Disclaimer: I did not notice nor see nor take part in the discussion that was mentioned in the comments. This answer is merely coming from me as a user and my experience based mainly on German.SE, Chemistry.SE and Travel.SE.

I disagree with announcement being made a mod-only tag

And to be even more specific, it is supposed to become a company-only tag. The way the top post (‘question’ — but this is meta, it doesn’t have to be a question) is worded, this sounds like it is supposed to be a one-way channel for the SE staff to transfer information to the userbase. That in itself is fine; as the top post notes there are numerous posts all across the different site metas (and here) that do so. Mostly, they are labelled with discussion in lieu of a better tag.

But quite frankly, aside from those posts here on meta.SE (the centralised meta site) these employee announcements have been — thankfully — few and far between. In fact, quite a few ‘announcements’ that would have been very important for the respective community had not even been made on the site’s meta by the team — instead, in the case I am thinking of most, it was a moderator who accidentally happened to frequent another related site where the ‘announcement’ was made in a comment or answer. This moderator then continued to post on the site meta.

Thankfully, your proposed solution would have allowed that user — since they have a diamond — to add an announcement tag to their question. But what about others? Say it had been me — no diamond anywhere — who had experienced that? The correct course of action would have been:

1. post

2. tag as discussion

3. flag for mod notice

4. wait for a mod to add announcement

5. live in the constant fear that it may be removed as I am in no way affiliated to SO, the company.

Or maybe:

1. contact the mods via chat

2. wait for them to post the corresponding post

But why? that is overly long. Information concerning the community should be rolled out immediately and not go through arbitrary waiting periods.

Furthermore, oftentimes and in all metas I frequent users post ‘reminders’. For example to remind people that they should take a second to look at the spelling and punctuation when editing tags. Another example would be the series on Meta.Chemistry.SE called ‘mind the buzzwords’ — reminding people that certain buzzwords are not good in titles because they are not descriptive; and that those titles should be edited. Again, the chemistry buzzwords series is now run by a moderator but in earlier days the user was an ordinary user.

The additional priviledges associated with announcement as per your post are not needed

I get the point of the notice which is saying ‘this is coming directly from the SO team.’ But that notice can (and probably should) be added to the system separately. Moderators are already able to apply notices to posts, e.g. stating that an answer requires sources or is low-quality. I think that the announcement ‘this post is by the SO team’ should be one of those — it remains in the hands of moderators, it is displayed prominently at the correct point and it can contain the text you needed.

I have a very big problem with this paragraph:

In addition, questions with this tag can't be closed, deleted or flagged as spam or abuse.

It is a general principle of the sites that all users who have reached a certain reputation level get all the powers associated with said reputation level unless they have done something worthy to lose these powers (i.e. get banned) — although the ban seems to be temporary in practically all cases. Thus, you are generally trusting us all — experts and non-experts, informed laymen and merely curious laymen — on making calls about whether something is a good fit or not, whether it should stay or get removed.

And suddenly, just because you (the SO team) wrote the post, this should change? Suddenly, there are posts that, please excuse the comparison but that is what it sounds like, were written with the Divine Right of Kings Stack Overflow, the Company? You are completely removing the community’s ability to say ‘this post is not a good fit here’ or ‘this post is promoting a service without being asked for’?

Separation of power is a fundamental and well-established principle of democracy. Democratic societies — and I consider the SO network to be one — build on the fact that nobody is above the law and nobody’s actions are infallible. Many a time have legislative or executive decisions been examined by the judicial power — sometimes resulting in approval, sometimes not. The close vote and flagging system is the SE equivalent to judicial power. It is community-driven and community-moderated.

Questions that wrongly acquire close votes get comments added why they should not be closed. Questions that are closed while part of the community disagrees gain reopen votes. This system is not infallible, both the community itself and the diamond moderators act as an instance of appeal. I have yet to witness an example where the community-driven process did not end up doing the right thing. Of course, sometimes opinions differ. If that is the case, there will not be enough votes to perform the decision the majority perceives as wrong. I have been on the wrong side of decisions a few times and while I may have been unhappy, in the end I shrugged it off. Democracy is the key.

If you, SO the company, do not trust us, the SE community, to make the correct calls (‘do not close’ if a post is on-topic, ‘close’ if it is not, ‘flag appropriately’ if it is spam/abusive, ‘do not flag’ if it is not) and even more, if you do not trust the site’s diamond moderators to make the appropriate appeal calls we have a big problem. Or, to put it in a different way, this would no longer be my site.

You seem to fear this may happen. Please back your anxiety with data. How many announcement-type posts have SO employees made, how many and — most importantly — which of those where closed, flagged as spam, flagged as abusive, gained delete votes? If that number is greater than 0 (reminder: I did not witness any to date on any site I frequent) try to ask why the decision was made, reach out to the community, discuss with us, before deciding that that may not happen.

announcement would be a great addition to discussion, bug, feature-request or support, but not in the way you propose

I highlighted above that announcements do happen on all site metas and that in most of the instances I witnessed they did not come from the SO team. Currently, they are labelled with the required tag discussion because it is the only one that mildly fits. These announcements are okay on meta sites. ‘Questions’ on meta do not have to be questions. By the way, this also applies to things that do not fully fit announcements: a very helpful post on Meta.Travel.SE is a dupe target collector in which a number of good questions have been collected that may be helpful in determining whether something has been asked before.

announcement posts do not have to receive any special protection. There have been cases of close votes being dropped on meta sites for unclear (the close vote dropper meant ‘what is the question here?’). All reviews were completed with three leave open votes, to the best of my knowledge. This, in my opinion, proves that the community is able to distinguish between posts that are within their meta’s scope or not.

Adding announcement as a required, but open-for-everybody tag would be a great thing to have; it would allow all users to tag their announcements appropriately. Naturally, the SO team would also have access to this tag and could use it if need be. Mistags are easily cleaned up by those with the editing priviledge — at least, I have yet to see a meta post that kept blatantly wrong tags for a long period of time.

Even if the SO team feels that they need a special, mod-only pink tag to signify ‘this post is actually one by the company’ (remember: I think a notice and featureing would suffice), this can easily be another different pink tag. However, it will likely be superfluous on practically all sites, so maybe it should be restricted to those the SO team actually talks to on a somewhat regular basis. (But then again: having an unapplied tag hanging around does not hurt the system.)

Whatever you do, it is best kept until in a few weeks or months!

As you saw in the disclaimer, I did not witness any drama happening, but another answer and numerous comments have shown me that there was recent drama. I would propose to let the entire issue rest until the drama has fully cleared up. One week is not an adequate timescale for drama to die down, the entire thing should be stalled for at least four from the onset of drama or two from the end of drama, whichever is longer.

If any new drama arises during that time, please stall the implementation further.

‘Six to eight weeks’ has become a somewhat running gag here as far as I could witness. Nobody will be upset if an implementation takes six to eight SO weeks.

Conflicts of interest

The author declares the following conflicts of interest:

• The author has posted quite a few announcement type posts on all meta sites they frequent.

• The author has received close votes on announcement type posts they wrote. (However, no questions were closed as such.)

• The author declares not to be involved in any of the discussion that seemingly happened elsewhere on the network. However, the author reserves their entitlement to an opinion as to whether the author thinks certain posts are on or off-topic for certain meta-sites.