Sorry to hear this Rob, always enjoyed working with you back when I held my diamond. Sounds like SE is being infected by the Woke virus with this preferred pronoun nonsense - but it's not my site so I don't have a freedom of expression leg I can stand on. Can't say I use the SE network much any more, and will likely use it less now. Which is a shame because there are some great folks such as Tim and Shog who've always been fair, rational and very supportive of the unpaid volunteer diamond mods.

I think the way the community and volunteer mods have been treated by SE is a bit cheeky despite the many hours of work they/we put into making this work from the beginning.

Also my heart sank upon hearing a certain individual arrived out of the blue as a "Director" despite having so little meaningful activity on SO. I didn't think this particular individual would be well suited to their new role, and recent events have just proved this.

Wee bit of an edit here. In Sara Chipps' blogpost here:

She blethers on about:

The team formerly known as DAG (Developer Advocacy and Growth), now part of the Community team, started by rolling out the Tag Synonyms Refresh.

As far as I know, I was the "community member" that suggested Tag Synonyms back in 2009:

Now I'm not getting all salty here, but y'know SE at least try and attribute major feature enhancements that were driven by the community. Sure there are minor enhancements which are hard to track down and attribute, but the big stuff (which I'm trawling through just now on old meta posts) that moved the community along, how's about some gratitude.

SE has a serious "tin ear" problem with the unpaid folks from back in the day that made this site successful that now pays your rent.

I'm kinda in a f*** you mode right now. This wasn't the community I joined back in '08, sure communities change, money has to be made, but the abstracted away corporates are living off of our original work and ideas when it was Jeff, Jarod and Joel....and the community.

When I handed back my diamond mod, all I got for the hundreds of moderation hours was a fricken mug and some shit pens (it's ok Tim, you'd no control over that). You need to do better than this, how about useful stuff like some Amazon vouchers for exiting diamonds to show your appreciation? You spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on new offices and data center environments, but you don't treat mods with any kind of respect or value. We helped get you here.

I kinda feel this "honour to be a mod" is a racket. It's unpaid work. Hell at least if I drive an Uber or cycle madly round the city as a Deliveroo driver I can at least get some kinda payback. But SO/SE has played on this "great honour" for far too long. Maybe it's time diamond mods do actually strike and maybe test the law for what in my country would be called "unjust enrichment", especially if SE is able to carry through an IPO.

We used to talk about the terribleness of help/question vampires but I kinda feel SE Corporate has also in a way sucked our community dry, and sucked the goodwill out of many of us.