Has Stack Exchange rescinded moderator access to the featured tag on Meta?

I'm just going to dump an answer in here to keep people somewhat in the loop.

Yesterday Juan posted the following question in our moderator Q&A team:

How long can moderator resignation posts be featured in the sidebars of our network sites?

Juan self-answered the question with the following:

Moderator resignation announcements have traditionally been encouraged as opportunities for former teammates to say a goodbye and have others wish them well. They are things we want the community to share in and respond to. Due to recent events however, these resignations have become more and more a place for people to post hurtful words and attack Stack employees, other mods, teammates, and community members.

We still value people posting these when they're stepping away from the team. We also value folks being able to say their goodbyes and we want to continue to feature these resignation posts. However, moving forward we can only allow them to be featured for a day. After that period, we ask that you un-feature the post or ping a CM to do it. The original posts will continue to be a part of Meta but they won't show in the sidebar.

A publicly accessible version of the question was created here, with a similar but more succinct answer from Juan:

Moderator resignation posts will be featured for around 24 hours moving forward. We will not remove the posts from Meta but the featured tag needs to be removed after that time.

_{The above quotes taken from moderator-only spaces were reproduced here with permission from a CM}

I'm not sure if I am allowed to voice an opinion on this but, can this not become a thing please? Yet another half-baked policy by the overlords that only serves to hide their dirty laundry from plain sight.

Not too long ago, y'all (SE Inc) decided to remove Hot Meta Posts from the sidebar. Fine, but that meant you then had to put your trust in the moderation team to manage such posts with the featured tag; heck, the question title even says "moderators now fully control"... so what happened to that? Where has that trust gone?

It's been clear for months that the powers that be no longer have any interest in co-ooperating with the community. But "recent events" have shown that this disservice is now being extended to moderators as well. This policy change is so disrespectful, not only to the moderator stepping down, but to the rest of the moderator team. Can the moderators, elected in good faith by the very community that runs your sites, no longer be trusted to do the very job they were instated for? Can you not trust them to ensure that people voice their opinions respectfully?

Nay, they've been doing their job all along. What you see in answers and comments is what remains after the mess has been cleaned. What this tells me is two things,

1. that you are expediting the downfall of the community you are "investing" in, and
2. that you can't handle being called out for it.

If you can't take the bad PR, don't make the bad decisions.

This can only mean one thing: It's time for SO mods to step down at the rate of 1 mod per day, so that there can be a continuously featured mod resignation post!

The above is of course not quite serious, but not completely in jest either. This latest policy is yet another unneccessary attempt to sweep the existing problems under the rug. At this point, every elected moderator, as well as every user who contributes to SE, must ask themselves: why do you still do free volunteer work for such a company?

I don't think SE will respond seriously to the grievances of the community. The time where this could be resolved with dialogue is long gone, and firing Shog should have driven that point home to everybody. However, if they run out of mods and power users who clean up their sites, they have no choice but to act - either they find new volunteers (hard), or hire people (expensive), or will be overrun by spam and low quality content (bad for ad dollars). So, if you want something to change, I suggest you stop all your moderation and curation activity.

I'd propose, that they should introduce a new one meta-tag: resignation. The amount of resignations so far would justify that. This would also help with not having to keep these excessive hand-made lists up-to-date, when one can simply click the tag.

This is just a pragmatic approach to the sad state of affairs, which would only reflect the given situation.

It would also make sense for archival purposes, so that one has them all in a tag-list and not a manually curated list, eg. so that one can jump from any one of these to the whole listing, as kind of history.

answered Jan 17, 2020 at 9:43

mag_zbc

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