What should the community take away from panel-gate?

Question

The event that has been dubbed panel-gate by members of the community has sparked emotion and even outrage from the community with regard to the actions of some, and how the events unfolded.

The facts

• The head community manager noticed a moderator account closing questions with a "canned" comment
• The community manager thought the closings were too close together and as a result, suspicious.
• Upon further investigation the community manager noticed some questions that didn't exactly fit the canned close reason, and became even more suspicious.
• The community manager searched meta but found no recent mention of a closing campaign, and only a single mention of what was happening in an almost defunct chat room.
• To protect the integrity of the site, the community manager suspended the moderator's mod status, pending an investigation into the event and communication with the moderator.

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• The moderator was closing questions that are explicitly off topic.

• The moderator believed he was acting on the consensus of the community.

• There are questions on meta that confirm the moderator's beliefs.

• A portion of the community has also confirmed these beliefs.

• The moderator has since resigned from his duties in response to this incident.

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Now that the situation has slightly died down, I wanted to create a question where the community can talk about what we should take away from this event. This question isn't about finger pointing or name calling, hopefully all of that is over. It is about what's left of the community can do better to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. We lost a very active moderator and other active high rep members over what appears to be nothing more than a communication disconnect.

To clarify, by community I mean both the SF community and the community managers. Anyone who has something constructive to say has the floor.

Answer 1

What should the community take away?

Stop looking for a savior

I've watched one moderator after another tire and burn out here, but somehow the reason behind it never came into focus for me until this weekend: there is very, very little community moderation here.

The support I've seen for Hopeless and the overt hatred and bitterness I've seen poured out on other members of the mod team are two sides of the same coin: folks dissatisfied with the site and wanting someone else to fix it for them. As long as you can say you're doing that, you're golden. But if you falter, if you find yourself looking for help tackling a project too big for a few people to do alone, then it's, "What good are you, you used-up has-been;" time for a new great white hope to chew up and spit out.

This isn't accomplishing anything. Moderators can accomplish a lot - and you've all been lucky to have a long string of them willing to pick up the slack for you with very little complaint - but expecting a moderator team to handle the majority of the moderation on a site like this is naive; a good moderator excels at doing the things you cannot, but your role in the moderation process doesn't end when you cast your vote... Abdicating responsibility once the election is over does a disservice to yourself, to the moderators you elect, and to the community as a whole.

You get the site that you work to build. If you're not willing to pitch in, then expecting anyone else to do it for you is irresponsible.

I'm being blunt, but I don't think there's a nice way to say this. Whether you like it or not, Stack Exchange is and always has been a community-moderated system; if you don't want to be a part of that, then don't expect anything to change on your account.

That's what y'all should take away. But you asked what I (or others at SE) should take away...

Better, earlier warnings

There are eleven of us doing this sort of support, across 140+ sites. We try hard to be aware and responsive to issues everywhere, but don't have the luxury of spending all of our time anywhere. Sometimes, stuff gets missed...

But none of this should have been missed.

I should've sat down with Hopeless his first week after being elected, gone over the actions he took, and suggested better / easier / more open ways of doing them. But I didn't see most of what he was doing; no one did.

My takeaway here is that we need better monitoring tools, better guidance for moderator tools, and warning systems when activity goes too far outside the norm. The ones we have were probably barely adequate in 2009, but they're next-to-useless now. I'll be writing up proposals for this over the next few weeks; a good bit of this information can and should be public, at least for trusted users, so I'll post those proposals on MSE.

On a personal note, I want to apologize to all of you. It's my job to keep an eye on things like this, to provide guidance and correction to those involved before they get wildly out of hand. I didn't, they did, and I'm sorry.

Answer 2

I think the biggest problem we have right now is negative expectations. To say that there is room for improvement in the relationship between SE and SF is an understatement. It does go a bit in both directions, to be fair. I'm going to start by stealing a quote from a recent comment by @RobM:

I coach newbie sysadmins and helldesk types at work by emphasising the difference between doing something for the users and doing something to the users. This feels like SE doing something to the community, not for the community.

SF's meta users have the expectation that we're ignored by the (usually) invisible SE overlords unless there's something they want from us. There is a perception that requests directed at SE staff typically get ignored for long periods of time. I'll let someone else provide the research to substantiate how accurate this impression is, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a common impression.

When SE admins do take action, it's usually in regards to an interest they have brought to us instead of vice versa, and the time between proposal (when it happens) and implementation is very swift by comparison. This creates quite a bit of consternation, even if there may be no connection at all between the parties who bring these proposals to us and the ones who are allegedly ignoring us. This is all the worse if it's a change that the community isn't exactly thrilled with.

Flipping this around, I think it's a fair assessment that several SE admins probably do what they can to avoid this site unless they absolutely have to touch it. Not only do we have a reputation for being ornery when compared to the other SE communities, we're extremely critical of the actions that the SE admins do take for the reasons covered in the prior paragraph. They expect negativity, so when they get negativity (particularly when it involves hyperbole) a great deal of it is probably dismissed out of hand. Nothing they do is going to make us happy, and things work out easier if they set their expectations low.

Summing it up

Looking at the larger picture objectively, this works poorly for everyone. SE admins appreciate being able to keep space between themselves and us for stress related reasons, and SF users don't appreciate it when SE admins do step in because there's an impression that they only do so for their own behest. We could try to debate who the biggest contributor to this bad relationship is, or who "started it first", but that's not going to get us anywhere.

I think the focus needs to be on what both sides can unilaterally do to improve this relationship. This does mean that the SE admins are going to need to be given an opportunity to ask us for what we can do to help them (and yes, that does include not being quite as quick to go for the jugular), but it should come with the understanding that there are needs that we need addressing as well.

I challenge both sides to begin working in this direction. It won't be easy, but our only choices are to live with each other, make each other miserable, or go our separate ways. If we continue down the road that we've been going for another year or two, the third option is increasingly going to become the only workable solution.

Answer 3

My biggest takeaway is that it will be business as usual here next week. Crap questions will happen, a few decent questions will surface that will get maybe 2 upvotes when 5 years ago it would get 20. The "experts" will banter back and forth within our inner circle elsewhere and the review queues will continue to be a den of despair. To think that anything substantial will change after all of this is a little pretentious since it seems like nothing substantial ever changes on SF short of what gets pushed to it from SE on high. Somewhere out there HopelessN00b is crushing devops, and the beat goes on.