Why was the decision made to develop Discussions from scratch instead of increasing the visibility, usability, and focus on chat?

Question

In the recent mod/staff virtual meetup, which included members of senior company leadership such as the CEO, a lot of discussion happened around focusing on new initiatives versus community requests. One example brought up was deciding to work on Discussions, as, according to Prashanth (the CEO), there were thousands of people saying that they needed a place for more open discussion in a less formal method than Q&A.

However, such a place does already exist, and has for many years on the Stack Exchange platform, and that is chat. There are currently three chat servers, chat.SE, chat.SO, and chat.Meta. These provide a much less structured, and less formal, way of discussion. It was explicitly developed to be the more lax "third place".

As Prashanth noted, it's very hard to build a community without discussing things, and I wholeheartedly agree. We've been pushing for more focus on chat for years, but it hasn't been a priority. I understand that; Teams and the like were much more urgent as the company needed to make money to survive.

However, when people are requesting something that very much does exist, but is not well-known, why was the decision made to make something entirely new (Discussions) rather than going, "Okay, we need a discussion area for the NLP Collective. Let's create a chat room, appoint "recognized members" as Room Owners, and prominently link this from the Collective"?
The existing chat features are where the community already hangs out, and so it would be less isolated - you're more likely to involve more people if you go to where they are rather than having them come to you. It has existing moderation tools that mods are familiar with, meaning that the existing tools can handle moderation instead of requiring CMs to moderate the Discussion spaces. It supports most of the features that Discussions currently has:

Feature set

• Users can browse and view open Discussions posts.
• Collective members can create new Discussions, and any registered user can reply to existing Discussions.
• Nested replies are supported.
• While voting is supported and post scores are tracked, there is no reputation impact to voting within Discussions.

Any user can view chat rooms, even if they can't talk until they have 20 rep. (However, users with lower rep can be manually granted talk permissions per-room, and this 20-rep limit is something that, if dev work was being done, could even be adjusted or removed on Collective chatrooms.)
Users gain the ability to create new rooms at 100 rep or so.
Replies are robust and implemented in the least confusing way of any chat system I've used.
Users can star interesting messages, and this doesn't affect rep (but you can get a couple badges).

In addition, this would have been a great opportunity to simultaneously work on something community-requested and that feeds into the current needs of the company.

From what Prashanth said in the meetup, I understand that focusing on a discussion space was a major priority in the past few months. The example given was Area 51 vs Discussions. However, I didn't hear anything about why a new feature was developed from the ground up instead of improving and using an existing feature, that's well-loved by the community and proven to be robust. Yes, apparently the chat codebase is esoteric, but surely with (one of) the original creator(s) of chat on board and a very competent dev team, it could be figured out.

Why was the decision made to create this new feature instead of using something that already exists?

Answer 1

In Discussions, we’re looking for the content within to be more of an ongoing resource for both readers and participants, where the conversations can be easily accessible and discoverable in both the short term and long term. Our current Chat tool does not easily facilitate extended lifespans of particular conversations, and previous conversations are often hard to find.

As others have said in some of the comments, we don’t see Discussions as serving exactly the same function as Chat. Of course, there is some overlap, because they are both spaces for users to communicate outside Q&A. However, there are also some key differences:

• Chat rooms can feel like one long thread or multiple intermingled threads, used more for real-time (or close to it) conversations on an ongoing basis. Discussions will be individual posts with subthreads that are meant to live on the platform long term, which people can come back to as needed.
• Chat rooms can have a defined topic but often do not have clear rules of engagement (other than following the Code of Conduct). Discussions are housed in a specific collective which defines their scope and have a set of guidelines about what types of conversations are considered useful and appropriate for the space.

The goal of Discussions is to have a space for conversations within a collective that doesn't fit neatly into the objective Q&A model but still augment the Q&A experience by helping technologists make well-informed decisions. On the other hand, chat is more open-ended, allowing users to connect however they see fit. We expect some Discussions threads to only be relevant for a finite duration in time, while others will become long-lasting points of reference.

You can read more about the goals of Discussions on this MSO post, and in this post from our research and design team, diving into the user research behind Discussions.

Both features add value to the user experience in their own way. We don’t see Discussions as a replacement for Chat, but as a separate way to encourage users to engage with each other, and build subcommunities on Stack Overflow.

Answer 2

Thank you, Sasha, for providing an answer.

Our current Chat tool does not easily facilitate extended lifespans of particular conversations, and previous conversations are often hard to find.

Well this question asks exactly this: Why not invest on making Chat better and add more features to it so it can accommodate those conversations?

Chat rooms can feel like one long thread or multiple intermingled threads

We can create "Threads" within "Channels"... Discord is a good example.

Chat rooms can have a defined topic but often do not have clear rules of engagement

I don't find this to be entirely accurate. There are number of rooms with their own set of rules, FAQ, etc. And honestly, I don't find the guideline for the Discussions to be really effective as is. So, whatever effort goes to making a guideline for them, can be (could've been) focused on making a set of rules for chatrooms.

The goal of Discussions is to have a space for conversations within a collective that doesn't fit neatly into the objective Q&A model but still augment the Q&A experience by helping technologists make well-informed decisions.

I am not sure how can we make "well-informed" decision based on uncurated content.

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All that said, I am not against the experiment. But all the options should be kept on the table, including abandoning the feature if it's proven to be more problematic than helpful. And based on the initial feedback, expanding the experiment should be put on hold for some time. Just considering Discussions in a bubble (not arguing whether they are needed or not), the feature needs a lot more work, understandably, before it would be considered for expansion. The UI is buggy, comments under each threads do not accept replies, you cannot mention users, flagging/curation is basically nonexistent, etc.