[fennecfoxen]

Monica was just the spark that lit the fire of the community-management disaster, but they'd been stockpiling fuel. Even the pronoun question itself was only raised as part of a somewhat clumsy top-down directive to move away from the "ideal questions and answers are universal and impersonal" approach that had previously served to render the matter of pronouns a non-issue. As things progressed, it soon became clear that Stack Overflow's corporate strategy was to try its hardest to stick their collective fingers in their ears and throw volunteers under the bus.

A thoughtful reader can imagine how pseudonymous moderators of the LGBT stack exchanges might be shocked by the company itself breaching an expectation of privacy, talking to the press using the volunteer's real name, and radically misrepresenting her position. What might be next? Might some of them be outed? Would a Google search for their name, too, reveal only the Stack Overflow controversy?

One open letter reads: "Stack Exchange has rewarded years of service by putting one of its volunteers in danger – and there’s now a very real feeling that we may no longer be safe on this platform." https://dearstack.artofcode.co.uk/

A resigning LGBTQ moderator wrote of the broader situation, "[Stack Exchange draws] vocal bigots from the woodwork with prompts to discussion, and then [vanishes], forcing us to decide between tacit approval through silence or defense of our own against an unchanging torrent of bigotry." https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334575/dear-stack-e...

A lot of volunteers just went straight out the door.