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But as a moderator, what the company is doing here is ridiculous and a seemingly flagrant abuse of license. If you take contributions under CC-BY-SA, you damned-well keep the attribution unless the contributor wants to be disassociated from it. If you don't want to be associated with a contributor, delete the account, and the content.

You can't pick and choose.

The criminal justice system already wields the responsibility of punishing criminals. Let the convicts go through due process and do their time. The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.

I don’t know what SO should have done (well, probably not ban someone for asking questions, assuming we have the full story). But it’s so fascinating to see how companies have no playbook to work off of.

Why? You can still get information from there, they're stopping you from working for free for them for some time.

"Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself." -Hermione Granger

The new username: "user4616250" is ringing a bell... Didn't 4chan used to give everyone names like anon4616250? It's got real V-for-vendetta vibes.

Stack Overflow failed to enunciate their own rules (or - let's be honest - imagined new rules after the fact), blamed you for breaking non-existent rules, sent you an obviously mostly copy/paste suspension notice (the bit about secondary accounts seems bizarre and non sequitur), and gas-lit you with the imaginary claim that you cannot vote on a post you already voted on which for whatever reason hadn't been logged.

FWIW also a high-rep SO user and had to create a burner account in case there's retribution. We shouldn't have to hide ourselves just to talk sanely.

SO is right to try to protect the bounty system from unintended uses, but not to make rules up on the fly and enforce them heavy-handedly and retrospectively, suspending someone for breaking non-existent rules.

Stack Overflow should make rules for bounties and make them crystal clear and unsuspend you. Can they admit they're wrong - will they do this? Of course not.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty#:~:text=Users%20may%20....

The slow walk on the pier is an example of the upcoming ?revenge? by the ?establishment?

Somebody publishes their thoughts contributing to how the world should be in their view on the internet. We all do that, me here.

They are then accused and arrested for a horrible crime. Murder, for example. This garners their thoughts a great deal more attention than they would otherwise get as now they are (in)famous.

No removal of publication until conviction.

Is there now an incentive to advertise your views by committing crime to attract as much attention as possible? Easiest way is to make it as horrific as possible.

I am thinking extremist racists will take those rules. More than one of them. More than once.

So now we're somewhere pretty uncomfortable. I think it wrong to suppress Osama Bin Laden's screeds recently removed from the Guardian online, however much I loathe him and everything he stood for. So what about some neo-nazi mass murderer? Or the copycat? Or the following ten? Is that really so hypothetical that we can't see a body count with it? Is this alarm-ism? I hope so, I genuinely do and have no hidden motive here.

I'm not buying that this situation has easy policy nor that whatever is done results in something we are going to be fully comfortable with.

One outcome may be very much worse for many more people than another, so thinking it through fully is really needed. Something I am yet to make much more than this vague start.

Online publishing policy seems like a relevant framing.

Personally I didn't know he was on Stack Overflow until I saw this. Had the mods left it alone I suspect it wouldn't have become more than some minor news or comment.

  Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Nothing but mostly smiles... except from "dad" who warns police might hassle me.

"I'm forty, pops;" I'm now also old, too.

For context, I have zero dependents, dropped out of medical school pre-ACA, and do not carry health insurance (USA, boo!).

There may be several good reasons (eg to avoid spending time on cleaning up unrelated to SO issues due to the notoriety of the account) but none was communicated to the community.

The tools for doing the moderation of personal votes and reversals and whatnot are blunt and clumsy and time consuming.

The tools for doing the "change the account name" is similarly blunt and clumsy, but much less time consuming.

From a mod perspective, it isn't necessarily "what is right or wrong" but rather "what do I have time to do? ... and if I don't have time to do this, what are the outcomes?"

There is a lot of "the tools for doing (diamond) moderation haven't been built out well" combined with "the stance of Stack Exchange Inc (I specify it this way to distinguish between Stack Exchange the community) has been inconsistent on social issues in the past." Running a social network (but not wanting to admit its a social network, and sometimes denying that it is, but having engagement metrics like a social network) with a diminishing paid moderation team combined with taking stances that haven't been run past a lawyer before a proclamation or actions being taken... and then as often as not going back on (or not following through with) those actions or proclamations...

And we've got problems. The actions themselves may not be of Stack Exchange Inc's direction actions this time, but the underlying confusion and lack of communication of clear policies (and lack of enforcement of the clear policies), or the tools to allow for less blunt actions... well... we've got problems.

I don't see this getting better as Stack Exchange Inc has taken very little action to increase the paid moderation team or take responsibility for the content that is published on their sites.

I wonder if those people also believe this to have been the case before Civil Rights.

Or even in the slavery era. Slaveholders were just law-abiding citizens! Slaves trying to escape were the scoundrels!

If not, then surely you can see how there's no way that "back then, the execution of US law was awful, but now in 2025, it's wonderful and should always be treated as delivering justice". Come on now. It's just as flawed now, just in different ways.

Which means just like in the Jim Crow era, you can't use the US execution of law as an arbiter of justness, ethics, morals, and what will improve society. Absolutely not.

Everyone who has such tendencies certainly has people they look up to who are murderers. They've definitely voted for them.

Lifted from another comment [1]:

"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642740

  The *erasure* of Luigi Mangione
  The saga on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, *and how tech always serves the ruling class.*

  It’s important to *grasp the severity* of my suspension: suspending a professional resource for one year will create a hardship for me. And, I’m one of the largest producers of content on the network

Now you can Fahrenheit 451 everyone if they go against the established order.

Is there some entity that enforces Creative Commons? That seems a blatant violation of CC-BY-SA by Stack Overflow.

It is certainly remarkable that a murderer has such a high approval rating, but he's still not close to being broadly popular.

> "Americans are twice as likely to view Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — very or somewhat unfavorably (43%) than favorably (23%)."

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidentia...

Of course, I can be totally wrong but I've seen these things happen (I've been both a mod and a core dev at Stack closely working with the community team 8 years ago)

With that said: his content is on there under the presumption of CC, it should remain.

Not so Fun fact: a second coworker, from the same company, different crime, has also been convicted and is serving 14 years. (Victim died when police shot the wrong person). His stack overflow account is still up.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/968075/gareth-pursehouse

https://substack.evancarroll.com/p/hacker-news-where-the-bil...

I mean... wow. This is not the point of course, but the point is obvious and public sentiment towards SO seems to be quite unanimous. And, to be fair, I suppose 0.1% of SO is quite a lot of people, but still. I don't think SO will do well behaving like that.

They seem to have a high desire to place any disrespect they can on what seems to be an otherwise revered political activist in recent times; and it's only further fueling the discussion, and in all likelihood - probability for successors.

They would have been smart to play a leveling field, to treat Luigi's act with an element of absurdity, which would cause everyday people to question if their relatability towards Luigi was warranted or even made sense. Instead, they played a hand that the fearful would - because they are, and only validated the vigilante's narrative - because it is.

Sloppy work, terrible writing.

Nobody could spare one minute to write, "Mangione was charged in the case of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson", or something like it? Is it taboo to even use the words murder or assassination in this context?

Profiteering on the lives of other people is morally repugnant so it's very natural for human beings to be angry at people who are directly involved and thus bear some responsibility.

The anger is natural but fundamentally it misses the mark.

Given the mechanism of american healthcare there will be millions of denied claims even if all the profit of the insurance would be reinvested and all employees including the CEO would be volunteering.

While that would absolve the CEO from the moral responsibility of profiteering it wouldn't improve the lives of the many people whose claims must be denied because of the mechanics of the heath insurance system.

Given the current system, the insurances must stay afloat and if the bankrupt that will affect even more lives.

Furthermore, hospitals have a different set of incentives which are not aligned with reducing the pressure on the healthcare insurer.

You could say "but the government should not allow that and it should just bail out the heath care insurers that go bankrupt in order to save lives". Yes you could say that.

Would they? Should somebody try that? Should some CEO of a major healthcare insurer be brave enough and bankrupt the company they're supposed to manage just to force the hand of the government to fundamentally prove that healthcare is a public good?

Should a CEO be shot for not risking everything to force the government hand?

Or should a politician get shot because they didn't improve health care when they could have? Which politician? Every politician? Only the top level ones? How time we would give them to make the change? One term? Two terms? Punish them when they retire after not having fixed the healthcare?

Despite all the power that the people have on paper, democracies are only as good as the public discourse that unfolds in such democracies.

Do we really think that we can solve problems as complex as healthcare by shorting at whoever our ape brain thinks is the most proximal responsible person?

It's not like the world isn't full of examples of countries where healthcare is approached as a public good from the ground up. There are plenty of places where you also have private healthcare on top of that.

Why don't you just take the opportunity to push for actual reform. Siding with a murderer is not going to help your cause.

I would bet Ross Ulbricht would be wiped clean if he became anywhere near as notorious by name/username.