Can you provide a reference for where Jeff actually said that?

Coordinating bans

We will cross-reference with Math Overflow, where possible, to coordinate bans. If a user has been banned from Math Overflow, except in the case of extraordinary extenuating circumstances, they will be banned from here as well.

There you go.

And if what I did was ban-worthy, wouldn't the same apply for Robin Chapman?

I'm not going to bother explaining, since I think you already know the answer, and if you really don't understand, then I don't think I can help you.

If I were to post valuable mathematical content at one word per post, would that be acceptable then?

I'll leave this one as an exercise.

It's nice to be able to type more than 500 characters, eh?

Re: the physics website, the last time I checked (admitted quite a while ago), the site was mostly dead. That could explain why Jeff Atwood hasn't seen trouble there.

(Ah, I didn't say that right. I do not mean that a physics.SE will necessarily go through the same problems as math.SE; I meant a "that statement is vacuously true" sort of thing.)

I don't think Jeff Atwood is intentionally doing anything wrong, just that his current actions are misguided. My understanding is that the prior SO experience (i.e. where Mr. Atwood was a moderator) was limited to websites such as StackOverflow and SuperUser, which all cater to somewhat similar populations (programmers, sysadmins, etc.), while the new SE 2.0 has him as a moderator on websites geared at very different populations (mathematicians, physicists, theoretical computer scientists, etc.). It is perhaps curious that the math website has a much greater number of problems than the physics and theoretical computer science ones.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that he has the best interests of math.SE at heart; and yet, nevertheless, ideally he shouldn't be a decision-maker there.

Unfortunately, who should? From what I gathered (which, being second hand accounts, bear the usual caveats), the moderator pro-tems went largely AWOL, and the one remaining one doing his duty tendered his resignation rather publicly. To second Noah's comment above, this experiment with no initial site administrator is quite a bit of a failure in this specific case. Ideally, Jeff Atwood wouldn't have to step in and make decisions. But considering that moderator elections take some time, I really can't think of any other option aside from someone on the SO team stepping in and take over the reins in the interim period.

In fact, I argue that if a clearly stated written rule was broken, a suitable consequence must be applied to the user who broke said rules. This is especially the case for a website whose goal is to be much more open to the general public, if we want the site to thrive and expand and not just end up a small community of several closely knit individuals. A prerequisite for the Moderators to do their jobs effectively would be for them to have the trust of the community, and that requires even-handedness in enforcing the rules.

In Daniel's system, what is called for is not community moderation, but an all-wise benevolent dictator. (Which as we all know, can work pretty well.) In a system where the people set the rules and the people enforce the rules, if a rule is broken, the proper thing to do is the fix the bloody rule, instead of setting aside provisos and exceptions for this person and that. (And no, I am not talking about US healthcare reform.)

In this particular case, however, I am not even sure exactly what rules were broken, and how much communication has been going on between Robin and Jeff Atwood and other SO admins. In particular, I do not, and will not, support Robin just because he is Robin Chapman, almost winner of Mastermind, wonderful all around guy, and frequent and exceedingly erudite contributor to both MSE and MO. Setting such a precedent can only foster nepotism (or accusations thereof later down the line). I will, however, support Robin in this case because I don't see any rules being clearly broken (unless shown evidence to the contrary) and I think the SO people could've handled the situation better.

I agree with Daniel's point about leadership in the abstract. But there is one circumstance to keep in mind here, one which now makes me shudder at the prospect of MO being incorporated as an SE2.0 site:

Jeff Atwood and other SO admins prefer to see all SE2.0 sites as "one big happy family" with one gigantic community, rather than individual communities on individual subjects of expertise.

An early evidence to this fact is the 100 rep bonus for associating existing SE2 accounts. They seem to care more about a uniform platform and uniform policies than about the peculiarities of individual communities (which is why on a few websites a ridiculous number of people have moderator-like powers with the 10K rep, while on some even the number above 3K is rather few). From his point of view, Jeff is a leader to all users of SE2 websites. To play the devil's advocate, when taken in the larger context, it is the Math.SE community that is different, and not Jeff Atwood (see also Pete's anecdote above).

There is no disputing the culture divide between the Math.SE community and Jeff Atwood, and I am not trying to excuse his words and actions. But before you, especially those of you who have not used Math.SE or other SE2 websites, fault Jeff Atwood too heavily, put yourself in his shoes and imagine facing the shock of finding what you've been doing, in essentially the same way, for dozens of times and succeeding, to be completely ineffectual in this one situation.

If you are willing to cut Robin some slack for doing what is habitual and comes naturally, will you not lend some sympathy to Jeff Atwood for also doing what is habitual and usually working? The way the things are going, if neither party (in the general sense, taken to include their advocates) is willing to give ground, the situation can blow-up in a really ugly way. That there are so many voices in the discussion with subtle differences just makes the whole situation a lot more volatile than it needs to be.

For the record, while I would hate to see Robin be suspended over such triviality, I did give his post a down-vote. Bringing that e-mail directly out in the open can only accelerate the deterioration of relationships. I utterly fail to see how essentially throwing a ticking time-bomb into Meta.MSE is supposed to be beneficial to the community.

Except this time, I actually don't think the community there is behind Robin.

I think that this is part of the "Jeff Atwood is God on Earth" effect among SO users.

Except this time, I actually don't think the community there is behind Robin. As I write, the thread has 15 upvotes and 17 downvotes.

+1 Daniel Moskovich. Losing Robin would be quite a loss for the MSE community.

The same can be said for Math.SE with regards to MO. That community needs to develop on its own. It does not need a gaggle of drive-by voters coming from MO just to stuff the ballot boxes for a certain agenda.

For what it's worth, most of the MO users who have accounts there are active members of the MSE community.

I should also add that the big paragraph with the blue boxes in the above post presumes a user who thinks Robin is intentionally protesting. I am actually with the opinion that it is just a bad, hard to break habit on Robin's part. (More than once I have tried to hit vim-style control keys when composing e-mail in G-Mail and as a result lost the whole text. So I know a bit from personal experience about hard to break habits.) And being threatened with suspension because of it is altogether rather silly. So yes, the whole argument above about civil disobedience is academic (though a bit of a pet peeve of mine when looking at internet fora).

If any time we had an issue in the MO community, it was resolved by linking to the SO blog or some random meta.SO post, I don't think anyone here would be happy about it. Why should we defer judgements about our own community to a bunch of people who don't even visit MO?

The same can be said for Math.SE with regards to MO. That community needs to develop on its own. It does not need a gaggle of drive-by voters coming from MO just to stuff the ballot boxes for a certain agenda.

While philosophically I agree with you that the start of Math.SE was not in the most satisfactory manner (little I could have done about it, since I couldn't join at least until public beta), that it has already developed means that change cannot come overnight. It will take time for the new moderators, whoever they be, to prod the community into being more engaged on policy issues and discuss more on Meta. Granted that Math.SE and the SE2.0 platform are significantly different from the platform and mandate around which MO was built, I think it is only fair to let the community figure out what works best for them, as opposed to immediately adopted your singular belief.

Ideally, because of the current agitation, after it blows over and after the moderator elections, more members of Math.SE will take an active interest in the running of the site, bringing it closer to your ideal. But in the off-chance that an overwhelming majority just lets out a collective "Meh!", well.... maybe it should then just be allowed to run its course.

In regards to your first point: note that nowhere in my comment did I address Robin's own interpretation of the events, that post was intended to address the on-lookers. Also, I would like to draw (a possibly somewhat arbitrary) distinction about complaining about Robin's possible suspension and complaining about the rule that led to Robin's possible suspension. Civil disobedience is aimed at provoking the latter, so that the rules will be changed fundamentally. Pleading for the authority to turn a blind-eye because "it's Robin Chapman" is the former, and is only about the symptoms and not the cause. To put it more bluntly: the first one is the creation of a privilege applicable to the elite few, the latter is about the repeal of an unjust rule. I therefore argue that the correct comment on Meta.Math.SE should not be

Please do not suspend Robin, as he is a respected member of the community.

or even

MO users will boycott MSE because Robin (who is an all-around, decent guy by the way) got suspended.

but something like

That the upper echelons will come in and suspend a user for doing something no one's complained about [Nb. this may or may not be true; only writing this as an example], shows something is wrong with the process.

or

This silly issue of hitting the enter key in the comment field has finally caught up with us and caused damage to the community (the possible suspension of a well-regarded user), can we please now have the old behaviour back.

or

MO users will boycott MSE because the existence of unclear/pointless rules under which Robin can be suspended.

I guess the point I am trying to make is this: if (and that's a big if) it was an act of civil disobedience, then Robin Chapman does not need your support; his cause needs your support.

Also, Willie, I should note that when you engage in civil disobedience and do get thrown in prison or what have you, there's nothing stopping other people from complaining about it.

Also, I do want to see math.SE succeed. However, I do not think that is possible with the amount of reliance on SO policy for determining math.SE policy that was displayed under the moderators pro temp. For instance, the ban on meta tags should have been discussed as a separate math.SE policy issue. Linking to a thread on meta.SO does not mean that the issue is resolved on math.SE. I'm not going to "get into it", but there was a movement early on that wanted to cede the prerogative of the math.SE community to determine its own laws to the larger SO community, which is, for many reasons, unacceptable.

If any time we had an issue in the MO community, it was resolved by linking to the SO blog or some random meta.SO post, I don't think anyone here would be happy about it. Why should we defer judgements about our own community to a bunch of people who don't even visit MO?

That's one of the reasons that I think Anton and Scott have done a phenomenal job. Sure, early on, there were links to posts on the SO blog or on meta.SO, but that was the beginning of the conversation, not the end. Even when we cite old meta.MO threads where some agreement was reached, people here are willing to revisit the issue if some sort of problem comes up.

The only things set in stone on MO are the target audience and the focus on hard-questions (as opposed to soft-questions).

(a) Civil disobedience would be a lot more effective if it causes inconvenience for those with the power to enact change. The way that Math.SE, and other SE2 sites started out with an administrator and with mostly hands-off attitude from SE headquarters, this means that the particular act of civil disobedience is causing significantly more problem for the users of the site and the moderators pro-tems of the site, whose powers end at voting up thread at meta.SO. While I am not a big fan of this "feature" in the SE2 software, I agree with Bill that the method of protest is completely ineffective and unnecessarily involves too many "innocent bystanders". (Which of course leads to some degree of ill-will from the core SO community toward Robin, which degenerates into the current situation.)

(b) Part of civil disobedience has always been the willingness to face up to the consequences of protesting, even in the context of oppressive regimes. A desire to be martyr for the cause if you will. All the people here and on meta.Math.SE who approves of Robin's action as civil disobedience yet argues against his suspension seem to forget that. Remember that the person who coined the term civil disobedience also wrote, in that same essay,

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison

and was imprisoned for his refusal to pay the poll tax. If you think that Robin's action is innocent and due to an uncontrollable tic, that's fine; you can argue against his suspension saying that the rules were never clear on this matter, that the man should not be punished for the software being changed on him, whatever. But if you will interpret Robin's action as an active form of protest, in view of the fact that he has been warned prior by moderators and/or SO brass, you will also have to accept the fact that his behaviour is not unbound by the rules of the game.

With that said: some other thoughts.

I agree that from our point of view that sometimes Jeff Atwood's e-mails and word choices can appear unprofessional. I would argue that it is a culture clash between different notions of professionalism. (Though that e-mail he sent to Pete Clark, I have no idea what that's about.) I certainly have friends from my undergraduate days who are now "professionals" in their own right and whose idea of professionalism is not far from that of Jeff Atwood's. It is unfortunate that he had to step in and try to manage a group that (a) doesn't want that level of interference, being used to rather large amounts of freedom academically and (b) enjoys a completely different culture from what he is used to. Of course this doesn't excuse his behaviour, after all, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. But I do ask members of MO, especially those who do not at least semi-regularly visit Math.SE, to exercise restraint and not jump in and make matters worse.

I think despite the many misgivings we may have about the current situation, and about the way Math.SE is being handled by the overlords, most of us (yeah, maybe not you, Harry) actually want to see Math.SE succeed and exist (if only as a foil for lesser questions). As such I really urge people to be patient with (what Bill Dubuque calls) growing pains and let the actual users of Math.SE sort this out themselves. Regardless of how wildly successful MO is, and we shouldn't just rush over and impose our point of views. At the very least, as mathematicians, we should know well that some lessons are best learned first-hand.

Does it count as coming around if one of the reasons I think it's important is so that there could have been someone there to suspend you during said private beta!

Oh, you're too kind...

Although some of what Jeff's doing is counterproductive, I think the main problem is that the "no site administrator" approach doesn't work for new communities.

I said this way back during the private beta. I'm glad people are finally coming around.

@Harry: You surely know by now that not everyone subscribes to your uniquely antagonistic approach to enacting change. In case you're unaware, it comes off as particularly patronizing to suggest that your approach is the only one -- note that it does not appear to be faring too well at the moment.

As a result I am convinced by this latest nonsense that MathOverflow should never allow itself to become part of the SE 2.0 community. We should begin preparations for setting up MathOverflow as an independent site with our own control over our own software.

But, as I wrote recently on the other site, I am pretty baffled by Robin Chapman's behavior on this issue. I certainly don't think that someone who is for whatever reason unable to adapt to a pretty small change in the site mechanics (and yes, an unpopular and seemingly useless change in the site mechanics, but still a small one) would make a good moderator, and I was pretty relieved when Willie Wong stepped up as a fourth candidate.

I am not confident that the screwiness here is going to go away anytime soon. I have recently received several emails from Jeff Atwood and Robert Cartaino. I responded to the first few of them but found Mr. Atwood's responses pretty disappointing: he's just not listening to me. At times, he doesn't even seem to be taking things very seriously: his most disappointing sentence ended with a smiley face icon. Quite recently he emailed asking me (non-rhetorically!) what it was about math that makes people so much more troublesome than on any of the other SE sites. What am I supposed to say to that? So I have decided not to respond further. Not the most auspicious sign...

The 'feature' is maximally annoying... The many times I've prematurely hit enter while writing comments have resulted in my simply deleting the incomplete comment and moving on. That is a significantly bigger loss of time...

Regarding strong moderation, I have no problem with it. However, there's a difference between strong moderation and moderation that is heavy-handed and arbitrary (and without any sort of attempt to gauge community opinion on an issue).

Talk about the site being deleted is absurd. The site is quite healthy modulo some minor growing pains and I see no reason why it will not prosper.

If there's nobody there to answer questions, it's as good as shutting it down.

If it counts for anything, I'd like to serve as a character witness for Jeff Atwood. I don't always agree with him, but I believe he is pushing for math.SE to be successful and I respect his opinions. To the extent that I had opinions about how to run MO in the early days, they largely came from reflecting on Jeff's words in the SO podcast and the SO blog. Importantly, he's willing to admit to mistakes and to change his mind when presented with evidence. It pains me to see potentially fruitful discussions get derailed by (implicit or maybe even accidental) accusations that Jeff is acting in bad faith. But like Noah said, it's hard to see how to bring down the temperature.

I didn't know about that blog post either until it was pointed out, and thus I too was assuming that the community support for Akhil was unfairly ignored. Thus, I now gather that they were merely asking for suggestions, but it was still their judgment call. I would say the overlords had also neglected to rename/clarify that "election" thread, but since the beer has already been spilt...

It is true that Robert Cartaino only asked the user base to identify potential pro tems, and he did say that they will select the moderators pro tempore from those the community identified. Now, this maybe yet another short-coming (like Qiaochu said) of using the SE engine for Meta: there has never been mention that the selection will be based on community up-votes. But given that you are using a system where votes are encouraged and shown, it is hard for the userbase to think otherwise...

@Cam: I think the situation at Meta.MSE has a bit of a "perfect storm" flavour to it. I wouldn't use it as an example against all of StackExchange (I happen to think that TeX.SE is doing quite very well). If MO can be allowed to operate in the SE framework under our current policies with a promise of only minimal interference from "above", then I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing. (There are plenty of little nits I'd like to pick about SE2.0, but I don't have a categorical objection to it.)

The choice of moderators pro tempore was never an election to begin with (i.e., their judgment call), according to this post: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/moderator-pro-tempore/ by Robert Cartaino. (Thanks to Michael Mrozek for pointing this out). The elections were intended to happen after a SE 2.0 site left the beta phase.

Admittedly, very few read meta.SO or the blog in there, so this fact was soon forgotten.

I suppose this clears a number of misunderstandings...

My "contributions" on math.SE have been quite limited. If you have specific issues you'd like to discuss with me, by all means, my e-mail address is public, and I'm very interested to hear your concerns. I honestly mean this. This thread is not the place for this, and in fact, this thread is not about me at all.

Then I'm extremely glad that it's not up to you. I don't think that I've in any way a.) publicly acted like a troll and b.) claimed to represent real mathematics. Since you apparently can't be bothered to actually get sufficient context, I think that you should refrain from commenting further. If you'd like to discuss this issue or another issue with me in private, you know how to reach me. I'm told that I'm a pretty reasonable guy one-on-one. Maybe that's true!

Also, "ancient customs" and "sacred rites" was a euphemism for the general culture of the mathematical community.

I read your contributions during the discussion prior to the moderator elections. They were (as I wrote in a comment in the current discussion on meta.math.SE) abusive, and there is no doubt that they contributed to the current unpleasant atmosphere on the meta site over there. In short, it is not scapegoating to blame someone for problems which they played a role in creating.

This is not to defend the SE team in their choice of moderators, their current mode of intervention, or anything else. It is simply to say that you have engaged in indefensible behaviour over there.

Regards,

Matthew

Thank you for your kind words.

Dear Ben,

I had a lot of free time over the summer. I have no intention of further defending my actions. This was a matter of politics, nothing more, nothing less.

Wow. I find it pretty unbelievable that you thought that this was a reasonable way to defend your actions. Don't you have better things to do with your time?

For some reason, there's this idea that I went over there and started acting like a clown. This is, in fact, not the case. I didn't make any friends over there by vigorously campaigning for questions to be mathematically well-formed and not answerable by a google search (indeed, this was the major source of contention early on). I was told by SO users that I was being an "elitist", and that they would not allow math.SE to become anything like a "MathUnderflow", an idea that, at the time, had much support on MO. I would call this period the "battle for the heart and soul" of Math.SE. There were two major factions, and I was probably the most vocal user on our side (other people on this side were, if I remember correctly, Scott Morrison (to the extent that he participated), Akhil Mathew, Qiaochu Yuan, Tom Stephens) .

Then came the moderator elections. Katie and Akhil garnered the most votes, but the original provisional moderators ended up being Katie, Isaac, and Kaestur Hakarl. I was stunned that the SE overlords would cynically skip over the only candidate that was an active member of MO and was rightfully elected as a provisional moderator! I inquired about this in the provisional moderator announcement thread, but I was flat out ignored. Further, the new moderators (sans Katie, who has never really been all that active) were using their powers to make Math.SE into a site following the SO rather than the MO philosophy. It was at that point that I changed my handle and decided to "take off the gloves", so to speak. After getting it out of my system (I flamed a few people who I found to be especially annoying, I'm embarrassed to say), I decided that a more reasonable approach would be to, at every opportunity possible, question the legitimacy of the moderators' elections, the moderators' allegiances, and their suitability as moderators of a mathematics site.

This, of course, was drastically exacerbated by the moderator Kaestur Hakarl taking it upon himself to suppress criticism of the moderation staff, as well as his penchant for inventing rules that the meta community never discussed. Then I was suddenly suspended for repeatedly rolling back an edit on one of my posts (where I offered to send a copy of a book by e-mail if the OP couldn't find it by other means). After my suspension was up, the problem was discussed but never dealt with. Soon after, I was suspended for a month for saying something like "This is why I hate that the moderators aren't mathematicians...". It was again discussed and never dealt with, although the community seemed to agree that the moderators overstepped their bounds by suspending me over that comment.

Since then, I asked a question whose title could have been more diplomatically worded, "When can we get rid of the odious moderators-pro-tempore?", but aside from that, the only thing I posted (sans a few comments about a technical issue) was the triple of comments I quoted above.

The question was not, as Pete indicated (in Akhil's open letter thread), a question of mathematical seniority, but a question of mathematical competence and a question of having an understanding of the "ancient customs" and "sacred rites" of the community of research mathematicians, so to speak. It wasn't even that there were moderators whose experience was originally from SO! The point is that important decisions about the content of the site were made essentially without the input of the very people who should have been consulted first! Even worse, the people who got elected didn't even win the election!

I realize that this is tl; dr material, but since this thread has been linked over at math.SE, I'm leaving this post as a comment on all of those comments accusing me of somehow fostering a negative tone. This reeks of scapegoating and doesn't even make any sense, since I posted on the main site, at the very most, extremely infrequently.

The idea that meta.MSE is not considered the right place to criticize moderator behaviour is, I think, extremely dangerous --- it necessitates people from "higher up" stepping in and opens the possibility of them, by doing so, losing the trust of the community.