Moderators and contributors of the popular question and answer site for programmers Stack Overflow released an announcement this Monday that they are taking part in a strike, directed at the company that runs Stack Overflow. They state in their announcement that they are frustrated with the way the company has treated them of late.
They write in their announcement that...:
...the purpose of this strike is to make a point to the management of Stack Overflow, Inc. of the extent to which they rely upon the goodwill and volunteer efforts of their core userbase. We wish to show Stack Overflow, Inc., that they cannot continue to treat us as expendable. They must work hand-in-hand with the core userbase of the site to continue to maintain the site and curate content.
The strike comes in the wake of several months of constant controversy on Stack Overflow, in which the company and the active users of the site clashed over a number of issues. The letter released accompanying the strike details some of the issues that the company and the community clashed over - including treating volunteer elected moderators as expendable and firing two of the most well-respected Community Managers on Stack Overflow staff - as well as a list of several demands that the moderators want met before they resume moderation of the site, saying "...We can no longer accept being ignored and taken for granted."
The people involved in the strike include the elected moderators of Stack Overflow, who are democratically elected by users of the site and handle thousands of flags a day, as well as several other groups of users who are dedicated to helping moderate Stack Overflow.
These include a group called Charcoal, who run a bot called SmokeDetector, which utilizes thousands of regular expressions - along with several other detection methods - to identify and automatically remove spam posted on Stack Overflow, with over 152,000 correctly identified spam posts to date; and SOBotics, who maintain various assorted bots to assist in Stack Overflow moderation, such as a plagiarism detector, and were recently featured on the official Stack Overflow blog.
One of the moderators on strike writes:
As of today, Monday, February 24th, 2020, I am going on strike as a Stack Overflow moderator, as part of an organized effort among the core moderation userbase of Stack Overflow.
This strike is part of an effort to drive home the point to Stack Overflow, Inc. just how much they depend on their moderators and core userbase. Recent actions by the company have proven that they no longer understand how much the site relies on the unpaid efforts of the dozens of users who voluntarily take the time to curate content and moderate the site.
Given how much every developer relies on Stack Overflow, we can only hope that the company and the community can arrive at a conclusion and that the site will continue to serve as a valuable resource for coding questions.
This is way too much information for a press release. Nobody needs to know all this and nobody outside the network really cares. The important point is that certain key groups are striking. Their names and details of what they do are irrelevant. I suggest replacing those two paragraphs with just: