Note that as of August 10th, 2023, the Sustainability moderators have concluded strike actions with the following announcement on Meta Stack Exchange:
Moderation strike: Conclusion and the way forward
Original Post:
Heads up to our community: as of June 5th, 2023, community members and diamond moderators across the Stack Exchange network (including the Sustainability mods) commenced a general moderation strike in protest of bad policy and worse treatment from Stack Overflow, Inc leadership.
- Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers
- An open letter from the community moderators can be found here
- SE staff's statement on the strike here
What happened?
If you've been active on any SE site over the last few months, you will have likely seen the on-going struggle with Generative AI content (e.g. ChatGPT) and its usage on the Stack Exchange sites. In general, most sites have either banned or limited the use of Generative AI/ChatGPT posts.
The ultimate catalyst to this strike is because of the information found in this post:
On May 29th, 2023 (a major holiday for moderators in the US, CA, UK, and possibly other locations), a post was made by a CM on the private Stack Moderators Team. This post, with a title mentioning “GPT detectors”, focused on the rate of inaccuracy experienced by automated detectors aiming to identify AI- and specifically GPT-generated content - something that moderators were already well aware of and taking into account.
This post then went on to require an immediate cessation of issuing suspensions for AI-generated content and to stop moderating AI-generated content on that basis alone, affording only one exceptionally rare case in which it was permissible to delete or suspend for AI content. It was received extremely poorly by the moderators, with many concerns being raised about the harm it would do.
...
The new policy overrode established community consensus and previous CM support, was not discussed with any community members, was presented misleadingly to moderators and then even more misleadingly in public, and is based on unsubstantiated claims derived from unreviewed and unreviewable data analysis. Moderators are expected to enforce the policy as it is written in private, while simultaneously being unable to share the specifics of this policy as it differs from the public version.
You can find the "public version" of this policy here as posted by SE staff.
For more information and discussions of the network policy, see the ChatGPT tag on Meta SE. Some notable ones:
