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  • 69
    +1, though you forgot the part about announcing stuff on major holidays, like the present fiasco. Or like kicking a Mi Yodeya mod in the face on a major Jewish holy day. I could understand nobody at SO knowing about Jewish festivals. What I don't understand is launching predictably controversial policies on a major US and CA holiday. Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 14:15
  • 1
    I have to admit that imagining elusive stakeholders sitting on some mega yacht in the bahamas and demanding this and that without even having visited SE once in their life is a solacing thought. At least, much better than all these recent decisions being made by the company itself. Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 14:18
  • 35
    I was going to log out and not look back, but I had to upvote this. The comment about announcing on a holiday made me also remember Chipps' comment about "shipping on a Friday". This latest iteration has made me realize I'm still bitterly disappointed about what went down in 2019. I desperately wish we could just roll back the clock to when "Be Nice" was an accurate summary of the CoC and the biggest controversy I had to deal with was trying to get people to stop tagging everything "grammar" on ELL. (Yeah, I lost that battle but it didn't crush my spirit like this crap does). Commented Jun 6, 2023 at 17:33
  • 6
    this time, hidden agenda is probably to transform the site into ChatGPT frontend Commented Jun 7, 2023 at 15:06
  • 4
    @ColleenV "Be nice" was the start of the slippery slope that led us to this point. Commented Jun 7, 2023 at 19:23
  • @IanKemp I wasn’t asserting an opinion about whether it was a good thing that the policy could be summed up that way. I was just remarking on how far back my nostalgia would like to go. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 1:17
  • 18
    No downvotes here. I think it’s been fairly obvious in several of these SE scandals that malice cannot be doubted, and that the true goal of SE is precisely the opposite of what they start out touting. In the Monica case, the CoC was deliberately written in an absurd way they knew would cause a furore and backlash against LGBTQ+ users, driving in a flurry of new users, which increased revenue. Currently, a network full of AI-generated posts created by AI-driven bots is exactly what they want because, again, it provides an influx of new users and increases revenue. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 2:53
  • 2
    Given all the flood of AI-centric blog posts from the company, and capitalists' well-known disregard for long-term care of their holdings, I agree this doesn't seem like much of a "hidden" agenda. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 19:13
  • 10
    @StephanKolassa "I could understand nobody at SO knowing about Jewish festivals." I couldn't. Not when Joel Spolsky (an outspoken Jew) was still with the company at the time. Commented Jun 8, 2023 at 20:43
  • 2
    Now that I think about SE's actions in the past 3-4 years and how insanely illogical they were, it reminded me of a popular saying in our country that even if our leaders intentionally planned to destroy this country, they couldn't do it more perfectly than what they have already done. Commented Jun 11, 2023 at 11:55
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I would NOT say that the CoC was crafted to cause backslash against LGBTQ+ users, but the golden opportunity of picking out a public example to hang in the main plaza like they used to do with pirates in the old day seemed a very careful planned act. Stir a mess with a poorly written policy, cherry pick a victim and then call in media coverage to present themselves as the ones who discovered this bad actor and are taking serious measures against them.... All of that looks like it was too much of a luscious opportunity to sit out. Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 7:50
  • 3
    @SPArcheon I don’t think it was done in deliberate malice towards the LGBTQ+ community specifically – that is, I don’t think hurting the LGBTQ+ community was the goal. But I do think they deliberately looked for a topic they knew would easily become highly inflammatory and had potential to draw in a massive crowd of reactionists, and trans rights and pronouns fit that bill to a T. The fact that it ended up being hugely detrimental to LGBTQ+ users was just immaterial to them. Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:35