What If It All Worked Out

what if it all worked out

Little update, within 24 hours of the end of the strike the stack overflow mods handled over 10k of the collected flags. Those folks are machines and are incredibly good at what they do, illustrating exactly how much the company needs them.

The end of the Stack Overflow Strike

Note: Skip to the bottom if you just want a quick list of strike outcomes and not story mode.

For those of you who missed it (I know many of the engineers I talk with day to day did), starting on June 5th the Stack Exchange elected moderators and many curators and users announced they were on strike. The relationship between the company and the community had been slowly slipping for the last 5+ years as company actions gradually degraded the once robust trust that community members had in how their platform was being run. However, none of these changes had truly threatened the long term existence of the site like the decision to unilaterally override the existing, community established policy to ban GenAI content with a new, secret, moderator only policy that effectively forced moderators to stop moderating GenAI content (this policy as since been released, and I'll link it later).

The combination of a policy whose contents were secret and which went directly against community consensus (and which many believed would ultimately result in the death of the site) convinced over 100 moderators and over 1500 users to sign on to the strike letter. These users included two key groups: first, Charcoal, a highly effective community built and maintained spam prevention group, chose to shut down their operations as a part of the strike, and second, the Stack Overflow moderator team agreed to stopped moderating, resulting in a backlog of nearly 20,000 unhandled flags during the strike.

This impact was enough to bring the company to the table. Despite despite banning strike organization from taking place on stack exchange chat rooms or sites (which required moving to a discord server for organization) and hush-hush messages to striking moderators implying that their moderator status may be revoked under certain conditions, the community held strong and the strike began.

Mere days after the strike began, the VP of Community reached out to ask for a set of community representatives to negotiate with in private. Elections ran through week 1 of the strike and ultimately 3 moderators were selected who would communicate with strikers in the strike discord and communicate with the company representatives in private, allowing negotiations began at the start of week two. These negotiations were interrupted by a couple of events which I've previously written about:

First, the botched release of the "AI Question Assistant" which turned out to pass questions to the ChatGPT API with a prompt and return the result (quickly jailbroken, widely mocked, and ultimately scrapped by the company). It had problem such as changing what question was being asked, fixing bugs in code, and answering the question instead of fixing it.

Second, the removal of the Data Dumps (with the implication that this was to prevent GenAI companies from training on it), which turned out to be a directive straight from the CEO and was quickly reverted after a call from one of the company's founders.

And finally, clear misrepresentations of the strike to any media outlet that contact them.

After the first month, spirits were not great. Progress was occurring but at nowhere near the pace that people had hoped for. The strikers had hoped for an immediate retraction of the GenAI policy, which had not yet happened, however what the negotiators were able to share sounded promising, so the strike continued.

Finally, after nearly 8 weeks on strike, the negotiators came to an agreement and announced that Stack Overflow had conceded on nearly every concern. Here's a quick rundown of the results:

One strike demand was that the private policy moderators had received would be published and so it was. This made it clear to everyone how damning that policy was. In summary, it restricted moderators to only act on self-admission and otherwise treat GenAI content as human (even when it includes clear tells such as talking about a knowledge cutoff date).

The second was that this moderator-only policy was retracted. It was replaced with a heuristic based policy that would allow moderators to act on certain heuristics, which was effectively the status quo prior to the strike.

They also made a commitment to keep the data explorer, the data dumps, and the API freely available. This wasn't initially part of the strike demands but was added after the data dump snafu in the middle of the strike.

They agreed to never mandate moderator actions in private that were not justified by a public policy.

They agreed to update their press policy to ensure that statements about the community are reviewed by their internal community team and not sent out without consultation (which is apparently what happened).

They granted moderators an ability to establish when the company has failed to hold up its end of the moderator agreement (by vote). If the moderators established that the agreement was violated, they have committed to reverting any changes that were made improperly and do them again, in a way that is compliant with the agreement.

They updated their policies around how they will handle support cases complaining about moderator action to involve actually consulting with the moderator(s) who made the decision, and also their policies around communicating with moderators more widely. Mods have been asking for a return to more active and open communication from the company and these changes are a huge step in the right direction there.

And finally they made some softer commitments around taking community feedback under account, being more transparent with platform changes, and making an effort to communicate more with users and moderators.

These changes are massive and while there is still some talk of continuing the strike until there is more follow through on these commitments, many users are chomping at the bit to get back to work. The vote currently stands at around 95% approval for ending the strike, so I think we can safely call this over, and a massive win for the Stack Overflow community. And if there's more you want to know about Stack Exchange or the strike itself, my askbox is open ^.^

Meta Stack Exchange

Moderation strike: Results of negotiations

We have reached the following conclusions during negotiations between community-selected strike representatives and representatives of Stack

Here's the official post with the results of the strike negotiations if you really like reading, but I'll try and put out a more layperson friendly version in the coming days.

Looks like the Stack Overflow strike is finally coming to a close, after nearly 8 weeks, having achieved all of its major goals (with only a few, small, compromises)! Just wanted to put something out since I'm pretty excited about it. Once it's official and the meta post is out I'll see if I can put together a more detailed analysis of negotiations and why this went so differently from other strikes such as the one on reddit.

Ok I've chatted with some friends and I'm actually pretty OK with the dash redesign. I wish there was an option to put the left bar icons back in the top right, but I also see the usability case of "these random icons dont really make sense until you memorize what they do, we should put names next to them"

Enough committing to the bit. Commit to the git.

i love the new dash and i love userscripts

DONT WORRY WE GOT THIS