The Stack Overflow Podcast

Wait, we're all content moderators now?

Episode Summary

This week, the home team discusses the environmental impact of blockchain technology, especially as it related to art and NFTs. We also explore the tensions around content moderation, and how users will find ways to turn nearly any opening for interaction into an opportunity for...free expression.

Episode Notes

Read more about the climate debate surrounding NFTs here.

We really enjoyed this piece: You either die an MVP, or live long enough to build content moderation.

You can find Ben on Twitter here.

You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.

You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here.

You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here.

Episode Transcription

Ceora Ford There's like a website that used to be up there was since has since been taken down that like index the energy use or electricity use like I guess I should say have like specific NFT's. And one of the ones that they have like an index for is this space cat GIF. And it says that like, space cat's carbon footprint is equivalent to an EU residents electricity usage for two months. Okay, that might be a lot.

[intro music]

Ben Popper "Start your observability journey today with Splunk Observability Cloud. Get full-fidelity, end-to-end visibility into your entire operation, whether on-prem or in the cloud. It's powered by OpenTelemetry, so you can take your data anywhere. Head on over to splk.it/sopodcast

BP Hello everybody! Welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk about all things software and technology. I am Ben Popper, the director of content here at Stack Overflow and I am joined today by my three co-hosts, Cassidy Williams, Ceora Ford, and Ryan Donovan. Hey, y'all. 

Ryan Donovan Hey!

CF Hi!

Cassidy Williams Hello!

BP So just to get out of the way, not to pat ourselves on the back, but we have sold over 5000 units of The Key. So huge shout out to everybody who bought one and helps us support Digital Undivided. And huge shout out to Cassidy who helped us design The Key and bring it to life by connecting us with Drop.

CW It's very, very exciting to see it come to life. And so many people are so excited about it. Like I knew people were excited when it was April Fool's Day. But I'm glad the excitement continued.

BP Yes, yes. I'm glad that there wasn't just a comment saying they by have actually stepped up to the plate. The price was right at 29 bucks, not bad. I did see one or two, you know, those hilarious comments. They're like, "I don't understand how this is useful at all at this price. Yeah, I could just build an entire keyboard." It's like, okay. This is not for you.

CW Yeah, I got a couple of those emails. I was like, calm down. It's fine.

BP But yeah, keep an eye out. There's been some requests for cooler features. Drop is hard at work on figuring out what they can do for the next manufacturing run. So keep an eye out for that. So Ceora, you brought a great topic which I have a strong opinion on. Maybe I'll be the contrarian on, about what is the environmental impact of NFTs, non fungible tokens, which is when people use the blockchain to mint something, a GIF, a song, a jpg, and then you can sort of track the ownership, it's a one up or run of 100 or whatever. So tell us a little bit about this story you brought and yeah, sort of where you sit on this.

CF I'm not sure if I have like an official opinion. Like obviously, I pride myself in being a person who cares about the environment. And I tried to like do things that are environmentally friendly, so the planet doesn't die, all that kind of stuff. And I think on Twitter recently, a lot of people have been talking about NFT's and crypto and blockchain and like, all that kind of stuff recently. And one of the things that came up was the environmental impact of crypto, specifically etherium and then NF T's. And I didn't know about this factor of like the whole blockchain craze. I never even knew that, like there was any kind of energy, anything going on with it. But someone shared this article with me on Twitter, when they brought it to my attention that like these things can tend to be not very environmentally friendly, especially when it comes to like energy emissions and things like that. I wanted to discuss that today to hear everyone's opinion on like, what they think about this climate impact that blockchain has, and like, should this impact how we use blockchain? Should we just stray away from it and like, everything that has to do with blockchain and NFTs and all that kind of stuff. I think sometimes we tend to get overly excited about like new technologies or anything that's new, without factoring in the also sometimes negative impacts of whatever the thing is. So I feel like something very similar happened with AI and machine learning. We got super, super excited about it without doing any planning or analysis of the effects that AI could have on our world. And now we're dealing with the repercussions with like gender bias, racial bias, all that kind of stuff. And I don't want something similar to happen with blockchain, because it seems like people are so excited. But we also need to like factor in some of the not so great impacts of like using this kind of technology. So yeah, I want to hear everyone's thoughts here.

RD Yeah, I mean, I think every technology ultimately uses electricity. And I read an article A while back that blockchain and crypto mining, if it was a country, it would be the 40th electricity use. And it was particularly dirty electricity, because at the time, it was mostly mined in China.

BP They've since completely stopped doing that, which is a whole nother bundle of wax. But part of the reason they did is because they're, yeah, they're essentially planting economy, the government can like decide unilaterally what to do. And they said, this is not part of our green goals. Also, you know, I think there's concerns about cryptocurrency sort of decentralizing obviously authority or control over finance. So they shut all of that down. But I guess yeah, sort of to Ryan's point. And Cassie, I'd be curious here, it's like, what if we added up all the PCs and consoles that people play video games with every day? Would that be the 50th country? The 30th country? Like, is that useful? Should we be playing video games? Like, I think it's interesting cuz like, people treat this like an industry. And then they're like, okay, if you took this as an industry, how much electricity is this using? But there's millions of things I'm doing all day, every day with gadgets, and computing resources that are not like good for society that, you know, probably are burning up a lot of energy. And I often yeah, don't know where that energy comes from. So I guess sometimes I feel like this is a way to, like pick on, you know, a nascent, sort of growing industry. And it doesn't put it in the context of like, we don't evaluate somebody using a hot tub or playing PC games all day in terms of the energy they're consuming, right? So like, why should we evaluate them that way if they want to make digital art?

CW Hm, I don't know how I feel about that, Ben.

CF I know the article that I read reference, like a specific NF. Let me see if I can actually find it. Like there's like a website that used to be up there was since has since been taken down, that like index, the energy like use, or electricity use, like I guess I should say, have like, specific NFTs. And one of the ones that they have like an index for is the space cat GIF. And it says that like space cat's carbon footprint is equivalent to an EU residents electricity usage for two months. So I think that is kind of like, okay, that might be a lot. You know what I mean? Like, obviously, we can't help but use electricity. And we can't help but pollute the earth to a certain degree. But it's something that eats up a lot of energy and causes a lot—I don't want to say it unnecessarily. But like, we don't need NFTs right? Like we don't have to do NFTs.

BP Hey now, hey now.

CF I'd like to say that could be a whole nother conversation. But it is something to think about, I think. Along with like other issues, I guess people have brought up but this is like something I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially since I think, especially in the United States, we're seeing a lot of repercussions to like climate change, and like flooding and wildfires and things like that. So I think about these things a lot more now. But also to your point, Ben like, have we ever had conversations about how like, even in the tech industry as a whole how much energy we're using, and like, you know what I mean? So yeah, I guess it is something to think about too.

CW I think too, like, we use a lot of energy, but the prices for all of these things that we use as a tech industry, as gamers, as all of these things are going up because of this thing that we don't fully understand. And so I'll use graphics cards as an example, like graphics cards prices have skyrocketed, and availability has gone completely down because of the crypto and NFT space. And so not only is it just really, really heavy on the environment, but there's so many people I know who wanted to build PCs or who want to upgrade their systems and stuff like that, who can't, because they both can't afford it and can't find some of the parts that they need because of this space.

BP Totally. I do think it's particularly galling, kind of as Ceora, as you were saying, because it's like it took two months of the average citizens electricity to make this 15 pixel JPEG, like that is like what really eats people up in the end, right? It's like, it doesn't even have to, it's just that you're going through this like proof of work. And so I know etherium has discussed moving towards proof of stake, which is different. So instead of like forcing computers to do these really intensive, energy intensive calculations, you'd move to a different system where people can earn money by like showing that they've staked something on the blockchain. And this is like an idea they have for taking etherium in a more green direction, which is good, or at least like it would be interesting to see where they've gone and one nice thing I guess about some of these crypto and blockchain projects is that you know, they're decentralized, they're open source, they're decentralized in a way that's a little different than open source, right?

CW Quote unquote "open sourced". 

BP Yes, you can look at it, but the governance of it is distributed in an open and so like it's you know, groups of people who are interested in this technology are going to get to decide on its future and they are considering its environmental impact. And then also like there have been like Gemini, which is owned by the Winklevoss twins and they own Nifty Gateway, which is one of the big NFT auction houses you know, they basically said like, we want to get out ahead of this we're gonna pledge you know this much to green causes and reforestation and make sure that we like balance out our carbon footprint, like whatever we do in terms of energy consumption, we're going to try to like sort of balance the ledger. So that's what we need every company to be doing, you know, especially like, you know, old line fossil fuel companies.

RD I think a lot of people sort of rankle at Bitcoin. And that sort of thing. It's like, we already have a pretty like energy efficient substitute for that, right? Like cash, and credit cards, and cheques. Like it doesn't burn up all that much energy. On the other hand, you can't sort of secretly buy drugs with it, or whatever else people use Bitcoin for.

BP Is it 2012? Are you kidding me? This is your take on crypto? Come on.

RD Yeah, absolutely. I don't know, it's still treated as an asset tax wise. Like it's not currency.

BP Well, I don't know, a lot more large blue chip, financial institutions are moving where the crypto industry goes these days than Silk Road. But yes, once upon a time, that was its main use? Well, alright, since we're on this path, I'll just say I had the thought the other day. Like, obviously, yeah, there's a lot of things I want to do to, like, try to combat climate change and move us in the right direction. But I also think, like Ceora, you're saying earlier, like, we don't want to destroy the Earth, you know, but I think sometimes people have like, sort of almost like delusions of grandeur. Like we could really mess up the earth for us, and like, probably ruin human society. And like, we could easily wipe ourselves out. The earth will be like, just fine. Like, in 10,000 years, like the earth will not remember that we were here. 

RD Yeah, they're not worried about the earth itself. Like they're worried about us on the earth.

BP I know. I just mean, I think some people think that we're going to ruin the planet, I do think we're going to ruin it. But like, the planet will outlive us, that just gives me—it makes me feel better. I don't have the power to ruin the planet.

CF One thing I think about a lot, too, is like if you pay attention, like the earth heals itself, right? Like a lot of things, kind of recuperate over time. So like you said, like, in the grand scheme of things, the earth will be okay, we hope. And another thing I think about too, which I think will tie everything together a little bit too as far as, like climate change goes, like, I know, you see commercials that are like, don't litter and like make sure you don't do this. And you don't do that, as individuals when, like a lot of the reasons why there's so much pollution and the oceans are like polluted and everything like that, is because of big corporations being irresponsible, and nobody checking them. So if we indexed how much pollution is like down to individual old me in Philadelphia, like littering, which I don't do. But if I did, it would not be as much as like, you know, these big companies that are just doing whatever they want without any repercussions. I think with NF T's and like the crypto space, where this could get tricky is that a lot of people are like being encouraged to jump in on it. Like, yeah, you should start like doing this whole NFT thing without like really knowing the impact that they can have. So if we keep encouraging people without informing them of like, okay, at the same time, this is the kind of stuff that could happen as far as like energy emissions and things like that, we can see like a huge number of people getting involved, and then having a huge effect on the climate as well. That's why I think like I mentioned earlier, sometimes when a new technology comes out, we're like, super, super excited. But we don't weigh all the costs, which I think is a conversation we should have like if you're going to talk about how great and exciting this new thing is. I see people making threads on Twitter. And they're only saying all the good things about blockchain and about crypto and about NFTs, like we also need to factor in these things that aren't so great as well. So you can make an informed decision, you know what I mean? So and then like to another extent, like, you can't know every positive and negative impact of every single thing that you get involved with. But I do think it's something worth exploring.

CW I went to a wedding this past weekend, and there was a guy there who owned a ton of NFTs, like this was his hobby. And what was interesting is all of his NFTs that he had were AR NFTs. And so he was just like, look, Spider Man is dancing around on my phone and stuff like that. And that part was pretty neat. It was neat to see Spider Man jumping specifically on our table and stuff like that. But what I don't understand are the static image and NFTs like the JPEGs and stuff, because, we could get deep into it. But I could screenshot that. And I saw an article recently where someone got an NFT of this piece of art. And they were super excited about it. And they made a print for their office. And the artist ended up like saying, hey, you don't have the right to do that. And they're like, but I have the NFT. I own this. And they're like, no, no, no, you have the ownership of the digital version, not any physical versions. And that like broke my brain a little bit.

BP Okay, but I have the I think I have the sort of like correlation now, which is like, I could go out and have a incredibly detailed and beautiful print of the Mona Lisa made, and I could put it in a frame that looks like the frame in the Louvre and I could hang it in my house. And so then I would have a copy that nobody could tell the difference if I put them side by side. On the other hand, it's not the Mona Lisa and so it's not worth anything. And like there's this amazing Orson Welles movie called Afro fake and several other documentaries, but like the amount of like fine art that's hanging in museums, it's actually fake is staggeringly high. Like, it could be upwards of 50%, like of art that hangs on the wall that is priceless is, you know, a copy of the art or you know, somebody else has the original. 

RD Sometimes it's a museum copy, because the original is being restored.

BP Right, exactly. And so like, it breaks your brain because like, money is only worth anything because we say it is. You know, like, none of this stuff is worth anything except is firewood in certain situations. So like, you own the digital copy, anybody can make a copy, but nobody else can sell it on the blockchain, but you therefore, you own the value of it, right?

RD It's also kind of a Greenfield speculators market, like people are buying it for its future value. And like, you know, as a comic book buyer of the 90s, speculation has ruined markets. Anything where you're buying, buying a thing for its own sake, like, then it gets ruined by everybody kind of going for that greater value, that kind of speculators market, you know, and then speculators are kind of playing on, it's called the the greater fool theory, they're waiting for a greater fool to buy it at a higher price. And then somebody gets stuck holding the bag. I guess I'm looking for an argument as to why owning the NFT itself is worth anything.

CF I don't know, because I really am a newbie to this whole space. But from what I've heard, it seems like people don't really care about ownership when it comes to NFTs because if they did, I don't think you would do NF's. I think that they really care about the value, like the ability to resell for a higher price, like they're trying to make a profit. That's what I think the real point of it is. Because if I really wanted to own a digital asset, I don't think I would do and NFT just because like Cassidy mentioned, you don't truly have ownership in the full sense of the word, right? But if I really like bought this asset, because I want to resell it in the future, because this GIF or this image, this meme, might be worth more in the future, then it makes sense to me, right? Like then it's like, okay, I get why people are doing this, because they want to make money. That's the only way it makes sense in my head.

RD I mean when you buy, at the end of the day, you don't own the copyright. And it's the same if you buy a poster or a painting.

BP I guess the other thing, yeah, Cassidy, that I do like about them is like, it's cool to be able to give digital artists and musicians like a new form of ownership and a way to transaction this stuff. And the thing that I like, get really excited about which I don't even really know if it's happening is like, somebody buys the rights to a song or a beat or a piece of digital art. And then every time it gets sold after that the original creator gets paid, which is really cool. Because there's always been on the internet where it's like, I made this meme, or I made this, you know, dance move, or I made this thing. And then it got taken up and became huge. And all these other people made money off of it. And the original creator meant nothing. So in that sense, like if it could bring sort of modernize the practice of like copyright and publishing, you know, fees and stuff, that would be kind of cool. I don't actually know if that's how it's working. And definitely the crypto market now is just like a super frothy bubble. And speculation is probably not always great for artists and going to get a lot of people burnt at some point. 

CF Well, I know a lot of artists are catching like a lot of flack now because of this, because of the environmental impact of NFTs. So like, if you want to do if you're an artist who wants to deal with NFTs like if you say that on Twitter, or on Instagram, people will get upset with you. Because of the climate impacted this house. So it kind of is like, in theory, it's supposed to, like be a way for artists to make more money into like, you know, be more profitable. But now they're getting like, a lot of backlash for it. So I don't know if it's like really doing what they intended to do. Or like if you're an artist, you're going to be like, oh, I'm not telling anyone that I do like NFTs, nobody needs to know that.

BP I don't think we should be artist shaming, because like you said 75% of the carbon emissions come from 100 companies and like 200 factories. Like your personal impact is so irrelevant, you know, and that's the same thing with litter. 

CF Or like fast fashion.

BP Yeah, exactly. It makes no difference. You have to be an activist vote for the right people get the right changes made. Not to say that you can't, you shouldn't vote with your wallet or your behavior. But like, your personal impact on the climate is so infant decimal that you should never feel guilty about it or like let people shame you. That is just placing the blame where it doesn't belong. Alright, so let's jump into one more discussion while we have the whole crew here. Ryan, you want to tee this one up? 

RD You know, here at Stack Overflow, we are big fans of user generated content. It's a hot thing for a lot of startups. It's an article I read that was you either die and MVP or live long enough to build content moderation, that anybody trying to jump in the UGC bandwagon either fails or has to do content moderation at some point because somebody is going to try to do some dirt with your platform.

CF Some of those words you said I don't really know what they mean. [Ryan & Ceora laugh] UGC, I don't think I've heard that before.

RD User generated content. 

CF Got it. Okay, everything's making sense now. Okay. Okay. [Ceora & Ryan laugh]

BP It's interesting, even like within the world of software development, it does come back to this in an interesting way. Like, for example, GitHub and some of the other platforms have gotten into these huge battles in China, where people are trying to use GitHub repos to, as like a platform for free speech and like keeping other stuff in there that has really nothing to do with code. So at some point, there's UGC and you've got to moderate it or like, you know, it would be fun to try to think of an example of like, where this doesn't apply. But yeah, like, as soon as you let somebody type a character, as soon as somebody can store you know, a character somewhere. There's the potential for UGC, and therefore, the need for content moderation.

CW If you make user content, you will have people posting weird stuff. If you make user interactions, you will have people harassing other people. It's just, a rule.

CF That's just how it's gonna go. That's why like, I've heard this debate or not, it's not really a debate, but people ask sometimes on Twitter, like, in the software development world, it's very common to have like your own blog, where you post your own content, and people are like, oh, should I have comments? And I know for myself, I will never have comments, because I'm not going to sit there and moderate them. Because I know people are going to be—there's going to be a bunch of "well, actually..." and, you know, there's going to be a bunch of reply guys and all kinds of other stuff I just don't feel like dealing with, you know, that's something that you always have to factor in. When it comes to like, Oh, do I want to have a comment section? Or I want to allow people to like give feedback? Like, do you really want that? Are you sure about that?

BP Yeah, Ryan and I have a few open emails. One is for we asked people to submit interesting questions and answers to us from Stack Overflow. And somehow, when people are searching, it's just like, "Help. I've been logged out of my machine. It's a Windows, like, I need to get back in, please send me the instructions right away." And we're just like, you become the universe's tech support. As soon as you put that out there. 

RD Yeah, you ask for some interesting questions and they're like, what's a computer?

BP Yeah, the other day somebody emailed and they were like, "I'm very angry, like I bought this snowblower from you. And it's not working at all, like I need a refund, like Stack Overflow needs to fix this immediately." And I was like, pretty sure you're thinking of Overstock? [Ceora laughs]

CF A lot different. 

BP It's actually funny you guys remember Club Penguin? Do you remember that?

CW Heck yes. So good.

BP Even Club Penguin, which is like you hang out with other penguins. And I think they gave you like five total emotes that were like horray,smile, friend. Yeah, like, even the hat eventually became like a vector for like, horrible abuse. And no matter what it is, right?

CF This reminds me of when we were talking about Yik Yak too, like, that's kind of what happened there was that there was not enough moderation. And so things always take a turn for the worst. When when that's the case, you know, it's like, if you give people the choice to be mean, or be nice, they're probably going to choose to be mean, like, unless someone's there to tell them not to, you know what I mean? So if you don't have like, the, the staff or the bandwidth to like, keep up with that kind of stuff. It's just best not to allow people to express themselves. I know that sounds horrible. But it's the truth.

CW That's even why like, if I play video games, and I'm not just playing with friends, I will not have my microphone on. People on the internet, especially if they're hidden by some sort of anonymity, a lot of people take advantage of that.

BP What about this? What if the original sin was creating safe harbor, and we had never done that, and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and Club Penguin and Activision, were actually responsible, they were legally responsible if somebody harassed you, or stole a copyright.

RD Nobody would run a platform.

BP But I don't know if that's true. If there was money to be made, and you could scale it, maybe you would just make a little less money and scale it a little less fast. And would that be the worst thing ever? 

RD If you had to cover every offense, only big players could do it, that'd be one or two platforms, and they would allow almost nothing. 

BP You don't know though.

CF I always imagine maybe like, if I were in an alternative universe, if I wanted to have like some sort of social media platform, I would think that I would want to have people who are employed to specifically moderate, like, that's your job is just to run your comments, and things like that. But I feel like at a certain point, that gets to be too much, like you're going to miss some things. And especially if you were like legally responsible for any kind of harassment that takes place, you're inevitably going to miss something. Like something is going to fall through the gaps. And you're going to be responsible for that. So I kind of feel like nobody would want to do it. Like, nobody would want to like have a platform like that, because that would just be a lot. That would be a lot to take in and to have to—unless you like put a limit on how much people can post. Like people have an unlimited amount of times that they can just say or do whatever they want. And you have to like check them for that. I don't know. I can't imagine that working.

BP First of all, yeah, I love the what ifs, because like we don't know, maybe the world post 2000 will look different. That'd be like, just AOL. Or maybe there'd be like a smaller, safer Facebook and YouTube. But what if the person who posted was extremely responsible and liable financially, socially, etc? Yeah, like, what if there were more consequences, real and immediate consequences for the user? Then would we have the better internet?

CW I currently advise a company called Polywork. And they are trying to do some things that are making it like an alternative for LinkedIn, but you post things that are outside of just your job title, anything that you do. And moderation has been a huge thing that we've talked about from the beginning. So before the site launched, and they kind of do that, Ben, where they're trying to figure out how can we put more of the responsibilities on our users. And for example, one of the rules that they have as if someone DMs multiple people and is harassing them and stuff. First of all, they have like an instant block button like it like you can block someone very, very easily, which is something that more networks should implement right away. Anyways, I have implemented blocking twice at different companies, that should have been done before. But anyway, if someone blocks you because you've been harassing them above X number of times, you're automatically blocked from the website. And if you do any off site harassment, and enough people report it, or there's evidence and stuff, they'll block you from the site. And so they're hoping that by blocking people from the site, that's punishment enough to hopefully prevent that, and it's interesting, I don't know if it will be enough, but it's a start, I think.

CF I was just gonna say I've noticed something that's been happening more recent times is when someone acts up on the internet, and they think because the internet, there will be no consequences. Even if they're like anonymous, meaning like their real name, or their profile pictures, not their actual face, people sometimes figure out like, where they work, and especially where they work, and they will, like email their employer and like, get them fired. So that's like one way that—

RD So the solution is doxxing?

CF I was gonna say that it's like, basically what's happening with a lot of people now is that like, they're so afraid of like risking their whole career that they try to wash their mouth a little bit more, which is kind of like, uh, because what are we getting doxxed for? Like, are we getting doxxed for standing up for like, human rights, basic human rights? Or am I getting dogs for harassing someone? It depends.

BP Right, maybe next time we can all bring are sort of like the exemplar that we would hold up in terms of like, what is the best online community like this organization are actually making it work, because like, Stack Overflow is another great example. Like, it's really hard to earn the privileges to comment or contribute or downvote. And so in that sense, like, there is almost no like, issues with misinformation. Like there are other places or like casual, you know, like a bullying, for example, but then eventually, you know, like, becomes a place where only a few people have earned a ton of reputation, and they become gatekeepers, and it's hard to get in. And they may not know that what they think of as like, policing the rules the right way to other people feels like being shut out or being you know, like, cruel.

RD But ultimately someone decides, someone decides what's acceptable, and somebody has to hit the ban hammer.

CF I will say, I will mention one thing really quickly that I just found out about on Twitter, Instagram has implemented a new feature where you can block someone's account and all the accounts that they create thereafter. So I think I've seen this on Twitter before where like, you block someone and they just create another account and harass you from that account, you block again. I'm trying to figure out how they would exactly do this. I guess if the person uses like the same email, they could do that. Yeah, you can, like block all the accounts. And I was like, that's a great feature to like, really help quail—

BP But what if that person who signs up for like some crazy VPN? Yeah, I mean, like, yeah.

CF It really doesn't. But that's like a step in the right direction, I think.

BP The solution is that we all go back to living in small tribes in isolated villages, and then you're ultimately responsible for all of your actions. 

RD Cool, cool.

BP Solved it. 

[music]

BP From the absolute best Stack Exchange, the workplace, asked nine days ago, viewed 224,000 times: "How do I ask for a demotion? I'm in a management role at a midsize company and I hate it. My first three years of the company I held a project manager role, which I really enjoyed. Nearly two years ago I was promoted to the head of project management, managing 24 PMs. I am miserable and I want to go back. My reasons include bla, bla, bla bla bla. How do I bridge this to my boss and get back to my old role?" So fascinating question there. The advice which I thought was very good from the top answer is, you need to find your replacement first and you can be demoted back to the position that you actually enjoyed. As long as you're not leaving a vacuum and creating a headache for your boss, you should certainly go back to doing what makes you happy. Yeah, and not make what makes you miserable. Alright, Well, everybody, thank you so much for listening. I'm glad we saved the environment and fixed toxic interactions online.

RD You're welcome, America.

CW We know everything.

BP I am Ben Popper, I'm the director of content here at Stack Overflow. You can always find me on Twitter at Ben popper or email us podcast@stackoverflow.com. If you liked the show, leave a rating and review, it really helps. And if you need more macro pad in your life, please go check out The Key. You can still order it, it'll arrive in December and you'll be supporting, ah yes, you'll be supporting a great cause. Cassidy has already got one, she's the only one on the show has got one. Very jealous.

RD I'm Ryan Donovan, an editor at the blog at Stack Overflow. If you've got a great blog idea, email me at pitches@stackoverflow.com.

CF I'm Ceora Ford. I'm a developer advocate at Apollo GraphQL. You can mostly find me on Twitter @ceeoreo_ on Twitter. I hope I got that right. I'll pass it on to you Cassidy. [Ceora & Ryan laugh]

CW My name is Cassidy Williams. I'm director of developer experience at Netlify. You can find me @cassidoo—hopefully I spelled that right—on most things.

BP Alright everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you soon.

CW Bye!

[outro music]