This is about feelings and emotions.
No, it's not. That mindset is what created this situation.
This is about doing the right thing, regardless of how people feel. Not making people feel good. Not avoiding or curing all hurt. I have no faith that anything positive will be accomplished as long as this is SO's mindset. We cannot trust them to do the right thing when someone's feelings are a higher priority to them.
The moment you agreed to this, you lost all hope of making anyone at SO rethink their stance. This is the foundation of the moral framework guiding all of this: feelings are so important that we cannot make people uncomfortable with our words. When you accept that way of thinking, you reinforce their beliefs. Rejecting this doesn't mean we can't have any standard for professionalism, but we have to be willing to allow some hurt feelings for anything (not just our situation, but literally anything) to improve.
I get it. It feels nice to care about other people and to make them feel good. This perspective is so seductive, but it's harmful as a foundational principle rather than a secondary purpose. It's harmful because it's impossible to apply absolutely to everyone at all times, and the inability to resolve the contradictions leads people to instead pick and choose whose and which feelings they protect. Inevitably, they make a destructive choice in their efforts to protect the feelings they have chosen, casting aside any consideration for the people hurt by it.
We, the community, assume Stack Overflow presumed bad faith on Monica's part.
I don't, at least not in the sense that they believed Monica was intentionally malicious or deceptive. My presumption is simply one of a faulty, inconsistent moral paradigm on SO's part.
Being welcoming is not mutually exclusive to question quality.
It is according to the people who talk about it being difficult to participate in this community. Their complaints typically center around our quality controls. At a bare minimum, we certainly cannot make both the highest priority. One of them must suffer.
We want to maintain the site quality. We define it here.
Actually, they define it here. The blog just links to that.
This is an inappropriate definition of quality for actual measurements. Voting is in many ways dominated by factors other than quality. Closure is less so, but the available close reasons intentionally exclude some major quality issues (like lack of research). As a heuristic that humans examine personally on a case by case basis, it's not quite so bad, but for aggregate measurements, it's not worth the pixels it's displayed on.
Commit to being more welcoming while having high standards. Again, we believe a more welcoming community is not mutually exclusive with question quality.
No, they don't. There is no world in which they actually believe this enough to live by it and one of their remaining community managers would tell a user to "see a therapist." That happened to me personally.
- We want all users to feel respected.
- We want to be as understanding as possible.
Sorry, but this just isn't true. I can personally attest they had no concern for making me feel respected. They showed absolutely no understanding toward me.
And if you think I'm not worthy of respect or understanding, they certainly didn't show anything like it toward someone who clearly earned it: Monica.
The long and short of it is that there's nothing new or helpful here. I'm sorry you wasted your time and couldn't see through the smokescreen, but they're just making the same statements that their actions have always belied.