2024 Community-a-thon Recap

Question

This past October, we hosted our fifth annual Community-a-thon, a special time when our team dives deep into the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange communities to experience (again) what it’s like to be a user on the platform.

This year, our main goals stayed true to the spirit of previous events:

• Build empathy among our staff by seeing the platform from a user’s perspective
• Encourage ongoing participation on the network beyond the event
• Collect feedback and insights to improve the user experience on our platforms

Some feedback we heard from staff participating:

• Downvoting and Feedback

  Staff noticed how discouraging negative scores can be, especially when questions are downvoted, particularly when it is your first time asking a question.

• Commenting Restrictions for New Users

  Staff noticed it is frustrating for new users to need reputation to comment where it would be helpful for them to have that privilege to ask for clarification or point out that links in the question are broken, for example. Comments are often crucial for understanding and improving contributions and needing 50 rep to unlock that feature felt like a barrier to entry.

• Site Navigation

  Some staff struggled with finding where to take specific actions or finding information on their profile and dashboard pages. Logging out of the network for example is in the sidebar and can feel a little hidden. Some staff assumed they’d be able to take that action within their profile page. They suggested including a more streamlined guide and improvements to help users manage login options better.

• Easier Access to Help Resources

  Some staff members struggled to find the help guides they were looking for particularly when using the search feature within the Help Center. Suggestions included improving discoverability and navigation of help resources to make them easier to find. Participants also wished they had more help content around how to participate successfully. This includes providing examples of previously posted content to illustrate what a successful question and answer looks like.

These observations probably won’t come as a surprise to you. These are all potential areas of improvement community members have flagged over the years. Many of these points have also been mentioned by our team in previous Community-a-thons.

Next Steps

In addition to the feedback we collect from the Stack Exchange communities, the feedback gathered from Community-a-thon will be helpful as we plan improvements and consider future changes to the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange experience. The feedback shared has been passed on to the product and engineering departments.

One of the goals around Community-a-thon has always been increasing participation from staff within the communities. During the event and at its conclusion, we internally share some of the interesting content that staff contribute across the sites. We’d like that to be a regular thing we do throughout the year to highlight and encourage continued engagement, so we’re working on more areas to shout that out internally. We’re also looking into taking some of the elements of Community-a-thon and baking that into new employee onboarding so all Stackers, regardless of what division they are working in, learn about the Stack Exchange Network and begin building understanding and appreciation for SE communities from the get-go.

We’re grateful for the team’s dedication and commitment to feedback about their time spent in the community. This experience not only reinforces our commitment to continuous improvement but also fuels our passion for making the platform as welcoming and valuable as possible.

Answer 1

^{Please note that this is directed at Stack Overflow, not Charlotte nor the staff members who have participated in this event.}

I don't know if I sound like a broken record or you do :) Either way, let's look at some of your findings.

Staff noticed how discouraging negative scores can be ...

Have you read my answer (and others) under the last years' recaps?

Downvoting could be an issue, but the solution is not blaming it on the voters (I'll explain why this feels like the blame is assigned unjustly). Company needs to take actions to help users familiarize themselves with the rules. It is concerning that even when it comes to staff, they go (or instructed to go) straight for posting a question or an answer.

If this was the first time that downvoting was getting discussed, I wouldn't be as frustrated. But as I said before, you have had Downvotes Research and numerous posts addressing it, e. g. Why do we need Downvotes Research?. What have you done for better on-boarding experience? I am aware of Staging Ground which is SO-specific, but what about other sites? Even then, Staging Ground is designed to help people with asking their questions (with the help of other users), not actually encouraging them to read the help page, or meta sites. Alas, something as simple as adding a link to per-site-meta on the left side bar has not been implemented.

Comments are often crucial for understanding and improving contributions and needing 50 rep to unlock that feature felt like a barrier to entry.

I have had shared this frustration early on. But that doesn't mean I am for lifting up that restriction. See this FAQ.

Some staff struggled with finding where to take specific actions or ...

Agreed!

Some staff members struggled to find the help guides they were looking for particularly when using the search feature within the Help Center

...

These observations probably won’t come as a surprise to you. These are all potential areas of improvement community members have flagged over the years...

You are correct. I am not surprised. I appreciate you acknowledging that. Please do something about it.

... During the event and at its conclusion, we internally share some of the interesting content that staff contribute across the sites. We’d like that to be a regular thing we do throughout the year to highlight and encourage continued engagement, so we’re working on more areas to shout that out internally...

Can you share some stats on continued contribution by staff members after the previous Community-a-thon events?

Answer 2

I see from this post that some employees only got to experience the site navigation because of this initiative, and that struck as very odd - at least if we are talking about the same people that are supposed to take informed decisions on the network operations like for example recently on the opportunity to start another ads experiment campaign.

I don't expect all the people working at Ferrari to have actually own or have driven a Ferrari in their life but most probably know that Ferrari are (usually) red and in the same way I assume that while not everyone at Coke actually drinks Coke everyone still knows it is a black fizzy drink.
For the same reasons, I used to think that employees would be required to have a basic knowledge about the site - or at least those whose work directly relate to the site would.

I therefore think I must have a misunderstanding here. Could you please explain exactly which employees roles took part in the initiative? Was this an attempt to make the site known to people working at the HR office, taxes and other places that don't really relate to the site operations and usually don't take part in the site decision making or was this really about the people taking those decisions as I assumed previously?

Answer 3

Site Navigation [...] Logging out of the network for example is in the sidebar and can feel a little hidden

Yeah... I haven't thought about this much myself, but I'm also not surprised to see it, considering that has been echoed on Meta AU a few times ^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12}. I'm not sure how to make it better (on mobile, there's already a shortage of top-bar space), but something like a tooltip when you first sign up like "click on this then that to log out" might help.

Answer 4

I'm a little curious about

Commenting Restrictions for New Users

You're always going to be able to comment on your own posts. What kind of scenarios would a new user run across where a new user with little contributions finds being unable to comment a major blocker?

Easier Access to Help Resources

When I was a new user, help was a single page. The company split up help (ironically) to make it more accessible to new users. I do wonder if a happy medium could be reached, between a single page of essentials, and deeper, specific help for when its needed.

Answer 5

I'm glad to have seen
the tradition be maintained!
So what was the swag?

Answer 6

I've written my related thoughts on comment restrictions here. The feedback on help resources is all great. On one hand, there's already lots of good content on how to contribute well (whether you contribute well and whether you feel success from the results over time are two different matters and the contributor has more control over the first than the second). On the other, maybe some whole-post examples would be a good thing. I'm sure the community would love to help with gathering or creating examples (and that there will be a lot of fun bikeshedding).

I'm really happy to hear that site participation may become part of your staff onboarding, and that you're considering building culture to celebrate staff participation across the network. My thanks to everyone who participated.

Answer 7

The Community-A-Thon is great. It's great that some staff actually see it from the user perspective...but it should be better.

You say that one of your goals is to "Encourage ongoing participation on the network beyond the event", but outside of this event, staff very rarely use the site (yes, I'm aware some use alt accounts, so this is based off observing the ones that don't).

Why shouldn't employees use Stack Exchange sites year-round, not because the company is encouraging them to, but because they actually have a question, or see a question they know the answer to?

One of your devs encounters an error and your dev team is having trouble fixing it? Try to find an answer on Stack Overflow and if you don't, then ask your question there. (I am obviously aware that you might have parts of your code probably shouldn't be posted for anyone to see on the internet, but there is also probably plenty of your code which could be. I'm also obviously not suggesting posting on SO or anywhere else if the question doesn't follow site rules.) If it's not a good fit for SO, maybe use one of the many other tech sites.

Have a question about anylyzing or collecting data or designing an experiment or study for SE? Use Cross Validated! Using AI to but your prompt isn't working? Try GenAI! Trying to build and maintain your community and have a question? I, for one, would absolutely love if employees (sometimes) asked questions they had about managing this community on Community Building (with an alt account though).

And employees can use Stack Exchange in their personal life too. Have a question about Parenting? Use the Parenting site. Question about your pet? Go to the Pets site. Want to create or solve some puzzles? There's a stack for that too, Puzzling. Travelling or planning to travel and have a question? Try Travel SE.

On one of those site, see a question you think you can answer? Go for it! See a post that needs an edit? Edit it (or suggest an edit). See a post that needs flagging? Flag it. Participate in the site for the same reasons the users do, because they actually have a question/know an answer/want to help, etc. This participation should be because you find some sites to be helpful to you and you find yourself able to helpful to those sites, not become the company you work for told/encouraged you to do so.

To be clear, like everyone else, staff should obviously make sure their posts are high-quality and on-topic for the site they are posting on and follow that sites rules. Also, like everyone else, there are obviously some situations where a question you have shouldn't be posted on the internet, and I'm not arguing that they post those questions anyways, but that tends to be a rare case, not the norm.

Answer 8

Staff noticed how discouraging negative scores can be, especially when questions are downvoted, particularly when it is your first time asking a question

Well, sure. That is the main weapon used by "anti Stackers" i.e. people who dislike Stack Exchange, especially Stack Overflow. So I want to share my opinion about this, in the light of this discussion.

First of all, I can't deny this is correct: it's never pleasant to receive negative feedback. Be it IRL, or in the virtual world.

However, the point I'm always trying to explain when seeing this, is that such negative feedback is not meant to insult or discourage, but rather serving two main purposes:

1. Educate the user.
2. Improve overall site quality.

From what I read in this recap, those points might have been missed by the participants, and it's fair. However, if you (the company/CM team) also agree with the above points, it would benefit everyone to try and find ways to explain it better.

Currently, there's only a tooltip "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful" when hovering the downvote button, which is likely the first place one who wants to realize what they made wrong (when getting a downvote) would check. Perhaps also link somewhere with more information, etc.

Answer 9

Staff noticed how discouraging negative scores can be, especially when questions are downvoted, particularly when it is your first time asking a question.

The Community-a-thon is relatively short: I encourage the staff to use SE for over one year to appreciate the devastation that Roomba causes on questions that are downvoted or simply just not upvoted. I find it to be much more discouraging for question authors: why spend time perfecting the writing of a question that may anyway get removed regardless of its quality?