Statement regarding Meta Stack Exchange

16 Jan 2020

Certain moderators on Meta Stack Exchange have, for a while now, been in the habit of repeatedly deleting any content that expresses disagreement with their views, or that even approaches criticism of their actions. Recently this has progressed to sending "moderator messages" regarding "rudeness" when this occurs, even when no rudeness was involved.

Today, when I calmly and politely* wondered aloud, on a moderator's answer, whether using a multi-paragraph analogy to repeatedly describe the community as "children playing in someone else's playground" could be considered tone deaf, this comment was removed. On subsequently suggesting that this activity was growing tiresome, I received another boilerplate "warning", and my account was immediately suspended for seven days. The answer, along with its fairly patronising content, remains unaltered.

This is bullying.

It is an outrageous abuse of power and should not be taken lightly by anyone. We must not stand for this kind of behaviour.

It is clear that it is now impossible to form any honest dialogue or discourse with the appointed moderators of Meta Stack Exchange.

As a result, once my seven-day suspension has passed, I will not be returning to engage on Meta Stack Exchange. My engagement with Meta Stack Exchange has come to a permanent end.

Furthermore, I am going to phase out my activity on Stack Overflow, addiction allowing. This site has seen its best days, and I no longer feel comfortable contributing content for a platform run by this company. I want to thank the Community Managers (both those remaining and those who were fired this week) for their tireless hard work in building what was built, and the engineering teams (ditto) for building a great platform.

^{* Truly! I deliberately worked hard on that.}

My contributions prior to 5th September 2019 are licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0, contrary to Stack Overflow Inc.'s claims.

Pet hates:

• Answers in the comments section
• "Ternary operator"
• Comma splices