process to ensure fairness and openness, while addressing much of the feedback we have received about the existing process.

• Our Privacy Policy prevents us from sharing whether or not action was taken against third parties due to a report. However, we still want to provide the reporter with closure, and are working on automation to let you know when the report is closed. You should receive an acknowledgement once we start work on it, and at the end of the month we’ll send a batch response to reports that were dealt with during that month - letting the reporter know the matter is now closed.

• We have heard complaints about alleged Code of Conduct violations from 2019 and earlier where the public perception is that a thorough investigation was not carried out, or that the user may not have received a sufficient warning (or other consequence). As we said above, we are unable to comment on the specifics of any case. And while we understand and empathize with the pain involved in these issues, we are not going to reopen old cases at this time. We are optimistic that these types of events will not recur. That said, an investigation into a new Code of Conduct violation will also include an evaluation of any previous issues whether or not the user was officially warned, and these can influence the result of the investigation.

We believe these commitments will better enable our staff to support LGBTQIA+ community members, help our 550+ moderators learn more about how these issues impact their sites and guide them in how to handle effectively situations that may occur. We are taking a strong stance to protect the LGBTQIA+ members of our community and ensure they can participate safely in the network. I hope that the Lavender Letter’s authors will continue to share and collaborate with us in the future to identify more opportunities for improvement. We commit to listening to your concerns and responding appropriately to improve the community experience for LGBTQIA+ members going forward.

Answer 1

status-completed As clarified by Catija here:

The statement about discussing is: "Further, the debate or discussion of whether or not you want to or should use a person’s pronouns is both offensive and alienating." - This does not mean that all discussion about pronouns is forbidden. It means that debating with a specific person that their pronouns are "wrong" or telling someone "I won't use your pronouns" is rude and offensive to that person. Someone asking "what does zhir mean?" or asking how to use they as a personal pronoun is fine

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The current stance on discussion is problematic

As it currently reads, any and all discussion about pronouns are against the CoC. This means:

If a new, English-as-a-second language, user inquires about exactly what these pronouns mean and why they're required to use them, that's against the CoC (remember, many languages don't have gender-neutral pronouns nor neopronouns, so these subjects are especially difficult to learn)

If I, then, engage in that discussion, and try to educate them, that's against the CoC.

The problem with the tolerance paradox happens if you don't allow discussion or education, and shun anyone not meeting your requirement of tolerance. Then, you isolate this community, and division grows, while if you do allow discussion within the constraints of striving for mutual understanding and accepting that pronouns on this site are required (being focused on understanding the why and how instead of denying the rights of others), you have an opportunity to actually reduce bigotry and increase understanding, instead of just distancing yourself from those that don't understand.

Yes, but you should follow the spirit of the rules, not the letter of it

That's problematic for me as well. I implicitly trust the moderators on the sites I contribute to, and I trust them to not follow these rules when they don't make sense.

However, there's a problem with regard to the company:

• I lost my trust in the company being able to sensibly handle issues surrounding the CoC in the sudden moderator firing last year
• The company has made clear that not enforcing the CoC is grounds for dismissal as a moderator
• We're supposed to trust our moderators not to enforce the letter of the CoC, but the spirit of it?

This results in a very awkward situation, where as a mod you have to use your common sense, but can be dismissed if you don't do it right, and asking for clarification about the CoC was (at least rumored to be) one of the major reasons for that historical dismissal.

If you do just use your common sense, you do leave a paper trail of objectively not enforcing the letter of the CoC, which can be used against you.

But you should trust the company as well

I'm sorry, but no. Regarding this issue, that trust has been broken, and it has not been rebuilt.

Don't you realize these discussions can be hurtful, tiring and alienating?

That's the problem. I do. We're putting members of the LGBTQIA+ community in a very difficult position having to encounter these, and even writing this post I realize it might hurt some.

However, I truly believe we must engage in this discussion to help uninformed people, and create understanding instead of forcing people to take things they don't understand at face value. I believe that if we don't fight this fight, we're pushing the problem into the future. And I believe this lack of mutual discussion and understanding, associated with things like search and social media bubbles, is one of the things that's fundamentally wrong with this time, and leads to many of our current (political) problems.

We do need ground rules for these discussions. There are people that engage in these with the purpose to hurt others, and that should not be tolerated. We can try to put these in writing, or, trust the moderators, as has been said I should do.

Answer 2

status-review

Our Privacy Policy prevents us from sharing whether or not action was taken against third parties due to a report. However, we still want to provide the reporter with closure, and are working on automation to let you know when the report is closed. You should receive an acknowledgement once we start work on it, and at the end of the month we’ll send a batch response to reports that were dealt with during that month - letting the reporter know the matter is now closed.

Just a statement that the complaint has been closed would not give me closure.

I understand that you can't give public statements regarding actions taken due to a report and I can even follow that it might not be a good idea to share the actions taken with the reporter of an CoC violation, but I would urge you to see if you can include at least the outcome of the investigation (CoC violation yes or no) in the response back to the reporter.

Answer 3

Just why

To clarify, this includes discussion questioning or debating the legitimacy of someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Further, the debate or discussion of whether or not you want to or should use a person’s pronouns is both offensive and alienating

How does Stack Overflow expect us to be an open-minded, engaged and thriving community if we're not allowed to have discussions? While I agree that people can be offensive, rude, disrespectful and discourteous, it is blatantly false that discussions about these topics necessarily have to be negative. Sure, codify 'negative attitude' as not allowed, but how is discussing something disrespectful in any way?

And why, just why, does the rest of the community keep putting up with such nonsensical and authoritarian rules? And please don't tell me that having a discussion about whether or not we can discuss those topics is also bannable. Because if it is, honestly ban away, I really don't see the point in caring anymore.

Answer 4

Alright, so....

First of all:

Thank you Teresa, Yaakov, Cesar, and everyone else who helped put this response together; it's sincerely appreciated that you were committed to responding to the Letter even though quite a bit of time has passed since it was posted. I'm aware that the company has been going through a lot of changes, especially in regard to how it deals with the community, and it's great seeing that work is being put into fixing outstanding problems related to the community.

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Next...

I was part of the discussions that were held between members of the community and staff members about the Letter, and gave feedback on this before it was posted.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts I have on this response and the reception surrounding it.

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• The sincerity of this response

I've seen some responses that are skeptical of whether or not this response is a sincere effort in repairing community relations and righting wrongs or if it's just an optics scheme - posting because it looks good and not because they actually care.

I believe that they're sincerely interested in righting wrongs. I and a couple other community members had a chat with Teresa, Yaakov, and another employee back in April about a response to the Letter, what specifically the problems encountered were that led to the Letter, and how to address those. (This included a lack of moderation in moderator spaces, which overlaps with other issues, such as the religion-based attacks that were floating around the TL for quite a while.) In the time since that video chat, employees have taken diversity training, there have been commitments made for enforcing the CoC equally, and e.g. tools for TL moderation are coming.

Those discussions eventually led to the commitments being made in this response, and helped formulate the response itself.

I was, to be frank, disappointed at the refusal to go back and review old cases (including at least one blatantly bigoted statement by a still-active moderator). Aside from that, however, I can at least confirm that the employees I spoke to are sincerely interested in helping the community and not making things worse.

• "We can't even discuss the pronoun rule!"

I've seen some complaints about this line:

To clarify, this includes discussion questioning or debating the legitimacy of someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Further, the debate or discussion of whether or not you want to or should use a person’s pronouns is both offensive and alienating.

...specifically, saying that this means that the "pronoun rule" can't even be discussed.

My response to that would be... well, sort of? Saying "I don't want to use your pronouns" or debating whether you should use someone's stated pronouns is offensive and a violation of the Code of Conduct. If you wanted to argue about whether or not you should use someone's stated pronouns, then yes, doing so is now explicitly against the CoC.

Refusing - or arguing in favor of refusing - to correctly refer to someone the way they've stated is the correct way to refer to them is delegitimizing and saying that the way that that person refers to themselves is incorrect or unacceptable. I would classify that as offensive. You do not get to dictate what the correct way to refer to other people is, and attempting to do so is attempting to remove their autonomy. You never need to refer to someone, but if you are doing so you do need to do so correctly.

This does not mean that good-faith questions or requests for clarification are a violation of the CoC. Of course, everything is context-dependent, and these policies aren't being enforced by robots. Like everything else, this comes down to individual situations, judgement calls by moderators, and taking context into account; this doesn't mean that anyone confused or learning about "they/them" for the first time is going to find themselves suspended. A little faith in our mods, please?

The Tolerance paradox is at play here as well.
If you tolerate intolerance, the intolerance will take over the tolerance. (Here's a nice comic.)

In other words... if we tolerate the intolerance - those who think that people's stated pronouns are up for debate - we are making a statement that it is okay to be intolerant. That means that those who actually want to be tolerant will leave, or be silenced, and you will wind up with only the intolerant being heard.

Allowing intolerance is equivalent to endorsing it. In both cases, the intolerance will become the dominant force.

• Amount of time it took for this response to be posted

Yes, it took a long time for this response to get posted. An entire year, in fact, pretty much on the nose.

This boils down to two separate issues: Stack's problems with the community, and trying to get the response right.

The problem Stack has with the community has been going on for the past year+, and most people here on Meta will be familiar with it; I'll just say that it was only several months after the Letter was posted that community really came back onto the company's radar.

But it was back in March already that Teresa had reached out to discuss the Letter and how to solve the problems that it spoke about. Since then, there's been back-and-forth in a chat channel, discussing how best to solve issues and reviewing copies of a response to make sure it sufficiently addressed the Letter's concern, over the period of months. It took so long because, as Teresa hinted in the response, Stack wanted to figure out what actual commitments to make and detail instead of just sending out a bland response with no real meaning. It took a long time because once responding was back on the map, doing it correctly was the goal.

• "Why doesn't this response talk about other things? Why the focus on the LGBTQ+ community?"

It's true that there are other outstanding issues, some similar to the concerns laid out in the Lavender Letter. (For instance, religion-based attacks were mentioned, which I called out in my stepping-down-as-mod post as well.)

However, the Lavender Letter was written specifically about the challenges that queer users - and especially moderators - encountered, going back further than just Sep '19. This response is meant to specifically address those issues, not everything all at once. Let's not conflate all the issues. and instead take them one by one.

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I will reiterate that I was disappointed in the decision not to review complaints raised about blatant bigotry that were never acted upon; especially when the perpetrators of that blatant bigotry are still diamond moderators on the network. I do not trust that the people capable of blatant bigotry are able to effectively carry out moderating and removing bigotry if it should come up. I do not trust that they are capable of cultivating a safe environment for all, and I believe that Stack is making a mistake in not reviewing those cases.

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And since this has come up and inevitably will come up again:
Stack's ham-fisted handling of this in September 2019 led to significant damage to the queer community, opening up LGBTQ+ users to attacks by people claiming to be defending Monica Cellio.
There was non-public context at play in Monica's dismissal.
The way in which she was treated was disgraceful.
There are still people prejudiced against LGBTQ+ users because of a perception that LGBTQ+ users caused Monica to be removed as a moderator. This will not be fully addressed unless Stack is able to resolve the situation with Monica to a satisfactory state.
I encourage Teresa to reach out to Monica and have a discussion.
This is not the place to discuss this further, because Stack cannot (or will not, it comes to the same thing) discuss this in public at all.

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Finally, I agree strongly with what @kviiri wrote in TTRPG General Chat:

If it's a year old thing, it'd be so easy to just drop the issue and hope it blows over. Answering to something that would be easy to ignore arguably demonstrates more genuine commitment than answering to something more urgent.

It's highly appreciated that Stack is addressing outstanding community concerns, including the ones that are relatively old, such as this.

Answer 5

When this response was posted two weeks ago, I had no intention of replying; like George, I felt it was not my place - I'm not among the signatories of the letter this response is addressed to, nor those affected by it.

But in the days since, I've seen a depressingly familiar pattern emerge: nice-sounding words spark debate and are followed by... Nothing. The group your response is directed at, whose needs you purport to care about and address, are left alone to handle the fallout.

This all happened a year ago...

...But perhaps you don't know that. As the other responses here attest, very few people actually know what happened a year ago, what led up to it, or where the underlying problems lay. Even among those affected, visibility into the totality of the situation was severely limited; you weren't here at all, so expecting you to understand much less be equipped to prevent a repetition may be asking too much.

So let's set the record straight...

Background

In a certain sense, the issues outlined in The Lavender Letter date back many years...

...But in a much more concrete sense, they date back to the summer of 2018, and a handful of events in the private moderator chatroom ("The Teachers' Lounge").

Affected moderators contacted The Stack Exchange Team, and after a considerable delay, received noncommittal responses.

1. We ask that Stack Exchange, Inc does more to pay attention to the complaints and requests of the LGBTQ+ community and does more to ensure that rules are properly applied such that LGBTQ+ people are treated with the same respect everyone should be treated with.

Further emails were sent, especially as new incidents occurred over the subsequent year; but still, responses were lacking or non-committal.

2. We ask that the consequences for not respecting members of the community be more explicit, and be consistently carried out. Too many times have transphobic or homophobic comments gone by with no response from the Community Team, leaving LGBTQ+ individuals to explain their own validity again and again and again.

Eventually, a private post was created by a member of the SE Team, promising training and guidance in the near future.

3. Moderating is hard, and the LGBTQ+ community has been underrepresented in media for long enough that many moderators do not know how to handle some specific situations. Some moderators have requested sensitivity training. This would help those who work so hard on behalf of the Stack Exchange community to receive the support and guidance they need to carry out their duties.

By the start of this timespan, the community manager team at Stack Exchange had been cut to the bone: where once there had been enough people to staff the moderator chatroom constantly, now attendance was intermittent. However, with the hiring of new CMs, staffing had been partially restored and these issues were identified in the moment...

...only for the relevant CM to be instructed by management not to respond, to wait for further instruction.

As months passed and the promised guidance failed to materialize, both moderators and community managers became increasingly frustrated, both groups growing less and less hopeful that any effective response would or could materialize.

A community manager, faced with clearing the backlog of emails, decided to prod management regarding the issue one last time...

...And then all hell broke loose. Unwilling to review over a year's worth of history, management opted to pick a name and make an example, perhaps thinking that a sufficiently "strong" response would suffice to compensate for months of apathy.

It did not.

Solving the wrong problem

To the three requests in The Lavender Letter, you commit to three actions (combined into two bullets; I will separate them):

All members of the Community Team and selected members of the Public Platform Team have already taken 13 hours of Diversity & Inclusion Training.

This is good, insofar as it was promised repeatedly by management over the past two years. The efficacy of such training cannot, of course, be known at this time - but a promise kept late is better than a promise not kept at all.

HOWEVER... The community team already had members who were able to identify these issues two years ago, and indeed they did identify them but were prevented from acting on them. The promise of training was held out as a prerequisite to developing policies and codes - but those were developed and rolled out without it. The net effect of this is that your team may now know what they did wrong in that rollout, but are none the less bound by their past actions anyway.

Teachers’ Lounge moderation tools are on the roadmap for the Public Platform team for Q4 of this year.

This is a good idea, and was requested elsewhere.

The second module of Moderator Training will focus on Diversity & Inclusion, and will be launched by the end of the year.

This was actually asked for in the letter, so kudos.

Crucially: you're committing to one of the three things that was requested in the letter. Ignored is the request for timely and consistent response to complaints. Instead, there's this:

We’ve established a new procedure for handling CoC violation reports: If the CM looking at it deems that it’s completely not actionable (meaning it can, without a doubt, be dismissed outright), they must ask a second CM to confirm. If the second believes it should trigger an investigation, one has to happen.

This... Speaks volumes. CMs didn't bury the complaints last year; your management team did, then flipped out and tried to pin blame on the CMs when nagged to respond. It appears they're still doing the same thing. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and that link was - and apparently remains - right in the middle of your chain. When the folks on the ground ask for help and get, instead, stricter rules... They're eventually going to learn not to bother asking for help... Or offering it.

I'm reminded of a story from the book of Kings, chapter 12:

But Rehoboam rejected the advice the elders gave him and consulted the young men who had grown up with him and were serving him. He asked them, “What is your advice? How should we answer these people who say to me, ‘Lighten the yoke your father put on us’?”

The young men who had grown up with him replied, “These people have said to you, ‘Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but make our yoke lighter.’ Now tell them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist. My father laid on you a heavy yoke; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.’ ”

Like Rehoboam, you have a great deal of positional power, and advisors who are more than willing to reassure you that such power is enough to accomplish whatever you should wish. Be careful...

Conclusion

Your response here is good; it recognizes many of the problems raised a year ago, and humbly apologizes for not addressing them sooner.

However... This response fails to recognize or address the root causes of those problems, and in failing to do so it risks perpetuating them.

We are optimistic that these types of events will not recur.

A lack of optimism isn't a concern here; if there's one thing SE has in spades, it's optimism. What is needed is a concerted effort toward organizational and cultural change; "this type of event" is already recurring; the only question is, what will y'all do differently this time?

A phrase I heard repeated again and again by management at SE a year ago was, "We're spending too much time on this." I sympathize; I'm sure you're very busy, have many pressing responsibilities, and can hardly justify spending even as much time on this as you already have...

My advice, now as it was then, remains: "don't be penny-wise yet pound-foolish". These are incredibly difficult problems, and they require a team effort - a focused team effort - to handle effectively. Put aside pride in status and position, adopt a willingness to learn from and support one another, and work together for as long as the work remains.

Good luck...

Answer 6

Since meta tends to be the place where the chickens come to roost - or at least the drama does, I'd like to make a few observations.

While we have an excellent community management team who've done awesomely well under trying circumstances, the disconnect between the company and the community over the last few years kinda contributed to the issues we've had so far. Occasionally attempts to make things better... haven't, and I personally feel that the somewhat top down approach to trying to fix these issues hasn't always worked. What happens at the ground level, in the interaction between staff and users dealing with these issues is more important than broader policy or even statements of intent, as well meaning as they are.

A lot of the issues we've had should have been handled when they weren't as major as they were, and I feel like there were many lost opportunities, both before and after the incident that resulted in these letters, and hurt feelings, and even hostility hasn't gotten better.

Policies are nice but at the end of the day we need folks to set an example (rather than being made an example of), and as much as frameworks and policies, we need folks in the company with the pull to go: "Hey, folks, knock it off" and be listened to.

So I guess the questions for me is...

How do we do better in watching out for each other and if the people within the company are going to have the time, energy and spoons to actually proactively keep an eye out and assist when we have issues, and working with the mods and keeping in mind community dynamics.

I do realise that the public view of these, and quite a lot of the drama seems focused on TL and the mods but... to an extent, part of the issue was how the company handled events, and chose not to handle the follow up. I'm glad there's movement, and there's been quite a lot of change and churn within the company but - that many of these issues have been allowed to fester over extended periods of time is part of the thing that's made it difficult to handle.

Imagine if someone had reached out to Monica the same week and talked to her... before all the legal ugliness (which seems to have made it impossible to get things moving again). Or if the response to someone being bigoted was: "No we don't do that" immediately.

Every action of this sort needs ownership and an awareness and willingness to follow up these decisions to ensure there's minimal collateral damage.

I do realise we're only human. Lots of us have day jobs, and for those whose day job is shepherding this community - they've been through a lot, and have had to burn their candles at both, hell even 3 ends... but that we even have had to write these open letters, and deal with the fallout of last year's events a year later is a failing. And these events still lack closure, and will likely be a distraction from the important work ahead of us.

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This is probably a tangent, but it's probably worth trying to at least roll into my answer, rather than leaving them to languish in comments.

I've always felt that there's multiple approaches to dealing with a community - all of which have their place.

One's by authority - the "force" option. It sometimes has its place

The second is by decree - which I feel is the option that SE has traditionally preferred, and to some extent getting a formal framework to deal with these things. The third is by the use of personal influence - which of course needs a certain level of trust from folks. Even with a top down approach to these things at some point it comes down to most people trusting you do the right thing. I can think of a few ex-employees and a few current employees who have that "skill" but there isn't enough of it.

SE has tried a lot of the formal top down approach, which hasn't always worked that well. Enforcement and policies are things SE has tried and is trying. I'm not saying those won't work or won't matter. Something like the welcome wagon, or many of these initiatives need a certain amount of buy in to work. That both needs trust, and folks seen as being on the ground helping with this.

I'm saying in addition that old school community outreach and goodwill can help steer folks the right way. The problem with both policy and enforcement is they don't preempt problems and change minds. Our goals can't be purely punitive

One of the arguments I hear a lot tends to involve being forced to use language

It's also frankly overblown, and folks use the worst possible interpretation of it as bogeyman. There's some situations where it might work, but the best traditions of SE moderation's always been about the third option.

Authority is the last resort, when appeals to better nature, gentle reminders, and stronger warnings have failed. And frankly the second option also is for those folks who insist on being hit over the head with rulebooks. I'd quite frankly be able to stop people with: "It's not nice" without someone needing me to spell out how exactly it's not.

It's been a long year... I've talked about "assuming good intent" in the past.

Maybe it's also about demonstrating good intent - respecting each other. Be Nice includes respecting each other's identities and using our ability to speak out and let people know something's not OK when we need to - and be listened to.

Answer 7

I support the Lavender letter authors and message. I also support the response here by Stack Exchange.

That said...

It's hard to please everyone, and the original wording clearly didn't strike the correct balance. That's fine. Finding a balance is difficult, especially when it comes across as dictating community behavior.

However, waiting a year to address it is problematic. A very large issue here is not the changing of terms or guidance, but of trust. If the community had more trust, then they would trust the company to fix their mistake.

Mistakes are fine, but they must be corrected immediately and without doubling down on their faults. The pitfall that I continuously see from the company is either not immediately correcting, or doubling down when wrong. Look at this post, look at all the censorship. There are deletions all over the place, if you wanted to have a message with no responses, then take it to the blog.

Letting issues like this languish causes problems. Going forward, there needs to be much more attention paid to issues, with immediate responses, when it affects the entire community. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs a best effort response. If that fails, acknowledge it, and make adjustments. If the legal department complains, replace them; their track record is horrendous.

The team now running the show here inherited a mountain of trust from the community, and while a lot of it remains, it has been severely diminished. That trust was not built from quarterly statements, or roadmaps. It was built by a group who always responded, and who did so with an air of humility and respect. They were a part of the community, not above it.

I would love to see some humility return to the group of leadership at this company. This post is at least moving in that direction, and it would behoove the rest of the team to take note of it.

Answer 8

As a moderator (of two sites) who took a break in response to the events last year, a Lavender user myself who effectively came out to the whole SE community in a Meta post responding to last year's events, and a cosignee of the Lavender letter, I find this statement very positive. I'm not too concerned about the amount of time it took to deliver, though there were times in the interim that I questioned how seriously the issue would be handled. This response pretty well addresses my concerns, particularly your comment under BelovedFool's post:

Thank you for responding with such authenticity and vulnerability, I can’t imagine it was easy. I recognize that it is hard to put your faith back into a company and community that has hurt you. My ask is only that you watch us over the next several months and year. We hope to earn it back from you. I acknowledge that promises and commitments can only go so far, and I hope we still have the chance to prove to you it is a priority for us. Part of the reason for the delay to respond is that I want to ensure they are not empty promises but that we have commitment & processes to ensure change.

Thank you for taking the time to really think on this and take action!

Answer 9

First, as a member of the Lavender community, I would like to thank you for posting this. I wish you would have publicly acknowledged the hurt you caused us sooner, but as the saying goes: better late than never.

I must say, reading your post (and posting this answer) was very emotional for me. I wasn't expecting it to hurt so much after almost a year. But I am good at burying my feelings instead of dealing with them and I guess that this post made them resurface.

As for the action you have decided to take/taken already, I have to say, I am not expecting anything of them. From experience, I know how hard it is to make a space safe for LGBT+ people (and for other oppressed communities) and, in trying to make a place safe, a lot of people make empty promises and symbolic yet mostly useless gestures.

You have lost my faith a year ago and I have since stopped believing that you will be able to do what you promise. I deeply hope that I am wrong. That you are not just empty words and shiny sparkles. So I will sit here and wait and see, hoping for the best but not expecting anything at all.

It has been almost a year and I believe that a lot of people here are still deeply hurt. I know I still am. But I hope and believe that, today, a little of this hurt will go away.

Thank you again for acknowledging your wrongdoing and for committing to do better in the future. Though, I do hope that next time you will be quicker in your acknowledgment.

Answer 10

Legislating Morality Has Never Worked

I read through the Lavender Letter and found myself frustrated. I'm frustrated, not because I believe there are people who do not deserve courtesy, respect, and civility, but because a minority among minorities is seeking to legislate the cure to their problems.

No, I am not being disrespectful. I'm being practical. The Lavender Letter suggests that Stack Exchange, Inc. has the responsibility to use police powers to enforce behavior on a service that permits anonymity and welcomes peoples from all national boundaries, all religious practices, all political ideologies, and all levels of education.

It calls to mind the U.S. Constitution's 18th Amendment (the prohibition against alcohol) and it's 21st Amendment (the repeal of the 18th Amendment). Therein are the permanent legal records of how futile it is to legislate morality. Indeed, legislating morality often has the habit of actually creating a worse situation than it would have had it simply been left alone. (Every law prohibiting homosexuality proves that point as they encouraged greater violence in an effort to remove a then-undesired morality — greater violence than would have existed had the law not existed.)

Am I advocating that the continued mistreatment of the LGBT community simply be ignored as an irreparable problem? Certainly not. I am pointing out that there's a difference between protecting rights and forcing morality. I believe I speak for the majority of Stack Exchange users when I say that we want to protect the rights of every user. But what the Lavender Letter is proposing is to increasingly (en)force morality. And the inevitable conclusion to every effort to force morality is to increase dissatisfaction. At best, talented people ranging from those who choose to hate to those who simply make mistakes will go elsewhere to find answers to questions.¹ At worst, it will lead to greater verbal violence.

The purpose of the Code of Conduct should be to guide and educate — not to punish and control. It's becoming dangerously close to the latter. I wonder if, compared to the whole of all users, the issues driving these changes are limited — because the problem does not appear systemic to me. I therefore hope that everyone (both the members of the LGBT community and those who are not) remembers that sincere change takes time — and when you try to force change, the consequences are often worse than we would otherwise have.²

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_{¹ I recall a Twitter post where a Stack Exchange officer's response to users leaving was, "Bye!" But that's just another form of discrimination. And it's just as evil and should be just as unwanted.}

_{² Inevitably, someone will ask why I posted this. It is because the way things are going I will eventually be slapped for rushing through a comment and forgetting to look at @user12345's profile to discover whether or not they've published a preferred pronoun and failed to use it. I've already had a post edited where the word "manned" (as in "manned spacecraft") was changed to "crewed." My post was discussing space craft in the 1960's, when the term was most popularly used, and even today "manned spacecraft" is overwhelmingly more commonly used than "crewed spacecraft". I have no doubt that the edit was made due to changes in the Code of Conduct and the discussions that brought those changes to pass. It is as nit-picky to complain about the edit as it was, itself, and yet it's an example of an unintended consequence that underscores my concerns. I'm not perfect. I'm not trying to hurt anybody. But the effort required to keep everyone else from feeling hurt is beginning to hurt.}

Answer 11

Before addressing the post itself, I'd like to briefly sketch a process US culture seems to be undergoing in recent years - which is quite strange to behold from the outside and relevant to your post.

On the one hand - the US suffers from extreme violence by law enforcement (over a thousand of civilians killed every year), and a massive punitive bent of state and federal-state institutions against individuals (0.7% or so of the population in prison, and a quarter of the world's prisoners for under 4.5% of the world's people). This is true in general, but disproportionately so for poorer and nonwhite people. The situation has even led to mass demonstrations and borderline riots in recent years.

But on the other hand - in elite, professional and academic circles, one observes a tendency not against the excesses of authority, but rather of an appeal to authority and action by centralized power - supposedly to address such issues: A semi-official mandatory curriculum of reeducation in "diversity and inclusivity", and strict immediate punishment for those perceived as having supposedly exceeded the bounds of accepted discussion. This occurs either through secretive in absentia trial-like procedures, or simply via empowering officials to mete termination or expulsion punishment, with impunity.

In a nutshell, and to oversimplify: A fundamental failure in society at large is being adopted, in a sublimated form, as a supposedly positive reform in sections of society which do not suffer the brunt of that larger social failure.

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Now, about the post itself.

tl;dr: You are continuing to hijack the (valid) issue of intolerance against LGBTQIA+ people, to justify a highly repressive and authoritarian mode of managing the Stack Exchange network.

We have heard complaints about alleged Code of Conduct violations from 2019 and earlier where the public perception is that a thorough investigation was not carried out, or that the user may not have received a sufficient warning (or other consequence).

Actually, it seems you have not heard our complaints:

1. Even your sentence here does not acknowledge SE Inc. acted inappropriately, suggesting that it is a "perception".
2. We did not complain merely about the lack of investigation or warnings. A large part of (active) users, myself included, complained about the Code of Conduct itself and the way SE inc. manages the network. There are many different complaints about the CoC, but perhaps the foremost is how unfair its procedural tenets are - secretive procedure, inability to defend one's self, ease of abuse, lack of built-in accountability, etc.
3. We are still awaiting a retraction of the charges against Monica Cellio, and an answer to @user514686's question.

As we said above, we are unable to comment on the specifics of any case.

Then, indeed, you have not listened, nor heard, our complaints at all. Transparency - the opposite of secrecy/privacy - regarding the specifics of cases of people being accused of misconduct and punished, is of fundamental necessity. Your values here are upside down.

Our Privacy Policy prevents us from sharing whether or not action was taken against third parties due to a report.

1. I actually doubt that is the case. Can you point out what in the privacy policy prevents this?
2. This is similar to saying that a government's commitment to citizens' privacy prevents it from saying whether someone disappeared because they have been charged, convicted and sentenced to prison or for other reasons.

Not only must the plaintiff be informed - the public must be informed. If you can punish due to a complaint, you must disclose the full details of the procedure; if you can't try us publicly, you should not have the prerogative to punish us.

And while we understand and empathize with the pain involved in these issues,

Ms. Dietrich, that is a vacuous statement. That is, it doesn't translate to actions which relieve the pain, on the one hand - raising doubts about that empathy - but we can obviously not refute it on the other hand.

I'd much rather you said "I don't care about those assholes who complain" and made some meaningful changes to the CoC to ameliorate the situation, rather than expressed sympathy with no positive action.

We are optimistic that these types of events will not recur.

You've just explained to us how they do recur. In fact, it is all but impossible for this situation not to recur while (the procedural aspects of) your Code of Conduct is in place.

We believe these commitments will better enable our staff to support LGBTQIA+ community members ... We are taking a strong stance to protect the LGBTQIA+ members of our community and ensure they can participate safely in the network.

I respectfully disagree. Your actions and stances have very little, if anything, to do with protecting LGBTQIA+ Stack Exchange users. In fact, you are associating your mistreatment of users and your highly-problematic policies with these users, essentially pointing the finger at them as a scapegoat: "Don't blame us. It's the LGBTQIA people who are the cause of all this, our hands our tied, and what we're doing has to happen on account of them", is the subtext of your post, and previous posts by Sarah Chipps (a deleted post - requires 10K reputation) and by David Fullerton.

That makes SE Inc.'s continued conduct and rhetoric more of a disservice to LGBTQIA+ users, in my opinion.

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PS:

and to help us better identify microaggressions

Perhaps you should focus on identifying macro-aggressions, and stop your commitment to engaging in those.

Answer 12

You've missed the time to speak and you've missed the time to act. Now you come and state that something is simply offensive and alienating, while you had a year to realize the actual things that are offensive and alienating. You still make the same mistakes: decisions behind closed doors, stating something without proving it, resolving to threats and dictate instead of compassion and understanding, and abandoning your original concept of "assume good intent".

There's been enough of decisions made by your team, enough decisions that have caused harm. Let us have discussions, let us have facts, let us have proofs and reach a consensus.

Answer 13

We are a platform of free and open exchange of information.

That is the core idea of Stack Overflow.

We should all be able to agree that this goal can only be achieved through respect while talking and listening to each other.

And yet, this post about respecting people is received so negatively by the community, that it is struggling hard to even maintain a positive overall score at all.

Respect cannot be enforced by rules.

Respect is the result of negotiations; the result of an agreement and understanding. Such an agreement or understanding cannot be reached, if all dissenting opinions are declared unspeakable.

I would like to see an initiative, that has majority support, that actually listens to and respects all sides. That finds a compromise where all sides feel their voice was heard, their concerns taken into consideration and their feelings being respected.

But this is not it.

Formalized rules and moderator powers only give you command over code and the ability to silence people. Your goal should be widespread support, not forced compliance through gritted teeth.

Answer 14

I really like the extra diversity training and the provision of resources for best practices, the moderation tools for the teachers lounge and the two level check system for complaints. I think that this training and these resources should be made public as far as possible for all users to benefit.

Judging by the score composition there seems to be a rift in the community though and I attribute it mainly to the "no discussion about it"-policy. What surprises me most is the need for it without many such discussions. In 2020, I regularly check on meta, and do not remember anything related.

However, the biggest problem for me is missing quantitative knowledge. How much of a problem is it currently? It could be very low, high or immensely high. Compared to last year, the measures taken then could have had a big impact, a small impact or no impact at all. The time evolution could have been positive, neutral or negative. It could become worse by the day or it could be effectively not an issue anymore. Do we need to be much more strict than now or are we on a good way - there is nothing really publicly available to gauge that.

Without really knowing what's going on and without seeing anything (may be me though), I'm a bit lost and can only take notice of what is done and what is not.

After some days of discussion here the composition of the score has further trended towards an equal number of up and downvotes. Maybe the increased moderation activity also plays a role here. It certainly feels a bit reminiscent of moderation in October 2019. Not sure if there is a better way, but it feels like if only the wording of the "no discussion about it" thing and the moderation approach would have been a bit less strict, maybe the announcement would have been considerably better received.

Answer 15

Thank you for these statements, these commitments, and the work it took to produce them. I know that the needs of minority community members are not always immediately obvious, and so we have to look more closely and to educate ourselves in order to be able to serve everyone -- and you describe exactly these sorts of efforts. That does a great deal to demonstrate a willingness to do the difficult but necessary work here.

Naturally, it's the follow-through and the subsequent actions that will translate this into real change. But this is a clear step along the path that might help make these communities welcoming enough for me to be comfortable.

I hope in particular to see the moderator community supporting this work. Not only is that a community that matters to me as a moderator, but it's also the group of people who are in the best position to help spread change across the network.

Answer 16

I'm slightly relieved to finally see a response to that letter after so long. It's always good to remember there are real humans, same as you, on the other side of the display. Keep being human, and we may yet see this community flourish again, led by the good leaders who haven't lost their touch.

But actions always speak louder than words, so consider trying this next - in your next Stack Overflow survey, omit any and all questions related to age, gender, sex, religion, ethnicity and all that, and share your findings with us - how well such a survey is received, if it clarifies or muddies any statistics, and if it's worth the surveyee time and stress spent filling out vs not having to.

Answer 17

I know this has been done to death already, but there's one aspect I haven't seen covered.

In the Code of Conduct, we state “We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples.” To clarify, this includes discussion questioning or debating the legitimacy of someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Further, the debate or discussion of whether or not you want to or should use a person’s pronouns is both offensive and alienating.

I wonder if this will have a serious unintended consequence. Denying that outlet will likely lead to the targeted group (those that object to pronouns) simply becoming passive aggressive.

The simplest way to do that is for them to simply ignore anything said by anyone that requests specific pronouns. Or possibly worse: to find ways to refer to content without referring to the person. I.e. effectively refusing to acknowledge that this section of humanity even exists.

I suspect this kind of thing would be very hard to moderate - it's hard to judge intent and patterns of behavior mean little since many people write like that anyway with zero intent.

I struggle to imagine that this outcome (no acknowledgment) would feel "less bad" than having the pronouns that were selected to represent your identity questioned. But I have no lived experience.

Answer 18

In the Code of Conduct, we state “We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples.” To clarify, this includes discussion questioning or debating the legitimacy of someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Further, the debate or discussion of whether or not you want to or should use a person’s pronouns is both offensive and alienating.

It would be unfortunate if this was correctly interpreted to mean that any disagreement is to be considered depraved a priori.