So your "solution" is to let yourself be exploited ?
There is no point in posting here, on MSE, trying to be heard by the company. That has been made abundantly clear. So let's just keep this site, for as long as we're allowed to, as a place for users to ask questions about the network. Forget feature requests, they're ignored anyway. Forget the desperate pleas for the company to hear us. They fall on deaf ears or, more likely, are never even read at all.
The intention of management is to keep users posting and visiting the sites they want them to so that they can make money for themselves. Your argument is that we should just go along with that regardless of what destruction happens to the site.
I don't think that's a widely held view, but regardless it's not mine.
The intention of these changes, IMO, is to make SE look attractive to investors, either in the form of merger style investment or an IPO. The managers pushing this are not doing that to keep SE alive long term, they're doing it to make a bit pay day for themselves, in the form of bonuses and share options. It's pretty clear from their behavior that they don't care at all about keep SE alive beyond that pay day.
My experience of these scenarios is that in the rush to make a big pay day for managers and VC investors the long term survival of businesses (some of which I'd been employed by at the time) is compromised.
At best companies going this route suffer a huge fall after the pay day - typically within months. This takes years to recover from. At worst recovery is not possible or the new management, again looking for a return on investment in short order, simply completely change the business and products to an unrecognizable state.
No users of SE will benefit from these changes (IMO). Adding content just adds to the pay day bonus the management team will make. It won't help SE survive long term in any form we know.
A lot of this doom and gloom could be eliminated if management, particularly the CEO, engaged with the community and made clear, unambiguous statements about the Plan for SE.
What we have instead been given is the likes of the last blog post :
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/17/this-week-stackoverflowknows-syntactic-sugar-overfit-or-nah-and-the-definition-of-norm/?cb=1
Just what is the point of that drivel of a blog post ? It serves no useful purpose and if that's management's idea of solving problems on SE, they're clueless. Talk about syntactic sugar - that's all this was - sugar.
What's the Plan, CEO ?
What we need is a short post from the CEO stating the Plan for SE, not just Teams. We need no waffle, no marketing speak, no legalistic language. No "one big happy family" spin. Just the plain, ordinary truth.
I don't believe we'll get it, but I'd like to be wrong.
Whether making noise and protesting makes any difference in the end I'm am skeptical about - I don't think anyone "up top" gives a damn. But doing nothing produces the same end game : SE a shell gutted for the aims of M&A or IPO and "management by bonus".
We all want a profitable SE long term. But if what is left is not SE, I, for one, am not interested in contributing to the wallets of a few managers aiming for a big pay out.
So prove me wrong, CEO. Let us know the game plan. Convince us it's not to gut SE for personal profit.
If you actually published a plan we could believe in and listened to our advice about running SE, maybe it would help SE survive long term.
Kinda dumb ignoring the advice of posters on a site that you want to be used by companies to get their advice from and inform their decision making. Maybe you (SE Inc) need to start using your own product.
