I'm stepping down as a meta moderator — in response to recent actions by the company

Question

One of my goals as a meta moderator has always been to try to nudge the company in the right direction and to try to help keep ties between the company and community strong. I've pushed for a good many things and I feel like I failed there.

With that said, it is clear that the direction the company is taking is not aligned with the community, and with the removal of Catija, V2Blast and ... god knows who else, strong internal community voices are lost.  We literally seem to have lost multiple people we trust: Shog, Robert and Nicolas, and now Cat and V2Blast almost at random. This isn't something that builds trust or shows care for the community.

These are mistakes and ones that hurt us as a community. The company seems intent on repeating the same cycle of chasing distant dreams and forsaking the community that built it up to where it is.

Staff are also users of MSE and I feel that if the company doesn't protect its own staff, and preserve the community interests, I cannot in good conscience remain as a moderator on meta. I don't feel like I can continue to clean up the messes the company makes, and the damage it does in the process to the community.

The community's voice in many ways is clearly ignored, and these actions are not an investment in the community.

To our community members and customers reading this note: you are foundational to our success. Thank you for your continued partnership as we enter this next phase.

We certainly don't feel that way as we've lost advocates and parts of the community within your company.

I do care about my communities — and while I don't see SO inc as being a good steward of it, believe that staying active as a user, and remaining as a moderator on Super User and Pets is the right choice for now. I may revisit that based on future actions.  

I'll continue to be active on Meta as long as energy, spoons and life lets me, though clearly until the company sees the light, I can't promise how effective I'll be.

Answer 1

Thank you Journeyman Geek for all those years spent to help this Community. I am not the most active user on Meta.SE, but every time I opened a discussion in here, your answers were always helpful, and insightful.

To me, you represent what the Community should be. Care, patience, open to discussion, friendly, those are the qualities that comes to mind when I think about your contributions here. You have shown to many users how we should interact on this network. You mod presence will be missed by us all.

Answer 2

It seems that there are no good news left in the box. We are going from one disaster into another with no end in sight.

Thank you for all the good work you have done here and all the energy you put into trying to make things better. Quite often when everything looked dark and hopeless, you haven't given up and this alone made me stick around at times I was too tired to fight.

I am glad that you will stick around, because what you post here in the public is way more important than you being a mod at this place.

Answer 3

Thanks for all the time and effort you spent on moderating this community. Besides the actual moderation work (of course), what I really appreciated was your ability to find ways to bridge the gaps between company and the community, especially when that relationship was particularly frayed. Even though we may not have always agreed on everything, I was thankful for your ability to keep a level head and allow folks to feel heard while keeping them from crossing the line. Meta Stack Exchange will definitely feel the impact of losing you as a moderator.

Answer 4

Thank you so much, Journeyman Geek. Even though I don't recall ever having a direct conversation with you, I have been inspired by you so many times. As a frequently nervous person who struggles with writing letters, I took inspiration from your words and advice for others. Every time I took interest in something and one of your well-written answers was there, I tried to read it through the whole way and to understand the motivation behind it and where those words were coming from. It helped me to understand people as a whole.

Your complete dedication to the community here is an inspiration for so many people - I certainly know it's not just me. Truly a role model and voice of reason and cool ideas, always - through day-to-day MSE life, through the strike. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Hope you can 'put down this burden' - as you put it - and relax a bit more. If it's not giving you joy, perhaps it's the best for your own personal wellbeing. We will all miss you as a mod here on MSE - I know I certainly will.

Answer 5

Thank you for all of your time and effort you spent here as a diamond moderator. My main initial experience, although only indirectly, was with your work during late 2018 and into 2019 dealing with various major issues back then, e.g., the COC (Code of Conduct) changes, Monica's "firing", the posted content license changes, etc. However, we survived that, with things starting to look up again shortly afterwards.

There are several interesting parts of your answer to Contest: what was the most impactful change on Stack Exchange in 2020? regarding that time period. In particular, there's

I spent most of 2019 firefighting.

Thank you for your work containing and putting out all those many "fires", so they didn't spread and do even more damage.

You also wrote there that

I would say practically the root of the most impactful changes for 2020 are realising that past choices were wrong. We're not quite at an entente cordiale or what I would term 'a symbiotic relationship' - but we're also not quite in a situation where employees are scared of, or encouraged to avoid, meta. It's something that could inform the direction of the network if the company is willing to keep at it, and invest back into the community.

We have a foundation for something better - but I am still uncertain to whether that's a foundation of sand or stone we are building on. In between then and now, SE's occasionally made a few community-hostile decisions - but on the whole, I'm not constantly resolving some monumental, fresh mess up.

Unfortunately, it now appears that foundation was made more of sand than stone. Nonetheless, I still hope the situation will improve again, similar to how it did after 2019, but perhaps more permanently this time.

Even though you wrote here that

I've pushed for a good many things and I feel like I failed there.

I don't believe you failed, as such. There's only so much a user and moderator of this site can do. I believe you did the best you reasonably could, and I doubt that anybody else would have done much more, if any, than you did to nudge the company and keep the ties strong.

I'm glad you decided to remain active as a user here. I've read many thousands of posts on this site, with many of yours being among the most pertinent, interesting and informational. I hope that we can continue to benefit from the high quality of any new posts you write. Also, you never know, but perhaps the company executives may even start paying more attention to them, so they then start to make appropriate positive changes, such as those which will improve the ties between the company and the community.