The new buttons are utterly disastrous, you can't see whether you have already voted or not. SE says that "this problem was especially prevalent on the Meta sites because they use grayscale", so they rolled out a change across the Meta sites. Wonderful. I left a comment asking nicely that they do the same for CV.

Honestly, was it so hard to visit the 12th-biggest SE site and upvote a single question to see whether the problem also occurs there? Do the people at CV really need us to point this out?

@StephanKolassa the whole implementation is botched and disastrous. See the sheer number of downvotes the post received. They didn't care about the feedback and now after the backlash, they altered the tone in meta sites but the problem was still there in platforms like maths, CV, and others. I mean why the haste.

Would any CV mods like to comment on this? meta.stackexchange.com/q/389811/256777

It's All True

I'll say a little more after dinner

There is indeed a secret policy imposed by the company, whose enforcement would make it almost impossible to remove A.I.-generated content except on the grounds of its being of low quality. I believe staff had begun to try & enforce it on S.O. moderators.

I don't think, though, that it's much out of kilter with our site's policy, if at all. Staff will likely not intervene in moderation here - if only because their focus is on Stack Overflow.

Discussion of procedural violations is admittedly boring, but it does not bode well that the company has chosen to brush aside our acknowledged rights, limited though they are.

One is the right of moderators, as representatives of user communities, to be consulted on new policies. Another is the right to clear & accurate public statements of those policies.

This is the response:

@Scortchi-ReinstateMonica well said.

@User1865345 That might have been the port talking.

@User1865345 Yes, the palaver about detectors seems to be smoke & mirrors. The world & his dog have known for quite a while that they're not especially reliable.

@User1865345 That's a lot of flags! I can't vouch for all 500-odd moderators across 100-odd sites, but I haven't come across any advocacy for reliance on detectors alone - quite the opposite.

I commented the other day:-"Perhaps we're fortunate, in a way, that ChatGPT's so bad at answering the kind of questions we get. An answer's being halfway decent already casts some doubt on the hypothesis that it's a thoughtless cut-&-paste job from a ChatGPT response. Anyway I don't think sites that have banned it outright have necessarily made the wrong decision for themselves."

Anyway I did join the strike: I hope it knocks some sense into the company, & they start to take a collaborative, evidence-based, approach to this & other issues. Good night!

Scortchi provides a pretty good summary. The change in policy is poorly justified and communicated (and SE employees have said contradictory things in different channels in the past week), but the worse part of it is that SE is ordering us, as elected moderators, unilaterally on how to do our volunteer work. We were elected to apply our best judgment to maintain & improve our sites, using donated time and expertise, but SE Inc has decided that they Know Best, Actually (™️)... for secret reasons.

And we definitely can't do a good job moderating / complying with SE's whims if they can't even clearly articulate what their policies / whims are. I've decided to join the strike.