Thanks for the blog post; this is a nice window into what goes into company decisions.
One segment in particular caught my eye:
Historical Archive Research
We have ten years of data and 172 sites on the network. While we are thinking in the future tense, something that is important for us to keep in mind is that we’ve performed many experiments in the past we can continue to learn from. We’ve also built and launched features that have been successful as well as those that have fizzled on release and we should keep that historical knowledge accessible for future decisions. There are also historical threads on Meta that we learn from. A priority is learning from our successes and not remaking the same mistakes.
Obviously, I'm happy that the company is making an effort to not repeat certain past mistakes, both recent and distant. At the same time . . . I'm a little bit worried as to how this research, as you put it, is being done. The adjective "historical" bothers me a bit; I'm no historian, but I do know that many historians deal with events and people and places that no longer exist. Sometimes all they have to go on are documents, ruins of buildings, artifacts, etc.
But the network is only about a decade old. Yeah, that's a long time. But . . . it's not centuries or millennia. The things you're looking at when you do this research - Meta threads, internal documents, etc. - are almost certainly still shaping the network today. And many of the people behind them are still hanging around (though . . . with a couple very notable exceptions). Those people are crucial to any understanding of how the past became the present, and how the present will become to future. This kinda "history" is still very much alive.
I hope SO will use treat archival dives as something that's extremely important. What with the departures I alluded to above, the company has lost a lot of institutional memory. I don't know if higher-ups understand just how serious that is. Some of that information is frankly going to be impossible to gain back, short of the people with it returning, which seems unlikely. But looking at old stuff - and engaging, where possible, with the people involved - seems like a great way to try and rebuild that lost institutional memory.
It might not be possible. I don't know. But it's hugely important to try, and to reach out to those who were here before you or I were. This kinda history is still very much alive. If it dies . . . then we're gonna keep going back to square one.
Institutional memory is important. I think that trying to rebuild it should be one of the company's top priorities.
