Your input: (Non-engineering) priorities for the community team

Question

As you probably know, we're in the midst of planning for 2022, org-wide. One of the challenges that we've long had on the Community Team is that while it's (relatively) easy to get wish lists for technical tools from community members.... we are not engineers. Every quarter in the mod survey, we ask mods what non-technical help they need from us, but I'd like to widen the net a little here (in keeping with the spirit of my earlier questions, when I joined).

What NON-TECHNICAL initiatives would you like to see the Community Team focus on at some point in the near future? (I'm making no promises, of course, but this is useful data for us). This could be a process or a policy that you think is broken, or needs to be re-aligned; it could be something we could do to help out your site - the world is your oyster here (unless, of course, oysters make you sick.... like they do me. In that case, the world is your, I dunno, chocolate bar.)

We're technically closed this week, but I am constitutionally incapable of staying offline this long (sssssssh, please, nobody tell my team - Rosie keeps telling me that I need to be better at modeling time away for my team - and particularly don't tell my boss) so I will be checking in on this question to see where the discussion leads us.

Answer 1

I bet you do this already, but it might benefit from more focus:

Stack Exchange is more than just Stack Overflow

Sure, it's bigger (according to some (all?) metrics) than the rest of the network combined, and it does pay for hosting/supporting the other communities. But when something is changed clearly with just Stack Overflow in mind, it frustrates many users big time. (Not necessarily me, I'm in the software development business myself and pretend that I know how/why things change. I'm just slightly annoyed at times).

The members of the Community Team are certainly aware of this (when I look at the flairs here, most of them aren't even active on Stack Overflow), but it would be nice if that mindset is transferred (more) to the rest of the company.

A good example to follow is the way Unpinning the accepted answer from the top of the list of answers was handled. Two years ago, it might've been rolled out to the entire network immediately after the pilot. After all, it works on Stack Overflow, so it should be good for the entire network, right? You chose to ask feedback from the communities, perhaps expecting only a handful of them to opt out (the usual suspects like Puzzling and Code Golf). In the end, opt-in turned out to be a better option. Kudos for how that was handled!

Answer 2

What NON-TECHNICAL initiatives

Personally I would like to see some CM team/mod make a call to organize the guidance on suggested edit criteria. Over the years there's been a wide range of meta posts written about copy-editing and there's hundreds (no, thousands) of such posts that state conflicting criteria. E.g. "Don't remove salutations" vs "Remove salutations" vs "Don't remove salutations if the post is old" vs "don't edit old posts at all", etc...

I think this kind of conflicting info makes suggested edit criteria very confusing and frustrating, especially for new users who are trying to integrate into the community going the editing route.

I have thousands of edits (upward of 5000) but still when I try to integrate into other sites there are reviewers who will reject all edits for whatever reason. When they're asked about it they say stuff that's broadly like:"It's not worth editing".

Answer 3

Somewhat related to Glorfindel's remark that many SE sites need a slightly different treatment from the SO model...

Consider adapting curation/moderation privilege reputation thresholds to the median number of rep received on the specific site in the past few years.

Why would this be useful? Yes, privileges vary between sites that are "full-grown" versus beta, but even sites out of beta have fluctuating rep levels. The ease of gaining rep differs more over time and sites than you think.

Exhibit A: CS.SE

Now that we have the yearly review, here's the table of most mod activity in the last year, and some comments from me

Total Rep*	Users
100,000+	2
50,000+	4
25,000+	9
10,000+	34
5,000+	58
3,000+	103
2,000+	145
1,000+	314
500+	763
200+	3,061
1+	119,841

Note that as of writing, 103 users have at least 3k rep, the threshold for close voting. This is on a site with >4k users of 200+ rep, ~120k users total, and with 11 questions per day. So, 0.085% of users can close-vote, with those users on average having to vote 53.40 times per day to close all incoming questions. Of course, users with a privilege are not very helpful if they are inactive. Of the 103 users eligible to cast a close-vote, 5 have used the close vote queue in the last 30 days, and had 70 questions closed. Many of those are closed by a moderator, I must add, because getting 5 close voters is hard. (Yes, I know there is an experiment to reduce it to 3. I have asked about it multiple times over the last few years, but I have never had anyone give me a timeline of when it may be possible to change on our sites. However, I think having more close voters is better than decreasing the number of voters required. Maybe we should do both.)

Of the users capable to close vote that often do so outside the queue, I can recall about ~20, roughly. So, about quarter of those with the privilege actually uses them.

One may remark that having a poor voting culture with a median 2 votes per answer (or at least, that's how it looks for me. It took me ~2 years to go 0 to 2k reputation) is our own fault, and that we should fix that. (this means about 120 answers before one gets the privilege of close-voting. Not many users are that active, and most do not answer that much within a year or so. More likely would be 2-3 years. I recall that when I became a moderator, I was slightly worried about removing a non-mod vote from the tiny pool of close-voters)

Well, I try to remind people of it, but it doesn't seem to work. Maybe our users genuinely have high standards, and CS is genuinely such a broad field that many users do not feel capable of judging answers outside undergrad questions and their own sub field (and the useful new undergrad questions have mostly been exhausted at this point... Unlike programming, CS undergrad is rather homogeneous and stable. Much more stable than the fields of research in CS)

Exhibit B: Quantum Computing.SE

Total Rep*	Users
25,000+	1
10,000+	10
5,000+	12
3,000+	31
2,000+	44
1,000+	86
500+	186
200+	495
1+	15,008

Note that this site still has beta privilege levels, with closing at a mere 500. So what do we have here? Over 800 users may close-vote, out of a total of ~16k users, with 5 questions per day. So, 5% of the users can close-vote, with an average number of 3.13 votes per person per day required to close all incoming questions. As for the voting behaviour, the median number of votes on my questions is 11, with 4 on my answers. I was able to go from 0 to 2k in about 3 months. Note that a big difference here is that I came to this site at the start, when people still appreciate naive non-expert questions, as they haven't been asked on the site yet. I wouldn't be able to do the same thing today, I think. Additionally, this site is in a very novel field and attracts simple questions from all sort of discipline. The low-hanging fruit has not been exhausted yet.

Exhibit C: OR.SE

Total Rep*	Users
10,000+	4
5,000+	10
3,000+	17
2,000+	41
1,000+	87
500+	139
200+	319
1+	5,719

Again, a beta site with close vote privileges at 500 rep. 298 users meet this reputation threshold, out of ~6.3K users, with a total of 1.7 questions per day. So, 4.73% users can close-vote, and those users have to cast an average of 2.85 votes per day to close all incoming questions. 6 median votes on my questions, and from 0 to 1k rep in about 2 months. Again, I joined this site early, and it is still young. However, I'm impressed with the quality on this site, and experience within the community. It has helped that they where mostly from an older now-defunct OR Q&A community, and managed to get a site on SE due to a Twitter campaign by one of the current moderators.

Summary

Site	Close-voting reputation threshold	Number of eligible close-voters	Daily questions	Percentage of illegible close-voters	Daily average effort per person to close all questions	Estimated real daily average effort per person*
Computer Science	3000	103	11	0.085%	53.4	10.7 - 32.0
Quantum Computing	500	800	5	5.00%	3.13	0.63 - 1.88
Operations Research	500	298	1.7	4.73%	2.85	0.58 - 1.71

*Estimated real effort assume between 20% and 60% of all daily questions should be closed (at least temporarily). This list is incomplete, you may expand it.

So, what can we learn? Well, first note that the 3 sites here have a similar topic, and that I've been active on all of them for some time. We can also see that while Quantum computing and OR are similar in size and statistics, and that CS.SE is vastly understaffed on the close voting front. (even by my most optimistic estimates, the effort required on CS.SE is about 10 times that of OR.SE) In practice, we deal with this by ignoring the close vote queue, or cleaning it up with moderator privileges. This is not ideal, as a community should do the close voting themselves, and the community has more trouble reopening questions that it did not close by itself.

What should be done, then. Well, as I asked, please consider whether the reputation thresholds on CS.SE ought to be changed in this situation. Try to do the same thing for every site where the statistics look bad. Feel free to edit this post to add the perspective of more sites, especially those where you think close-voting is less than ideal.

Answer 4

While to an extent the community team is the earpiece of the company to the community a key task broadly would be still to rebuild the links between the community and the organisation that were broken.

(As an aside - I hope/suspect a good many of these things are already on the pipeline - so with that awkwardness out of the way, on with the post.)

Most practically?

In the past year, or maybe two, the community team went from the functional equivalent of being
"in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.", or perhaps in the equivalent of a Dank Basement or Little Room under the Stairs. Now there's an actual team I guess there's two things worth considering. We've a bunch of folks 'generally' familiar with community management in a professional, non SE sense. We also have a small core of CMs hired from the community, and at least one person who's both familiar with SE (as a moderator) and community management elsewhere.

On that vein - and aside from best practices from 'outside' the network - it feels like a crucial thing is to get to know, and well, be embedded with the broader communities. While I realise resources are limited - It's something that's been neglected over the past few years, and with the loss of a lot of institutional knowledge, kind of essential for understanding the culture, issues and 'rules' of communities first hand.

Fundamentally - as much as training folks to be Community Managers, its useful for folks outside special events, to train themselves to be community and pick up skills, contacts and the presence needed for effective communications across the network

Slightly less practically?

Historically a lot of early regulars drifted away. Some of it was natural attrition. Some of it was interpersonal conflict. I'd say one of the more difficult things that needs to be done is balancing giving sites the attention they need with respecting their autonomy. It's not always gone perfectly, but I'd love to see folks from say Server Fault (which was my second site) return. It's probably a 'hard' if not impossible thing, but in addition to growth (new users), retention of current users, it would be nice to investigate (gently!) getting legacy users back.

I'd also say a slow and steady continuation of building up and maintaining a CM team. We're early days yet - and I don't know what sort of staffing levels y'all can get away with, but I'd love to see the team at worst stay at current levels, and at best keep growing slowly.

"I want a pony?"

A little selfish, but a little more geographic diversity in CM hires. Quite a few users and folks in the community are on the other side of the world ;)