Let's not forget that stack overflow is getting a huge increase in traffic because of the COVID-19 lockdown. So, business is picking up for the executives, which means more money for them and there are a lot more new contributors around.
@Ave The biggest issue I see is that it has much more provisions for SE directly telling mods what to do. They can extend the agreement with the mod policies on meta, and mods are required to "accept additional guidance given by members of the Stack Exchange, Inc. Community Team and Senior Leadership Team"
I'm pretty sure that second part was much, much worse in earlier non-public versions of the agreement
The agreement isn't problematic if you trust SE. But especially with a few more extensions like the underage user reporting that was published and then removed on meta, you get potentially a lot more formal reasons to remove mods.
But my strong impression is that a large part of it is caused by a desire of the people higher up in SE to keep the mods more under control (this is based to a large part on comments from e.g. Shog on how bad earlier versions of this were).
If you disagree with an instruction, you can still always just resign your moderatorship at that time. It's not like it's a job we need to keep. Pre-emptively inviting removal by refusing the new agreement is of course an option, but it feels a little premature to me.
@EddieKal You're a mod too. Shouldn't you know this? There is a moderator removal process, bullying and bigotry are violations of the code of conduct, and moderators are required to follow the code of conduct on penalty of removal
@MadScientist I did sign it. I think it's reasonable
My major issue is the "accept guidance from Senior Leadership Team" stuff. The language is watered down to make that clause essentially useless, but I'm not sure that would stop them from trying it out anyway
@murgatroid99 Yes I do know that. But those things were/have been allowed to last for months without SE doing anything. I will stop here and hopefully get a post onto the floor of Meta SE soon.
You can open up version 1, and open up version 2. You can view them side by side and map out the differences.
Then judge for yourself what you think is okay (everything except for #4 from what I've seen) to expect from mods and what isn't (#4).
@MadScientist This is the only concerning one I saw, yeah. I'd be not care much about it several years ago but SE administration has, uh... not been great lately!
I think the statement I agree with the most is this:
If you disagree with an instruction, you can still always just resign your moderatorship at that time. It's not like it's a job we need to keep. Pre-emptively inviting removal by refusing the new agreement is of course an option, but it feels a little premature to me.
I think it kind of reduces the effectiveness of quitting over a thing if you're not going to say exactly what it's about (in the linked post it is kind of obvious to some extent, but "However, there are multiple problems with this new version" clearly says "multiple", and I cannot find multiple issues myself), or if it's not immediately obvious (recent event).