The company’s commitment to rebuilding the relationship with you, our community

Question

My name is Teresa Dietrich. About a month ago, I joined Stack Overflow as Head of Product and Community, reporting directly to the CEO. During my years as an engineer and technology leader, I saw the impact this community and site has on people across the world and I am very excited to be here. While I have personally gotten a few answers from Stack Overflow over the years and have seen so many engineers I work with rely on it daily, I’m new to both the SE/SO Community and to the company. In my new role, however, I’m committed to learning about and rebuilding the relationship and trust between us all.

I understand our community ranges from users who visit only to find an answer, through increasingly deeper levels of engagement, to our curators and high reputation users at the core. I recognize I’m coming to this position at a low point in the relationship between the company and our most avid community members - those who are active on Meta and our Moderators. I know that there is a lot of work to do to repair our relationship with the community and I’m here today to show you how we plan to do that.

Over the last month, I have spent time listening to and asking questions of our Community Managers, our Engineers who are long-time community members, and those throughout the company with community involvement. I have been digging into our data and the feedback from our Site Satisfaction Survey and The Loop. I have been reading what you’ve said to us publicly including your posts on Meta and the Open Letter to Stack Exchange. Please consider what I write below to be a response to the Open Letter along with some of the other issues I’ve seen.

In the letter, you mention Tim Post’s 2018 blog post, Our Theory of Moderation Re-visited. Tim got it right when he said then that we had run afoul of these five principles. We have done so again since this blog was posted, and we likely will again in the future, unintentionally. From everything I have learned so far, I believe the unifying theme across our core community members, our moderators, our employees and company leadership is that everyone cares deeply. I believe - with a stronger relationship and better processes for feedback between us - that we can prevent larger incidents and learn from the ones that got us where we are now. I support these principles and we are recommitting to them and will show that commitment through our actions.

I believe that my position here now means that accountability for the company’s relationship with the overall community, particularly meta, starts with me.

I want to personally apologize for our actions or inactions, as the case may be, in the past that had a negative impact on our relationship. While specific recent events may have individually caused harm, years of neglect and a growing distance from our community led to those events and it will take conscious effort to repair the damage.

I want to start by establishing transparency with the community, and I know that transparency is an easy word to say but harder to define and put into action. I believe that transparency comes down to two core actions: expectation management and context setting. We (the Community, Product and Engineering teams) will endeavor to clarify and reset when necessary what you can expect from the company. We will also provide as much context as we can for policy, decisions, and actions that we take within legal and regulatory constraints - we want you to understand why we’re making changes, not just that we’re making them.

How will we do this? First, we established four themes for our community work this year.

1. Understand our Community -

• We will seek to better understand our community and the user segments within it. We will work to better understand the pain points and needs of our users and deliver solutions to them through our features and initiatives.
• By being increasingly transparent we aim to regain trust with everyone - from brand new users to you, our most dedicated community members.

2. Represent our Community -

• As we better understand our community, we will represent you to the teams within the company whose decisions and actions impact you.
• The employees at the company continue to change and come from a variety of backgrounds. We commit to helping everyone in the company learn about all of you and the site to empower them to make better decisions.
• We will develop a community language and framework to educate the company and bring them along on the journey.

3. Improve Feedback Metrics -

• Our users have shared that they don’t feel heard by Stack Overflow. We will define a framework for the various types and methods of feedback and dedicate time to processes and outreach that identify ways we can be serving them better and facilitating better two-way communications.

4. Increase Community Engagement -

• Though our active user base continues to grow, our engagement has remained the same. What this means is that while more users are coming to the site every month, the number of users who engage meaningfully in the site does not increase proportionally.
• To change this dynamic, we will balance investing in improving our tools and features that benefit our long-term users with initiatives that convert new users into engaged ones.
• We want to build long-term relationships with as many of you as we can by providing useful features that deliver value to you. If engagement is not growing with the overall user base, a lower percentage of you are getting value from these interactions each year.
• Working directly with targeted groups through UX research, we will identify and invest in features and tools that will improve the experience.

Based on these themes, we are building our Community Roadmap of initiatives. I will share the Q1 roadmap with you all within the next week in a blog post and will take part in an accompanying Meta discussion (update: The 2020 Q1 Community Roadmap was released on the blog and on meta on Feb 25). I considered sharing it here but believe there is enough to share about the process and initiatives to warrant its own separate post and discussion. I commit to sharing these roadmaps with you regularly going forward.

Initiatives Launched:

• We have continued to publish “The Loop” monthly to share the UX research and product exploration going on within the Product, Design, Community and Engineering teams within the company. We will continue to solicit feedback through The Loop as well.
• We have established what we believe are clear and open guidelines to deal with situations where moderators may need to have their privileges revoked or to be reinstated. We know the processes aren’t perfect yet and you have shared how you would like us to improve them. We’ll be reviewing your feedback and work to incrementally improve these processes for transparency. Our goal is a set of procedures that work to protect all users, the Community as a whole, and the company while being respectful of our moderators.
• We have released an updated Privacy Policy that incorporated feedback from Community Managers along with a meta post for questions and discussion that accompanied the update.

Initiatives in Progress:

• We have defined a standard process for new policy or process review that includes Community Managers, employees who are long-time community members, and Moderators before being shared and put into place. Our plan is to provide new policies to the planned Moderator Council for feedback periods before they are made official. We will then share it with all Moderators through the Stack Moderators Team for advance notification. We value the deep understanding that moderators on the network have of their communities and users, and welcome honest, respectful feedback from the greater Stack Exchange Community.
• We are encouraging employees to be active within the community, both officially on metas and for fun in their areas of expertise or interest, and will be providing simple guidelines and a helpful FAQ for employees in the next week (update: the guidelines and FAQs were shared with employees on Feb 25).
• We are defining our commitment to responding to Meta posts & Moderators questions through our new standard process and will be sharing that with a group of Moderators for feedback. We will share it with you all within the next two weeks (update: our commitment to responding to Meta and Moderators was posted on March 4).
• We have drafted our followup and clarification on the Content Licensing issue and will be publishing that within the next two weeks (update: our followup regarding content licensing was posted on March 3).
• We will be creating a Moderator offboarding process, including a survey and interviews with departing Moderators. Our goal is to take the time to listen to and understand why a Moderator has chosen to resign and how we can improve the site, processes, and policies. We will send this survey to the recently-resigned moderators so that their suggestions can be considered (update: The survey was sent to moderators on April 3rd and made available on MSE on April 7th).

We want the relationship between the company, the community and its moderators to be based on open, transparent communication that will be made in good faith. I believe the deterioration of communication and trust has been a problem for quite some time. I believe that re-establishing transparency and open, two-way communication will be a key ingredient in rebuilding the relationship between the community, moderators, employees and the company.

To all of the moderators who have resigned or suspended your activities over the past few months: your presence and impact is missed. We value all of your work to keep your sites clean and communities healthy. We understand the many reasons why you felt that it was necessary to step down and that it was a painful decision. We are working on many of the issues that influenced your decisions to leave, and we aim to back these intentions up with actions, accountability, and consistent open communication. If you feel that your issues continue to go unaddressed, I invite you to post about them on Meta in a respectful way. And if you choose to apply for moderator reinstatement, we look forward to hearing about this as well and to seeing you back on your sites.

While I am only a month into this role, we have a lot more plans in the works around how we gather feedback, encourage collaboration, improve curator tools, and improve the quality and relevancy of content - and we are excited to work together with you to make sure this platform meets the needs of our entire community. I personally commit to reading and responding within Meta at least once a week going forward and you might see me hanging around on Travel, too. I sincerely hope these commitments and actions will contribute to rebuilding our relationship and trust, and I look forward to engaging with you all more as we go on this journey together.

Answer 1

I want to be hopeful. I really do. But I can't. The company has burned through all its goodwill, with me, at least. I want to think this is the first step to recovery, but I thought that about every communication from SE to the community. I'm not willing to believe in yet more words. Words are cheap. Words we have received in abundance.

The follow-through on those words, however, has told an incredibly different story. The company fired the very people that were trying to preserve the communication between us. The company has not met the commitments it made. Until there are clear, concrete changes in how the company treats us volunteers, and, more importantly, holds itself accountable to the communities, I can't see this as anything more than words.

In the words of Jerry Maguire, "Show me the money".

Answer 2

While I am rather pessimistic about whether anyone will manage to clean out the Augias' stable of fiefdoms and overall dysfunctional culture that Stack Overflow the company seems to have become on the inside.... this is definitely a breath of fresh air and the first corporate communication in years that sparked hope in me that something could, maybe, actually meaningfully change in company-community relations. We'll see.

There are a number of things the company could do that in my view would signal that it is actually willing to put its money where its mouth is:

• Offer to unilaterally and unconditionally free Monica Cellio from whatever non-disclosure agreement is in her settlement, if this is something she wants to revisit. Right now, it is looking like she is being pressured to shut up by an authoritarian government threatening her loved ones or something. It's a terrible look, and as far as I'm concerned, I have no interest in contributing anything to the place, and would not shed a tear if it crashed and burned tomorrow, as long as this is not fixed. (If Monica then chooses to continue to not talk about how the legal action was resolved, that is perfectly fine and totally her right, of course. But then we will know it is because she wants to put things behind her, not because she is being gagged on pain of being driven into ruination.) Failing this... find some other damn way to make this truly right. Because as it stands, it doesn't really feel like it is.

• Offer to unconditionally, retroactively increase severance pay for Shog9 and Robert, and possibly the other employees that were let go, to four weeks' wages and benefits per year worked, or whatever else is reasonable, and acknowledge the departure and momentous influence the two CMs had on what Stack Overflow is today, in an official blog post. I know our preoccupation with this may look silly to you; parting ways with people when new leadership comes in is par for the course for any high-powered company, and obviously any business has the legal right to pay just as little severance to former employees as it absolutely has to. However, Stack Overflow has an unorthodox, symbiotic relationship with its community. A proper send-off both financially and in honouring their impact is important to that community because being a company that does right by its employees is part of the unwritten contract that motivates the often highly-paid professionals that keep the site running to donate meaningful slices of their time to a for-profit enterprise. That the company didn't look out for its employees and the volunteer community that helped build the place had to step in to help out is a disgrace, and it can't be good for the morale of the remaining employees, either.

  In regards to not making the payment conditional on a non-disclosure agreement - this may look like a huge concession, but might actually work out to the company's advantage. The dirty laundry now being aired in public on Twitter (very responsibly, politely, and professionally, I might add) by some ex-employees who apparently didn't sign such a document may look ugly at first - but I am certain it will actually turn out to be a net long term benefit for company-community relations. Because everyone involved with the site sensed all this internal dysfunction all along. We just couldn't put it into words because they lacked information. Now it can be talked about... both inside and outside the company... and fixed. Well, maybe.

• Give consideration to the idea of spinning off the public side of Q&A into a nonprofit. I know this probably looks insane to you. But it could (to stick with the Greek mythology) be the strike cutting through the Gordian knot: separating the concerns of the for-profit company and those of building a library of knowledge that is free and open to the world forever. Opening up the possibility of the public Q&A part becoming partly funded by donations or the communities themselves... while still serving the for-profit company's goals in a multitude of ways, as a prestigious flagship, funneling customers, showcasing the Q&A product, and many others.

• Whatever you do, please have all community-facing employees continue this new, awesome, largely bullshit-free style of communication - even when having to announce stuff that people won't like. The Stack Overflow community is very intelligent, and can smell dishonesty from a mile away. Continuing the course of the last few months - of radio silence and insincere communication - would be a sure-fire way to destroy what little trust there is left.

Answer 3

Over the last month, I have spent time listening to and asking questions of our Community Managers, our Engineers who are long-time community members, and those throughout the company with community involvement.

Many of the most respected Community Managers saw their employment end with SO/SE within the past month, many long-term site moderators have resigned, and quite a few high-reputation users have suspended activity or deleted accounts. Some details were shared by the departing employees and it seems there is a problem at the core of company. While this post makes a solid attempt to address this growing disconnect between the Company and the Users it seems odd then that some of people best suited to assist in this endeavor are no longer here.

I wish you the best in your new position and look forward to initiatives you laid out. I hope you can quickly build the trust of the community because I know it will be difficult to replace people who spent years developing these relationships. I also hope these efforts are not "too little, too late".

Good Luck!

Answer 4

Thank you. I hope this is "this time for realz".

I was one of the proponents of the open letter, and I set up the site to host it. I thought it had the potential to create some momentum behind changing things at the company, and I was disappointed when all it got was a wishy-washy response that gave few solid commitments and then petered out never to be heard from again. A further response was promised but never materialised.

Then, Stack Overflow apologised. Twice. The first was... not great. The second - from David Fullerton - seemed to have potential; it acknowledged the major issues and tried not to place fault anywhere but the company, and I hoped that might be the sign of actual change. Then... that came to nothing as well; the commitments it promised were barely delivered, and then only as an afterthought.

And then Stack Overflow decided to gut its community management team by removing two of its most prominent and experienced members. I'd stuck with things up to that point, but that was my final straw - I didn't go out with a bang, just faded into the background and stopped participating.

If these are solid commitments, not afterthoughts, I'm looking forward to coming back - but I hope you can understand that I won't believe it until I see it. Actions speak louder.

Answer 5

To start off, thank you for posting this. This is the most promising thing I've seen since I stepped down as a moderator several months ago. This is the first thing I've seen that gives me an actual glimmer of hope that I could get on board with having a diamond again.

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You say:

"...I personally commit to reading and responding within Meta at least once a week going forward..."

Do you believe that once a week is enough to keep on top of issues that the community raises? Meta has a tendency to move rather quickly; I'm usually here for roughly fourteen hours a day, six days a week, both keeping an eye on the main site and hanging out in the Tavern on the Meta, and I still entirely miss some important things. Do you have a system in place for making sure that things don't get missed due to the fast-paced nature of Meta?

Answer 6

To all of the moderators who have resigned or suspended your activities over the past few months: your presence and impact is missed. [...] If you feel that your issues continue to go unaddressed, I invite you to post about them on Meta in a respectful way. And if you choose to apply for moderator reinstatement, we look forward to hearing about this as well and to seeing you back on your sites.

I'm not a moderator, but it seems to me this is very late, and not really going to do much for the moderators who have quit or are no longer actually performing moderator actions.

The damage done to moderators is real, and I doubt there is much that can be done at this point to bring them back. Would you want to risk being on the receiving end of the reputational damage that was done to Ms. Cellio?

Focusing on the requests that moderators have made over the past couple of months, instead of hand-wavy non-apology apologies, would be a welcome departure from the status quo as it exists up to this point.

In short, action not words.

Answer 7

It's nice to see something written, but I have a serious question that I think needs to be addressed and would be a good starting point for a new Head of Product and Community:

Why did Stack Exchange, Inc see a need to change things in the first place?

I've been on the Stack Overflow network from all the way back when it was in private beta and have watched things evolve over the years as things scaled. While there were growing pains, the community had sorted out a fairly decent way of moderating things. While people are correct in that it was somewhat off-putting to newcomers and a better way of integrating them into the community was needed, the system also managed to keep high-quality information on the internet as well.

Reflecting back upon the past six months to a year, I get the impression that Stack Exchange, Inc. started trying to dictate to the community how to operate. As I write this, I even see a "Teresa Dietrich is a new contributor. Be nice, and check out our Code of Conduct." banner despite the fact that I have over 10,000 reputation and, in theory, should be an established member of the community. While a minor quibble, it it something that gives an impression that professional adults don't always care for.¹

Beyond the impression of trying to tell the community how to operate, I've also gotten the impression that Stack Exchange, Inc. (SEI) just doesn't care. I seem to recall a comment by the Director of Public Q&A about Meta users being irrelevant because they could "fit in a New York City apartment" which not only contributes to the impression that SEI doesn't care, but that as an organization you are fairly condescending as well. Exacerbating this impression are comments a Community Evangelist² made about a "eureka moment" regarding Meta... when a Stack Overflow Meta user pointed out the role that Meta plays (with data) back in July 2019 almost six months before SEI had the same eureka moment. For extra irony the analysis links back to the question that has the user analysis as an answer without mentioning it. In the academic circles I travel in, a peer reviewer would rip someone apart for plagiarism for doing that.³

So where does this leave things? I'll be honest, I'm pessimistic about SEI and the Stack Exchange Network in the future. I've actually told junior developers and students that while Stack Overflow is a good place to look things up, they might want to reconsider contributing free labor to a poorly managed for-profit company. My own use of the site has pretty much been limited to passive reading and I'm reluctant to contribute anything beyond Meta posts like this.

Perhaps more importantly, the direction the company has gone, has lead me to recommend against using Stack Overflow for Teams or posting to the Developer Jobs site.⁴

So to return to the original intent of this post, I'm keeping an eye on the direction that things are going but I really would like to know why the dramatic shift happened in the first place. I'm a fan of project postmortems and I get the impression that there are some lessons to be learned here. For myself at least, that would be a good place to start rebuilding trust in the brand.

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1. To address the one comment that's been getting upvotes, that was intended as a side comment on the direction of where the network has been going. I understand why it was added, but on the same token: "Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions"
2. I know the network is vast and you can lose track of things, but some roles within the company demand a bit more.
3. It's debatable if it actually is plagiarism of course, but a manuscript would need to be revised to acknowledge it (e.g., "A similar idea was presented by...").
4. To give a bit of context, I work at a large organization with over 10,000 employees.

Answer 8

It's odd to read an apology for something that you didn't do

Welcome, Teresa.

I want to personally apologize for our actions or inactions, as the case may be, in the past that had a negative impact on our relationship.

I appreciate that sentiment, particularly if it's heartfelt, but you didn't do any of that. Over the past couple of years, some other folks did. Not random people, but decision makers at SEI (or whatever name corporate Stack operates under).

About a month ago, I joined Stack Overflow as Head of Product and Community.

I wish you nothing but the best as you travel this journey uphill, in a snow storm ... and I hope that you can get some change implemented.

Something I'll ask you to consider about the nature of SE/SO: a substantial amount of value that the SE and SO model built and cultivated was donated (for free) by a wide variety of volunteers. I think a lot of people feel both taken advantage of and taken for granted. Burns like that can leave a mark.

Good will is a hard resources to accumulate; when you do "you'll know it when you see it."

We'll know it when we see it coming from SEI. You'll see it in return.
Here's hoping.
And as they say in Missouri: Show Me!

Answer 9

Welcome, Teresa.

I appreciate your post but you should not be apologizing; you didn't do any of the things that you apologized for; you weren't even with the company.

I feel I should introduce myself, so you have some sense of my investment in the well-being of the company that pays your salary (indeed my investment here is a contribution to that salary, since without a large body of curated answers that generate views, there's simply nobody to advertise to). I have had a StackOverflow account for a little shy of 10 years. I'm a former mod of a StackExchange site, but I resigned from it late last year after more than 4.5 years as a moderator. Network wide I have answered over 4500 questions, for about a quarter of a million reputation, and overall I have an Impact of somewhere around 16 million people reached. In early January I passed 7 years straight (i.e. 2558 consecutive days in a row, literally every day) on my main site -- but since then I have become disengaged and I no longer come every day.

Please be aware that if there is any hint of ill-feeling in what follows none of it is intended to be directed at you; you had nothing to do with the issues, but I feel strongly about them and occasionally my feelings might show through, even as I try to avoid it.

To be honest I have spent some days debating whether or not to even reply to this; I feel that the company has exhausted the last shreds of my preparedness to extend it any further trust, co-operation or goodwill. I simply don't believe in it any more. I don't believe things will get better. I don't think there will be positive actions. I do think there will be plenty of words and there will be some small actions, but I doubt that any of them will be things that make a difference to me. It will require substantial action to change that.

It's not that I don't believe that you in particular want to make things better (or even that in a vague sense that the company as a whole doesn't wish things to be better). It's that I don't believe that the company will allow you to change any of the things that would make me feel like I would again want to contribute regularly, and most especially, that I could again safely act as a moderator.

We will be creating a Moderator offboarding process, including a survey and interviews with departing Moderators. Our goal is to take the time to listen to and understand why a Moderator has chosen to resign and how we can improve the site, processes and policies.

SO well and truly missed that boat. You don't need interviews to know what the problems are already, between questions and answers here and on the various site-metas there's literally hundreds of mods who were jumping up and down, saying more or less the same things over and over, many well before resigning (myself among them; I put off resigning for a very long time). There's been plenty of feedback.

You have a lot of it there right now - months of it (and to an extent, even years of it) - unaddressed issues from serious long term contributors who wanted things to be better.

You don't need to tell us that you'll act on feedback. You can show us what becomes of feedback, it's there waiting for action. Then you won't need to ask, you'll get regular constructive feedback again from people who want the company to succeed, no problem.

your presence and impact is missed.

The company had the opportunity to show me that - to fix things before I resigned, when it was clear I was thinking about it, and other mods had already done so. I expressed myself in clear terms, along with many others. I waited a good while, there was plenty of time. There were lots of opportunities to show me how much that was true.

Then there was another opportunity to fix things even after I resigned. David Fullerton publicly said they would fix them. I waited and waited. They didn't. Instead they delayed until the only action left was for people to lawyer up to prevent further damage to reputations, and that's what happened.

The company even had the opportunity to keep me as an active user after that. I stuck around answering questions. Things got much, much worse; most of the people in the company that I still had any personal trust in are now gone. Nearly every person I felt had any clue at all what this venture was about (from the standpoint of the people that actually generate the content) isn't here and most of the very few that still are here are doing things where I no longer see them, they're cut off from me.

The company quite deliberately walked away from me. Not once but several times. Apparently it was very important to do that -- to breach our trust repeatedly -- because the company chose to burn a heck of a lot of bridges to get to wherever they were trying to go. Why would a mod who felt they had no path left to begin to trust that the company had their back be keen to stick around afterward?

It doesn't seem to me like the company misses my contributions at all; my community has made their feelings very clear, but the company has ignored me. I appreciate your statement, but something very substantial would need to take place to make a difference to the clear impression that I have been given to the contrary.

We value all of your work to keep your sites clean and communities healthy.

I've heard something along those lines for a couple of years now. It's not that I don't believe you, but I no longer believe the company line on this. I can show you more or less the same sentiment many times.

Serious, subtantial action is needed.

We understand the many reasons why you felt that it was necessary to step down,

I feel like you're being sincere, but you only just got here. If that were true of the company, how could things possibly get to the point that they're in now? How could that be possible?

It's not like something suddenly happened and there was simply no chance to make it right. This wreck took months (or in some cases much longer) of doubling down on things that shouldn't have happened between bouts of promising to fix it.

If that's really going to change, show us.

and that it was a painful decision.

Again I appreciate the intent. However, I really doubt anyone who hasn't been in the position of helping build a community every day for many years could really comprehend the level of pain involved, nor how deep the breaches of trust were that precipitated it.

I've literally been using my (otherwise quite valuable) expertise here, adding value to this company for free, almost every single day, for the best part of a decade, helping to support and build a viable community of answerers, in my corner of it.

We are working on many of the issues that influenced your decisions to leave, and we aim to back these intentions up with actions, accountability, and consistent open communication. If you feel that your issues continue to go unaddressed,

To say things remain "unaddressed" at this point would be a very large understatement.

However, the company has made its position crystal clear on many of the main issues I have. They have outright stated they have no interest in fixing any of the things I am most worried about, and meanwhile they've greatly reduced the opportunities to even be heard.

I invite you to post about them on Meta in a respectful way.

I've posted about the problems I have already, here and on the site meta where I was a mod, for all the good it has done.

You have a chance to show us how effective your invitation is -- by all means go read what I (and many others) posted on this meta, and on the meta of the site I moderated. Much has been said over recent months (and indeed for a good while before on this meta by many people). Act on the issues that have been raised. If you are allowed to do it, you will earn back some of the trust that once existed.

Show us.

When something concrete happens, I'll believe there's finally something to be gained by reporting other things that still seem unaddressed.

And if you choose to apply for moderator reinstatement, we look forward to hearing about this as well and to seeing you back on your sites.

I couldn't consider coming back without substantive changes.

Good processes alone are not sufficient, for what should be obvious reasons, but I'll explain it a little.

Keep in mind, for example, that with the removal of a moderator, there were already processes in place, but they were simply ignored.

I see no reason to think that - whatever processes you put in place, no matter how perfect you make them - that when something unusual happens and a company employee just decides they want to, the proper process won't simply be ignored. Again.

And I expect that the company will again just back any such action to the hilt.

I have explained in detail, in a very lengthy post and in shorter doses since, why I don't feel I can act as a moderator any more. I explained some of the issues in September, and in October, and in posts since, and every single issue I had is either no better now or is actively worse now. I do not feel like anyone in the company was listening; they seem very much to be listening to their own PR, or paying much more attention to outsiders on twitter.

Show us how things are different.

We know the processes aren’t perfect yet and you have shared how you would like us to improve them.

Here's an important one: If a moderator is removed without proper process, it makes no sense for them to be subject to any process to get reinstated. The moment it is recognized that proper process wasn't followed, they should simply be reinstated forthwith, with no "process" whatsoever. You can't correct an error by treating it as if it was a correct action.

I agree with you that the process is flawed --- if we're considering a moderator that was correctly removed by proper procedure. It's utterly inappropriate for one that was not.

Anything less than that position is not justice for someone removed without proper process but rather a shameful travesty, a doubling down on company misconduct.

While things stand as they do, I can't trust that what happened to a moderator before wouldn't happen to me. I can't trust that I won't be removed for questioning the practicality of an aspect of a policy, or having personal difficulties with it that may need to be discussed at length (after all moderators are expected to implement policies, they'd better have some ability to question the details and the practicalities of their implementation).

I don't trust the company any more. I can't trust that procedure won't be tossed aside. I saw how easily it happened, and how the company dealt with that egregious breach of trust. I can't trust that I won't be subject to public smears, and with apparently no consequences whatever for the person who did it. I can't trust that one person's interpretation of what company policy might be won't trump decent, humane treatment of any long term contributor. I don't trust that lawyers won't be pulled in at the first sight of any difficulty, and they will certainly prevent the company from doing what is right, even if the company were remotely inclined to do something decent.

Putting processes in place is not sufficient -- we already had processes. What happens when the process isn't followed -- that's one of the places where you can start to rebuild the trust that was lost.

Go ahead and make that issue point 0 of the policy on reinstatement: "Policy 0. If we fail to properly follow the stated policies on removing a moderator, here is how we will fix our error ...".

And then actually show us better policies in action. Show me I can trust the company to do the right thing by us, by showing me how it acts after it recognizes what it did was wrong. Show me what the company does to fix a breach of trust. So far its every action has made me trust it less.

I've been waiting a long time for positive action.

You sound like you mean it, so I'm willing to suspend disbelief one final time. I really want you to succeed.

Show us what all this actually means.

Answer 10

I guess it's a start.

I'm a MSE mod, and unsurprisingly, that means that I've spent a lot more time than is probably healthy here.

I've also heard a few stories I shouldn't have, and it's worth thinking about the effects recent actions have had, both at a personal level for management level staff and as a company. While I believe assigning blame is still counterproductive, it might do well for some folks to accept and understand the very real consequences of their actions.

I'm aware that there's been a significant amount of attrition, both voluntary and involuntary, and it's often the folks most committed to the community, both in terms of employees, and community members. (And many are both, and some community members might aspire to work for a Stack Exchange they knew cared.)

There's also a handful of communities that drifted away. Many of them have chatrooms dedicated to keeping up with goings on here.

Every loss diminishes us. We probably lost a significant amount of expertise, both in terms of knowledge in the domains our sites serve and in terms of folks who know the Stack Exchange network intimately in recent times.

Trust is hard won. But many of these folks still have close enough ties to the network to care.

Winning that trust needs more than words - it needs actions. And in a community that's been told they don't matter, it might need a grand gesture.

We're battered and bruised - I know at least on MSE - the mods have been taking rotating breaks from the site because we've been hit with waves of drama.

There's been a few bright spots. Despite all of the constraints placed on them, the community team, or what's left of it, has still mostly been doing their best. They lost a lot of folks at once - and yet, despite it all, have been soldiering on.

There are lots of communities and a strong, well resourced and motivated CM team has been pretty high on the wishlist for ages.

Yaakov's been awesome (don't let it get to your head 😁). He's been a pretty good conduit both ways and gets meta. We need more folks like that.

Originally, I was going to give a few suggestions on how to make things better.

Trust is earned, not demanded. It's not bought either. So I figure that I'll trust the folks I know I can trust, and hope that they can get the right things through. So... Trust the people who've been working hard to hold the community together and listen to them. They'll have an idea of what to do if they can speak freely and without fear.

Answer 11

This all sounds super great and you sound like a great person.

The problem is that we've gotten apologies and chipper avowed plans to make things better already and they haven't gone anywhere, leading to a lot of cynicism about additional ones.

My Background

I used to be a mod. I am active on Workplace now, and they're doing a mod election, and I refuse to participate because of the repeated contempt SE has shown for the mods (and CMs, and community). I don't participate here on Meta.SE any more, I just saw this pretty much by accident as I clicked through on a night of utter boredom. I'm one of those that has been alienated by SE's actions - to be fair I felt fairly disenfranchised just over years of being a mod and not feeling very supported by SE, but this all made it 100x worse.

What You Can Do

Incremental improvement is fine, but I think the only thing that would make me think SE was at all serious and make me consider any kind of non-arm's-length interaction with SE again is an immediate public apology and offer of unconditional reinstatement to Monica. That would be the single thing you could do, which requires practically zero effort really, that would be a real and concrete act that would let me (and, I suspect, many in the community) feel comfortable with engaging with any of this (whether she accepts or not). I am pretty sure whatever legal agreement exists between you absolutely doesn't prevent going further than what it requires.

Otherwise, to be honest, it seems like a thief sitting on top of his previously stolen loot earnestly saying "well I will never steal again!" It omits the obvious responsibility of making the current things right.

It's About The People

Something to maybe be aware of. A community is made up out of people. Not "processes", not "documentation," not "active next steps," but people. What has happened is there's been a concerted attack from SE central on people that this community cares about. In general there's been negative sentiment shown against the moderators and CMs and Meta users and site users, and in particular there have been active negative actions taken against Monica and Shog9 and Robert and others. "We (probably) won't do that again" is not exactly healing. "We have processes now" isn't healing. We don't care about your process, we care about our people. You have plenty of control over how Monica, and Shog9, and Robert, and all the others are treated right now, they all still exist. You can make all kinds of promises and put together various processes but if you can't do the right thing by our people, no one will care.

Answer 12

I want to personally apologize for our actions or inactions, as the case may be, in the past that had a negative impact on our relationship. While specific recent events may have individually caused harm, years of neglect and a growing distance from our community lead to those events and it will take conscious effort to repair the damage.

I appreciate you personally apologizing, but since you only just joined about a month ago, you were not involved or responsible for most of those actions or inactions. What would be much more meaningful is if we got sincere apologies from the various people actually responsible. Note I'm not talking about the now-deleted, almost non-apology, from Sara Chipps in An Update to our Community and an Apology, or even the better, but still fairly inadequate, one from David Fullerton in An apology to our community, and next steps. Instead, a sincere apology includes things like explaining why the mistake occurred, what was learned from it, what steps are being taken to avoid having it happen again, what sort of restitution is planned & being done to those harmed, etc. Most importantly, though, appropriate actions need to be taken to help show that the person actually truly regrets the mistake(s) and is taking concrete steps to address them.

Based on the past, I don't expect this to happen. However, if it did, it would mean a lot to me, and I'm sure others here as well. Also, it would help to repair and improve the relationship between the company and the community.

Answer 13

Involving the moderators and the community more in the creation of new policies and features is certainly a good and very welcome thing. But how well this can work depends a lot on the details, and how willing SE is to actually change their minds upon that feedback. Based on some of the previous cases where SE asked for feedback from the moderators in the private Team or in TL I'm not yet convinced that SE is willing to fully commit to this.

Asking for feedback is only truly meaningful if the company is willing to make fundamental changes to the proposed policy or feature, if necessary. Many of the more recent cases where SE solicited feedback from moderator or meta didn't feel like this but more like SE presenting a mostly finished decision. The changes SE made due to the feedback were certainly welcome, but they were often rather shallow. For this feedback cycle to work well the big decisions need to be on the table, a possible result of moderator or community feedback should be a total reworking of a feature or policy or even scrapping the plan entirely. If the main result of asking the mods for private feedback is a bit of polishing of the language, that's not good enough.

I'm not asking for SE to let the community or the moderators have a veto for any decision. But SE shouldn't just present stuff to the moderators after the major decisions have been made.

One major issue with these new initiatives to improve community relations is that the company acted in ways that fundamentally contradicted them. The moderator council has been proposed a while ago, and while it's not that easy to make this work well, I thought that the idea had potential as long as SE could restore at least a bit of trust along the way. What actually happened is that SE fired Shog and Robert, and Jon left on his own. You're putting the remaining CMs in an impossible situation there, they have to convince the moderators that the company is acting in good faith for this kind of initiative to work, and the company just stabs them in the back and makes sure to destroy any remaining trust.

The community team is severely understaffed now, if SE is serious about improving community relations that must change. If you do not change this, you're just setting up the remaining CMs for failure, planning new initiatives is meaningless if there is nobody to execute them properly.

Answer 14

One small bit of parting advice... You need to ignore the people who think that getting and responding to feedback from a million junior programmers on SO is more important than feedback from hundreds of highly engaged users across the network.

Turning one “promoter” into a “passive user” or “detractor” will affect SE from a business perspective far more than making a large number of only-here-for-the-answers users happy for a little while. Anyone who thinks otherwise is focused on the wrong metrics.

I think that y’all are undervaluing the communities on the smaller non-technical sites. Those communities are something that can’t be bought, and yet they’re treated like second-class users and have to make do with whatever you develop for Stack Overflow because their feedback is buried in surveys designed specifically for the trilogy. If you’re thinking that web traffic/ads is the way to make money and the smaller public Q&A sites are some sort of side effect instead of something intrinsically valuable, y’all need to stop listening to the bean counters.

SE doesn’t have to focus just on programmers to be successful. SE’s core audience should be the life-long learners, the curious, the teachers and collaborators (in the best sense of the word) regardless of the topic. Others will benefit, but those are the people you should be focused on understanding and serving. Those people, when they band together in a healthy community, solve all the problems y’all are trying to solve with policies and micromanaging how long a post can be featured for and such. The public Q&A part of SO needs to get smaller, not larger. It needs to go from a firehose to hundreds of fountains with benches under shade trees that encourage lingering. SE’s interface is inhumane when it attempts to scale up to millions of visitors a day, and no amount of chastising your users to be nicer, rewording the close reasons, or moderator diversity training will fix that.

I suspect though that SE as a company has moved into that phase where the innovation stops because investors are getting tired of waiting for their ROI. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just sad to see something special paved over.

Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
til it’s gone?

Answer 15

Welcome to meta (and SE in general)! We've briefly had the chance to indirectly talk on comments; after a discussion with Shog9, journeyman geek and a couple of others, I thought I'd ask this question related to the plans of SO/SE.

As I am sure you are aware, a volunteer was fed to the lions/press in the recent past, by name, and to this day, this specter lingers on. I am sure that we can agree, this kind of spotlight, even if it is corrected after the fact, tends to tarnish one's name for a very, very long while.

Shog9 briefly stated a No comment policy on talking to the press; however, I personally deem this to not be clear enough of a statement, and I'm sure I am not the only one to think so. Ever since this, I have stopped helping others completely, because of the fear that, out of the blue, something like this might happen to me. Who did it is irrelevant; after all, everybody makes mistakes. The problem, and the fear I have is that it may still be easy for somebody to do it again.

You've briefly touched on the "safe" and "positive" experience for employees on meta. I would like to ask you if you could consider the "safe" and "positive" experience of the volunteers on this site in and outside of the site as well. As a result, the question I would like to ask you is twofold:

1. What safeguards were put in place to prevent this kind of feed-somebody-to-the-press event from happening again?
2. What remediation process is there in the case that it does happen again?

I am sure we can agree that this is important. After all, imagine if this happened to me and a potential employer found the article in the press. This isn't just some small thing - real people could be having real problems due to this, and because it happened once, it's at the back of people's minds and it will be for a while, until there's more than a one-liner about what can and cannot happen. Specifics would be great.

Update from SE: Teresa has posted an official answer to this question, addressing this issue.

Answer 16

I have been here for a decade, answered a few questions on SO and a few SEs. Not the highest profile user, nor the lowest. I know I am a small cog. I had a downright absurd, abrupt, weird, disconcerting Twitter chat with a SE board member which led me to say I do not know what's going on and I truly don't. I read basically one side of the happenings. And while I grumbled on Twitter I haven't joined the fray on Meta until now.

But I know one thing. I know there is one sentence that is missing and you will not be credible until that sentence isn't missing.

That is "We apologize to Monica."

You (SE Inc) did drag her name through the mud, and didn't apologize to her in public.

We are waiting.

Answer 17

May I suggest that instead of asking recent moderators to re-apply that you instead extend the olive branch and offer reinstatement?

This will show positive community action, 'own' the apology and remove the need for those people who are hurt/burnt to go through some needless SE corporate bureaucracy... No need to open old wounds through enforcing that process.

Congrats on your new job!

Answer 18

Welcome to Meta!

We are encouraging employees to be active within the community, both officially on metas and for fun in their areas of expertise or interest, and will be providing simple guidelines and a helpful FAQ for employees in the next week.

I'm really happy to see this. I know a number of us have complained of a lack of employee presence on the sites themselves, which certainly hasn't lessened the community/company disconnect. It lends a humanity to the company which, to be honest, has been missing for a while now. I hope to see employees visiting sites across the network for the fun of it - and I know they'll be quite welcome wherever they show up.

I personally commit to reading and responding within Meta at least once a week going forward

That's very much appreciated; I would have hoped that folks in the company would be doing this anyway, but seeing it said explicitly is nice. That said, I also hope you'll consider looking at various per-site metas from time to time. With 170+ sites, checking in on a given site with any regularity is obviously impossible, but then again, there's usually not much for you to see on, say, HSM. But . . . I think maybe keeping an eye on the per-site metas would provide you with interesting insights, like the meta posts made by departing or striking moderators and other discontented users.

If you feel that your issues continue to go unaddressed, I invite you to post about them on Meta in a respectful way.

This is also good to hear - but I'll echo what others have said, which is that many folks have articulated their feelings already, and I hope that the existing feedback, too, won't remain unheard.

Answer 19

My name is Teresa Dietrich. About a month ago, I joined Stack Overflow as Head of Product and Community.

Kinda funny. When I heard about you joining SE Inc. in that position, and your past history, my very first idea was "maybe it would be helpful to send you a private, short, polite message on Twitter, just to indicate that there might be point of views you don't hear about from your new peers in SE Inc management". But then I reminded myself that your past history shows that you are the kind of person who figures such things all by yourself.

I am very glad it worked out this way!

Definitely a great start, I just wish this new fresh tune from a new SE Inc. employee ... wouldn't sit in the shadow of the resource actions some weeks back.

We are encouraging employees to be active within the community, both officially on metas and for fun in their areas of expertise or interest, and will be providing simple guidelines and a helpful FAQ for employees in the next week.

That one can't be "over" emphasized. I really invite every SE Inc. employee to go try it. Interacting with "the community" isn't always easy, but when you scroll down to the final paragraph of this answer, you might find the gold standard on how to have a good, constructive time here.

To all of the moderators who have resigned or suspended your activities over the past few months: your presence and impact is missed.

Hear, hear. Of course, it has to be seen if "your" position (about the proposed processes, even improved ones) can ever lead to the step that so many people still hope for: seeing Monica Cellio to be reinstated, without further delay, fuzz, politics.

Finally: this is a really great start. But let's be honest: we have read nice great words here before. At some point, without corresponding actions, great words turn hollow and pathetic.

I very much hope that this won't happen here. Instead, I wish you success in moving your ideas forward. And as long as you do that openly and transparent, without a hidden agenda, rest assured: we will be listening, and contribute. You see, even if we dislike this or that idea, as long as you are honest about the why and what, we will listen.

Answer 20

Welcome. While this might seem to be beating a dead horse, I don’t think you will be able to regain the trust of the community without first repairing the most famous instance of betraying that trust: removing Monica’s diamond. I don’t want to appear insensitive, but I can’t imagine what damage (to an individual, to an agenda, or to the organization) that SE thinks would occur that would be so great as to outweigh regaining community trust, if that trust or the community was valued.

The only conclusion I can come to that makes any sense, is that neither the trust nor the community itself is seen as valuable.

PS: it’s good to see something that doesn’t look it was written by lawyers trying to avoid admitting that something negative might have happened, somewhere, sometime, to someone.

PPS: If the above is a failure of my imagination, then please clearly state what SE believes would happen that is so terrible if Monica’s status were restored.

Answer 21

Welcome.

I'm an ex-mod who resigned early in the "fracas". I want to reiterate that I had multiple reasons for resigning, primary among them was the loss of trust I have in Stack Exchange the company. In short, I had "always assumed" that my duties as a moderator put me in a vulnerable position with the community - dealing with the occasional volatile or disruptive user, and having to make tough calls where you cannot make everyone happy inevitably leads to high emotions, and upset users. In short, we put ourselves on the line (for no pay) to do the job as a moderator, and the expectation is there that when things are tough, that the company, its community managers, and other moderators would help, support, and defend, as necessary.

That last one, defend is critical. When shit happens, I expect that Stack Exchange will defend the moderators it puts in that vulnerable position. Obviously... within reason - but a moderator behaving reasonably should be held in the protection of the organization.

A lot of things happened when Monica was "fired", but what struck me most, is that Monica needed protection FROM Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange BECAME the threat.

Your note about reaching out to previous moderators is encouraging me to write this, since your post appears to be sincere (thanks for that, it's appreciated).

So, for me, to consider returning as a moderator I think there are 3 things that need to happen:

1. marked shift in the tone of interaction between Stack Exchange and the moderators - no idea of how this happens - SE sort of screwed things up royally and it's kind of hard to fix. I don't even think forgiveness is happening in the (ex) moderator community yet, and certainly not close to forgetting.... Trust is an elusive thing, so hard to get, and so easy to lose.... and almost impossible to restore once gone. I can't help but compare it to trying to trust a dog that bit you before.
2. time - it will take a while before the actions that Stack Exchange takes can set a new trend that can be "trusted" to be improving, to the point where re-establishing such a relationship is realistic.
3. a formal agreement, including legal protections for both the moderator, and SE in the event of disagreement, etc. The "Moderator agreement" is no longer sufficient for me to consider "reapplying" for a moderator position. It's a 1-way "contract" and does not specify limits on behaviour, procedures, obligations, or expectations in the event of issues.

So, I hope that gives you a sense of what at least one ex moderator would consider a viable path forward for Stack Exchange ... should you want me to consider returning.

Answer 22

Thank you for writing this, and welcome to Meta.

From Our Theory of Moderation, Revisited,

Someone wise once said that if you write it down, you’re less likely to forget. And um… that seems pretty clearly correct. So, to all 600+ of the people that make our sites work every single day – thanks for everything you’ve taught us, and for everything you do every day.

You've written "it" down twice now. Let's try not to forget a second time.

I am also glad to finally see a response to the open letter created back in October. You seem to have addressed most of the issues brought forward to the best of your ability... But as many other answers are mentioning: Actions speak far louder than words.

I have one other concern. It has to do with the recent release of Community Managers, as well as Jon's departure.

What are your plans for structuring the community management team? We've obviously built a strong bond with the recently released Community Managers. What are your plans for rebuilding that bond in your future community management team? Are you going to hire more CM's? Is there some other solution you have planned?

I wish you all the best in your new role as Head of Product and Community, Teresa. I hope you enjoy your visits to meta, even as I and many others look forward to your words being put into action.

Answer 23

Thanks for taking the time to provide a response, Teresa.

I'm going to be honest here. The last time we went down this road, with the CEO communicating with us, I felt like there was something at least positive.

Then, it felt like the Meta community was blindsided in a horrible way. Any standing equity I felt like I had evaporated overnight.

To say that I'm bitter about how things turned out might be is an understatement. I truly feel like I've tried and tried and tried and tried again to feel like I could engage with the company on a number of issues that have hit Meta...all to just ultimately acquiesce on the current state of things and just let the chips fall where they may.

It's gotten to the point where I truly feel that the credit and good will of Stack leadership is so far in the red, that even this statement - which, and I do want to stress that I believe it to be earnest and in good faith - can't really convince me that y'all are serious about committing to Meta.

In its current state, I can't give you the loan that you're asking for. You're asking me to trust the company, and I don't believe that I can do that without getting let down betrayed burned again. I've been beaten and battered for far too long now, and I'm just tired of all of this.

I'm over the talk.

But I suppose I'm crazy, and I'm willing to give y'all one more chance. I believe that if you guys took one deliberate and explicit action right now, I could give you the loan you're seeking. This would prove that you're really committed to us, our community and you're not just trying to establish whole profits on our labor of love.

---

The "new" homepage - the unauthenticated experience that users get when they first come to Stack Overflow - is truly jarring. It turns our site from a place about Q&A into a marketing tool. There's plenty of feedback to chew through here, so I won't rehash it.

But.

I feel like if you guys take action and pull that out of production for a little while - at least until the community and the company can reach a reasonable middle ground on what the actual goal is with unauthenticated users - then I can truly believe that you're willing to re-engage.

If that's too much, then at least find a better example of Stack Overflow "Supporting open source". Enough open-source projects like Spring leverage Stack Overflow as a common place for Q&A; surely the company can draw from better, less controversial examples.

Take one of these actions (or both), and sure, I'll back the loan of faith you're looking for in all of this.

Answer 24

Some thoughts on initiatives:

Initiatives Launched:

We have continued to publish “The Loop” monthly to share the UX research and product exploration going on within the Product, Design, Community and Engineering teams within the company. We will continue to solicit feedback through The Loop as well.

The initial run wasn't exactly well received and generated lots of questions on its purpose and intent

We have established what we believe are clear and open guidelines to deal with situations where moderators may need to have their privileges revoked or to be reinstated. We know the processes aren’t perfect yet and you have shared how you would like us to improve them. We’ll be reviewing your feedback and work to incrementally improve these processes for transparency. Our goal is a set of procedures that work to protect all users, the Community as a whole, and the company while being respectful of our moderators.

Again, the "Here's our glorious Edict" left a sour taste: Review Feedback post

We have released an updated Privacy Policy that incorporated feedback from Community Managers along with a meta post for questions and discussion that accompanied the update.

This one feels more business and legalese. Ironically, the post privacy-policy-updates-feb-2020 which has a couple of discussion points has only 1 form of communication which effectively kicks the can down the road to "the near future". If you're just going to tell us and ignore questions for clarification then post it as a blog.

Initiatives in Progress:

We have defined a standard process for new policy or process review that includes Community Managers, employees who are long-time community members, and Moderators before being shared and put into place. Our plan is to provide new policies to the planned Moderator Council for feedback periods before they are made official. We will then share it with all Moderators through the Stack Moderators Team for advance notification. We value the deep understanding that moderators on the network have of their communities and users, and welcome honest, respectful feedback from the greater Stack Exchange Community.

I want to stress that "before being shared and put into place" feels like one of the problems we've been talking about. It's fine if moderators are involved in a sort of alpha stage approach, but not opening up to meta/community for additional feedback before you "share AND put into place" is one of those pain points, we can't feel heard if you just keep making announcements.

We are encouraging employees to be active within the community, both officially on metas and for fun in their areas of expertise or interest, and will be providing simple guidelines and a helpful FAQ for employees in the next week.

Good

We are defining our commitment to responding to Meta posts & Moderators questions through our new standard process and will be sharing that with a group of Moderators for feedback. We will share it with you all within the next two weeks.

I find it a bit off that "responding to the community and mods" requires a standards process

We have drafted our followup and clarification on the Content Licensing issue and will be publishing that within the next two weeks.

Good, I know this is a sore spot

We will be creating a Moderator offboarding process, including a survey and interviews with departing Moderators. Our goal is to take the time to listen to and understand why a Moderator has chosen to resign and how we can improve the site, processes and policies. We will send this survey to the recently-resigned moderators so that their suggestions can be considered.

I'm not sure why you need to send them a survey, almost all of them left feedback in a "why I'm resigning" post. Listening more would have prevented the need for all that offboarding in the first place.

Answer 25

I'm a user who tends to find things that already exist here. I'm not active on meta, and I hardly ever ask questions and answers. There are many users (many of them who are active on meta) who can provide answers much better than I can.

That said, I've been watching and waiting since November or so, to see how SE handles what has been occurring. I haven't been vocal, I haven't made my opinion known until now. I suspect my opinion may reflect other users who haven't spoken up, so I'm going to tell you.

For the past few months, I've been ashamed of SE. I have some SO/SE related stuff (t-shirts, water bottle, etc.) that I've been actively not using in public because of how this has gone, and I can't support a company who would treat its volunteers, and employees the way it has. It's wrong, it needs to change, and wrongs committed by SE need to be properly righted.

Teresa, I truly wish you the best of luck fixing things that are broken, but that requires SE to stop trying to sweep problems under the rug. Stop pretending that your core community (of which I'm definitely NOT a part of), here on meta doesn't matter. They matter more than most other users who use this site in my opinion. To be fair to you, this very post looks like a step in the right direction. Whether there will be real action behind these words remains to be seen.

As things stand, unless you do something drastic, I'm awaiting an alternative, non-corporate site to be developed. I suspect there are others who haven't been speaking up who feel the same way. I'm tired of reading from certain SE employees about how it's just a small vocal minority who disagrees with SE. That attitude will ruin the company, and employees who publicly express those opinions need to be kept in check. It almost seems like it's the opposite problem: there's a small vocal minority of SE employees who disagree/dislike the community.

This was harsh, and I'm sorry for that, but I assure you that I only spoke up now because I feel you may actually be sincere, and I felt that I needed to emphasize how dire this situation is. If it was some other unnamed individuals posting this, I wouldn't have bothered to respond.

This post is definitely critical of SE, but it is also an appeal to SE to fix things, so I hope it's taken in that spirit.

Answer 26

Thank you.

We will also provide as much context as we can for policy, decisions, and actions that we take within legal and regulatory constraints - we want you to understand why we’re making changes, not just that we’re making them.

In the spirit of this desire, I have a question.

Increase Community Engagement -

• Though our active user base continues to grow, our engagement has remained the same. What this means is that while more users are coming to the site every month, the number of users who engage meaningfully in the site does not increase proportionally.
• To change this dynamic, we will balance investing in improving our tools and features that benefit our long-term users with initiatives that convert new users into engaged ones.

When I read this, it appears to me that there's a fundamental misunderstanding underlying the desire to increase engagement. So why is this a goal?

The ideal use case for Stack Overflow is that I have a problem, I search for relevant questions, and I quickly arrive at an existing answer that provides the missing information I needed. When I'm trying to solve a problem on the clock, I don't want to spend an hour writing a good question. I don't want to spend three hours hunting down the information and posting an answer about it. I want the information to already be there in an easy to digest format.

While we addicts... I mean, more active participants take pleasure in adding to the knowledge base, most people aren't willing to spend a lot of time on doing that. (Hence the quality problems we observe on a daily basis.) They're here to get an answer, not create answers for other people to consume. They'll be much happier if they can get their answer and be on their merry way with as little effort as possible, and reading an answer is a whole lot less effort than writing an entire question, waiting for someone to answer, and then evaluating whether that answer is correct and applicable. If SO is succeeding at its core mission, then we should expect to see this sort of engagement to decrease rather than increase.

So why do you want to increase their engagement?

Answer 27

Thanks so much for posting this. I appreciate the sentiment that you say that you are listening. For most of us, this is something we have yet to see from SE, but I'm hopeful to hear you saying this at the very least. Let's keep this conversation going.

I want to personally apologize for our actions or inactions, as the case may be, in the past that had a negative impact on our relationship. While specific recent events may have individually caused harm, years of neglect and a growing distance from our community lead to those events and it will take conscious effort to repair the damage.

Thank you for apologizing. For the past few months, it felt like SE believed they had done nothing wrong or that they were not accountable to the community. This statement is the beginning of an apology -- for the first time in a while, it almost sounds like SE is acknowledging that they have made mistakes recently. I respect and appreciate that.

However, we need a more specific apology to understand what this site will look like going forward. What specific actions or inactions are you apologizing for? The treatment of Monica, the unexplained removal of community managers, and the boilerplate responses thus far, etc., have each wounded the community. The community sees each of these instances as mistakes by SE that demonstrated directly that Stack Exchange was not interested in listening to us. Each issue requires specific and clear language for us to know if we can trust SE to not repeat these actions again. For instance, in the removal and subsequent treatment of Monica, SE did not follow their stated process, modified the process without explanation or clarification, and directly harmed her through other actions. How can we be sure that SE will not behave like that again?

If SE does not see these instances as mistakes and will not apologize for them -- if SE will handle these kinds of situations in the same (or similar) ways if they were to happen again -- it's better for everyone if you could just tell us that now. The community needs to know this before we can move on. If we don't get more specific language regarding these lingering issues, the issues will remain in the back of everyone's mind, continuing to erode away our trust.

Answer 28

Others have voiced my sentiments regarding "actions speak louder than words" so I wanted to address another angle.

I firmly believe that the first step to reconciliation is transparency. Being honest regarding why things transpired the way they did and what steps you've taken to ensure they don't happen again will give the community a better idea of what they are dealing with.

The past six months have revealed through the cracks and leaks that the company - or, rather, certain folks within it - was actively stifling their CM team and preventing them from doing their jobs.

From the firing of mods to the firing of CMs - who by the way, painted a rather grim picture of recent life in their roles at SE.

So, my questions are as such:

• Can we get some transparency into the claims that the CMs had their hands tied?
• Can we get some transparency into why the company was being so dismissive of the community?

No canned responses saying "we're sorry, we're trying to do better" or "meta isn't scaling" or whatever the new spiel is, we just want the truth. I just don't think we can just shrug the events of the past 6 months off without any real answers.

Finally, some food for thought, if you want to the company and community relationship to improve then address the concerns of the community - a good starting point would be the overflowing feature-request tag - and treat them as the avid contributors they are.

Answer 29

Had this been said in 2019, it would have been at least plausible. February 2020, after all that? I do not believe a single letter of this: the talk is nice, but I just can't hear it over the noise of the actions.

In other words, I would REALLY like to believe this. But you know, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Such about-turn is ridiculously improbable.

Piskvor over and out.

Answer 30

Those are good words; but I'll be happy for you to show me the money as it were. StackExchange needs to follow through.

I gather that management is realizing now that you can't just chase business priorities and leave your volunteer force behind. I expect management to do the absolute least possible to change their ways, while still hoping to win back our faith. That's my expectation; feel free to exceed it.

I would say SE needs to renegotiate with Monica so SE can say it was wrong without worrying about getting sued for that. And then do just that. This is social media. You don't get to play the media game like Standard Oil or US Steel. Whatever that "Moderator reinstatement policy" silliness was, it needs to be round-filed; any policy invented in the heat of controversy is done for all the wrong reasons. Moderator reinstatement should actually be an one-sided edict to the effect that Mod X's firing was reviewed and exonerated. I wouldn't even bother having an administrative reinstatement process; just declare that Mod X is welcome to run and win the next mod election.

It's not such a simple thing with employees; I don't know what to tell you about Robert and Shog9. I think the only answer there is for personnel rearrangement (i.e. other firings) to prove SE sincerely wants to return to the original, successful/profitable values. Then you could try to re-recruit those employees.

Honestly I always thought the paradigm shift driving all this pronoun/Monica/Shog9/Robert thing was the company being groomed for acquisition, and highly paid consultants telling SE that they had to change stuff to get top dollar from an acquirer like Ziff-Davis or Oath. Sillier things have happened...