The community managers owe the ELL community, the moderation team, and me personally an apology

Question

Suppressing community voices, selective comment picking off, window dressing.

What is going on with you, Stack Exchange Community Managers?

5,769 voters were eligible, 1,146 visited the site during the election, 823 visited the election page, and 305 voted. But this is all you are giving 305 ELL voters?

First, let us let the policies straight. The policies are in place to protect regular users, and the point is "building a community where all people feel welcome and can participate." (CoC) And now I ask you: how do you expect community members to participate when the entire election process saw multiple instances where you ignored and disregarded mod requests and the workload reality. How do you expect the average user, especially new users and those who are not in those inner circles to feel motivated to participate again when, after being kept in the dark for days, what you now are telling them omits crucial facts. And those facts are not about any one user, but simply about you, yes you. How do you expect people to feel welcome when you are actively and arbitrarily silencing dissident and critical voices?

You have been arbitrarily and unilaterally censoring protesting voices and making like you have triumphantly resolved a difficult situation caused by our ELL mod team, when in reality it is the opposite. As the moderator responsible for requesting an election in the past year as well as the chief point of contact in many account-related cases in the past year, I am proud to say that the moderation team did a great job. In fact, I think we did everything we could, taking into account being constantly short-staffed and overworked.

1. Please do not do any more suppression of critical voices. This post is specifically about how you, some members of the CM team, handled the 2021 ELL election. If you have a problem with criticism from us moderators and users, point to a policy that says, "No criticism of any staff is allowed." Until then, when it comes to community decisions and CM (mis)conduct, transparency is the best policy.

2. For obvious reasons of conflict of interest, CMs whose behaviors are questioned in this post should refrain from willfully removing this post and other dissenting voices, in order to avoid further erosion of community trust. I am naming Cesar and Catija who can be seen here giving speeches after removing disagreeing voices. Direct responses addressing things brought up in this post are welcome, but censorship should not happen again.

3. You removed comments and suppressed voices that are directly addressed to you and about your violation of the trust of ELL moderation team and your community trust, rather than about any other specific user. A lot of the comments you removed are neither about any specific user nor about individual suspension cases. If you disagree, we shall look at those comments you removed one by one, and I expect you should be able to point to a relevant policy for each removal and give a convincing reason.

4. You have given yourself the license to freely tell dissident voices that those opinions are "wholly incorrect" or "neither truth nor kindness". Based on the little information I have been allowed to peek at, the statement you are putting out and telling the community to believe is neither accurate, nor truthful, nor in any way an indication of responsibility.

So, for what is worth, this is a statement about the recent election from me as a moderator and the sole moderator that has been closely working on the election. Or I tried to at least.

1. I requested a new election of a CM back in January 2021 because some of our ELL moderators had been inactive and the workload had been obviously getting too much for the active ones. My requests were ignored. Yes, just like that. Ignored. In fact, since January, I have only had the privilege of getting two responses from that CM, both highly reproachful in tone. CM support? What is that?

2. In the following months, several other attempts at scheduling an election had been made, but the scheduled time came and went, the election got forgotten or pushed back, three times (or was it four?) We were promised summer, promised the 4th of October, and other promises I don't remember.

3. When there were signs of the election finally happening, we, ELL moderators, requested 2 positions, but again, we didn't get any responses. The election was set in motion without consulting our perceived workload.

4. During the nomination period, when concerns arose about the election, and I tried to get help from said CM, I was again ignored. I don't know whether that was intentional or not, but I was very anxious for the fairness of this election. Requests continuously ignored, Glorfindel and I tried working together but there wasn't anything we could do, so as Glorfindel suggested, we waited. And days later, at long last I finally got word from a CM, her response can only be described as stern, reproachful, and disrespectful. But maybe I should've been happy because that was the first time I successfully got her attention in... 9 months. When you treat someone equally and respectfully, and you fail to see their messages, and it is an honest mistake, shouldn't your first response be "Oh sorry, I dropped the ball there"? Instead you chose to double down on the harsh tone, and what was the goal?

5. With all the things I have mentioned, we have reasons to consider it is possible that this mess that we ended up with could have been avoided, this whole snafu of electing a moderator and then having to retract a previous announcement and doing it all over again. Again this is about the election, and this is about community trust and transparency.

6. The moderation team has not been told any specifics regarding causes of the eventfulness of this election. We are in the dark just like y'all. We don't know what happened. So user accounts and related investigations should never be made public, but I am not aware that moderators are also excluded. I thought those things were the reason you need moderators. Or is the real question who gets excluded?

7. Community Managers owe the community and the moderation team an apology.

Answer 1

For those who may not have met me, I’m Philippe - I’m the Vice-President of Community for Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network. I’ve been asked to comment here and share what I can of my team’s thinking, and to speak to the accusations that are being made. Obviously, there are a lot of strongly held feelings here. And while I would hope that we can get to a place where everyone is comfortable that they’ve been heard and their opinion has been considered, that may not happen. But as a step toward that, I will commit to reading everything posted here, personally. I want you to know that I’ve looked into all claims made here, and I took them seriously. I’m here to tell you what I found.

I feel the need to set some expectations for this conversation, and I also want to say clearly that I’m not interested in getting into a back-and-forth war of words. I want to reiterate that we will protect the privacy of other users in this conversation. This means that I’m probably not going to respond to a lot here, because there isn’t much more I can say without violating long-held guidelines that we don’t discuss suspensions publicly.

There have been a lot of allegations made, and I’d like to respond to them.The first thing I’d like to get out of the way is: CMs are not trying to assign blame and say the moderators did badly here. We don’t think they were wrong to investigate, nor were they wrong to escalate the concerns they had. When considering what happened here, there are a couple of facts that are important to know:

• We received an escalation back in January from the moderators and looked into it, and on request from the moderators we looked into it again back in October - I cannot, and will not, divulge the results of said escalations because those contain privileged information we don’t talk about publicly.
• While it is true that comments were deleted here, they were deleted because they were singling out and talking about one specific user and their disciplinary history on the site. We don’t do that.
• We will continue to remove posts that are attacks against other users and will continue to enforce respecting their privacy - please, stop. This isn’t about prohibiting criticism on CM work, this is about protecting peoples’ right to not be defamed publicly on meta.
• We will also not talk about privileged information, such as investigation results, publicly. One particular comment that was deleted was an accusation that we cannot engage with because doing so would require us to disclose private information, so we deleted that one too.
• For extremely important issues, or for areas that require an answer, we request that mods go through their own CM escalations form or use the “contact us” form. This allows us to ticket and prioritize work for tracking purposes, in a way that the (purposely ephemeral) chat pings do not. This is the same guidance we give all moderators (mod-only link). Any time a mod needs to ensure that CMs review and respond to something, raising an escalation is the best thing to do. This is not a new process, nor is it a process that is unfamiliar to this mod team.

On the issue of the election and ignoring for months - we never intentionally ignore moderators. While we did receive a request to have an election in ELL and took a long while to act on it, please know that this team has organized and completed more than 70 elections this year alone across the network. Working through this backlog has not been easy and demanded triaging, as well as hiring, to get through it. This wasn’t a case of ignoring ELL requests or simply not caring about them, but rather an ongoing effort to move through a big backlog.

We’re being accused of withholding pertinent information from the moderators of this community. The one thing we’ve kept confidential is a chat CMs held with one user directly, and we will keep that one private. Moderators were informed that this chat was going to happen before it took place. Other than that, the mods on the site have access to all actions the CM team takes on users' profiles, including mod messages sent and deletion logs showing all actions that were taken (they were taken with usual moderation tools, so they inherently leave access to moderators). It is wildly inaccurate to say that there were actions taken that left mods in the dark.

As I said, I'll read through everything posted here, but I don't expect that there will be a great deal more information that I can share, simply because there isn't much more to give. I'd like to conclude with one further thought: much of the criticism leveled at my team (publicly and privately) has been beyond what I would consider the limits of polite discourse. If you want to criticize actions that the CMs may or may not have taken, that's fair. My email is public and linked from my profile. But I don't think it's asking too much when I ask that it be done courteously.