#Remember: "Everything is Awesome" is the theme-song to distopia.
Remember: "Everything is Awesome" is the theme-song to distopia.
#Subtle hint: YOU AREN'T LISTENING
Active reading [<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/theming#Verb> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let%27s#Contraction>]. Removed meta information (this belongs in comments). [(its = possessive, it's = "it is" or "it has". See for example <http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Its-and-It%27s>.)]
This_is_NOT_a_forum
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I'm a little late to this party, I don't usually browse the Meta-meta and only pop in when I see it in the sidebar or get linked from a Meta-SO post (like I was just now).
Anyway.
Gnat has a good point that the development focus has clearly shifted away from "tools users need" and onto "things that make us look pretty."
Haney staunchly promised a revised search feature being rolled out with Channels. Well...Channels, I mean Teams are done. Pressed, boxed, shipped, and in stores today. Search? Nowhere to be seen. We've been asking for a better search bar for years at this point. Like five. SO's only ten years old, how can a feature that's needed a tuneup for half its life get ignored like this?
Instead we got a site redesign that's...mixed at best. Some things can be styled and some things can't (despite literally being part of the same sprite sheet (yes, I will continue to bring this up)). The available colors for the header are borderline indistinguishable from other sites. For example, PPCG (where the new themeing has rolled out) looks like a meta site. Hooray it no longer looks like a beta site...I guess..?
We've had the new default unified theme up on Programming Puzzles & Code Golf for a month and a half now and the response there has been really positive.
And from The Nineteenth Byte (PPCG's site chat):
How do I downvote a website theme?
Yeah. Super positive.
Server Fault looks freaking identical, so does Mathematical, Photography, Tex, Unix & Linux, and Ask Different (they're all black/gray). Super User still looks like a beta site (its blue). Ask Ubuntu is beta-but-red. Mi Yodeya is the only one that actually looks like itself. Sure there's a couple of subtle design markings in the header, and there's a custom logo, but if I squint and step back a few paces I literally can't tell them apart. I'm awash in a sea of uniformity (and to think: someone thought these were great examples; I dare you to replace those images with their beta and meta incarnations and repost it on the blog and see if anyone notices the swap).
That's not what we wanted from the revamped site themes. Sure, we know that the full customization that used to happen was way complicated and not uniform, but what we got was...comparable to taking away the theme from sites that had themes so no one had it. It wasn't an upgrade, it was a revision to status quo: "everyone already looks like beta, so we'll just leave it like that and say its new."
#Remember: "Everything is Awesome" is the theme-song to distopia.
Rocks, clocks, and socks, they're awesome
Figs, and jigs, and twigs, that's awesome
Everything is awesome, including conformity, brain washing, willful ignorance, and government spying.
Stack Exchange (the company) seems to be trying to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls and put on fake smiles and repeat the mantra "everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine" hoping that if they do it enough, it'll come true. It won't. It never will. Not unless you address the core underlying concerns that your users have.
And those concerns are one, simple, thing:
- We do not have the tools we need to do our jobs
Sure, it's a pretty broad concern, but it's still true. It may be a technologically challenging task, but it's still true. The search isn't good enough, the duplicate-finder search is worse (I use Google to find the things I need), I've seen moderators complain fairly regularly that "they can't just do that." I think the last one I saw dealt with a bad audit and the fact that it couldn't be removed as an audit without validating the post (which was spam) in some way (in this case, it would have cleared the spam flags).
I've also seen spam posts show up as audits where it was literally impossible for the reviewer to determine that the post was spam because the required information (eg. six identical answers posted to six questions, all deleted) was outright hidden from them (because those other answers were deleted and if the reviewer doesn't have 10k rep, they can't see them).
Or there was this failed audit where a post was deleted and turned into an audit, but the post was actually good content, and reviewing it as such failed the audit. Only solution? Head to chat and get the attention of a 10k user or mod to undelete it.
Which I suppose I can just sum up as "the audit system we have is terrible, everyone knows its terrible, but nothing's ever been done to try and fix it."
Do I need to go on?
There's a reason your users are overflowing with negativity. And it all falls right here:
Often (and more often recently) I've heard colleagues dismiss meta feedback.
--Jon Ericson ♦
Ignoring your users is never the right action.
The more (generic) you dismiss feedback, the more negative the response will get. Because you're not listening, so people point out the fact that you're not listening, which gets ignored because it's so negative. It's a self-perpetuating problem.
#Subtle hint: YOU AREN'T LISTENING
Are we good now? Great. Break the loop. Lets get to work making the site more awesome. Figure out what tools moderators need, figure out what in that list is feasible, build it, test it, ask for feedback, listen to that feedback, make changes, roll it out, repeat.