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Thank you for the transparency. However, this is perhaps the most offensive thing I have read from the company in the past year. I knew that the company thinks this way about our library, but it feels different to read it.

Thank you for the transparency. However, this is perhaps the most offensive thing I have read from the company in the past year. I knew that the company thinks this way about our library, but it feels different to read it. I am overreacting.

Stack Exchange is not something that users get anything out of. It's an elaborate con to get members of a highly-individualistic culture to perform expensive, pro-social behaviour, via the magical power of numbers-go-up.

Stack Exchange is not something that users get anything out of. It's an elaborate con to get members of a highly-individualistic culture to perform expensive, pro-social behaviour, via the magical power of numbers-go-up. (There are, of course, exceptions.)

Sure, there are some pretty major social problems, but most are reflections of major problems with society, and are gradually improving as activists work in areas of society where they can make a difference. Stack Exchange is not really a place where that can happen. The company can make symbolic gestures, or do activism effectively in other areas; but e.g. employees attempting to use their positions of power to subordinate users and micromanage interpersonal interactions on the site is just… ineffective. (And, imo, unfeminist.) Those (seemingly) responsible for that particular farce are no longer in charge, but it's still an important lesson: what seems like an appropriate intervention to employees, isn't necessarily.

Sure, there are some pretty major social problems, but most are reflections of major problems with society, and are gradually improving as activists work on them in areas of society where they can make a difference. Stack Exchange is not really a place where that can happen. The company can make symbolic gestures, or do activism effectively in other areas; but e.g. employees attempting to use their positions of power to subordinate users and micromanage interpersonal interactions on the site is just… ineffective. (And, imo, unfeminist.) Those (seemingly) responsible for that particular farce are no longer in charge, but it's still an important lesson: what seems like an appropriate intervention to employees, isn't necessarily.