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Why are important (or what is criteria?) announcements made in the blog and not on corresponding meta sites?

I don't like the blog format. I do like Q&A where important problems are risen as upvoted answers.

It's not using Stack Exchange authentication, I can't trust comments there, nor someone else would to me.

Talking specifically about this blog entry, those share buttons on top and detailed author description on the bottom... It feels like a "sweet PR lie" to me (compared to a meta post, which I immediately trust), while the problem is well defined and a blog article contains links to actual Stack Exchange meta posts.

Why not posting all announcements on meta? Why posting them in the blog?

Is it only because there is https://stackoverflow.blog/ and it will be completely empty without announcements? I fail to see there useful articles, am I blind?

Another point: if it would be on meta, then I could give a useful comment. No way I am going to comment anything on that blog page, even if it would be possible normally (but it's not).

P.S.: this post is not about how bad blog is (but I may fall into the hate a bit). It's about announcements posted there and not here.

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  • Yeah, they could really reinvent the blog format (like implementing suggested edits and using the same commenting system) and become a provider.
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Jun 22, 2018 at 14:48
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    A blog is especially not an appropriate place for announcing policy. It used to be the case that the Terms of Service would tell you to read the blog for details! I don't think that's currently the case, but the blog is still used too much.
    – curiousdannii
    Jun 22, 2018 at 15:12
  • sometimes... feedback just isn't useful.
    – Kevin B
    Jun 22, 2018 at 15:16
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    I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "sweet PR lie"... can you be a bit more specific regarding what you find problematic there?
    – Catija StaffMod
    Jun 22, 2018 at 15:37
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    Personally, I have the opposite opinion, but I do like this question because it outlines that there doesn't seem to be clear rules about what goes where.
    – ryanwebjackson
    Jun 22, 2018 at 15:47

1 Answer 1

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We're going to be moving our communication strategy planning primarily back to meta. There was a very poorly-timed and ill-conceived mention of changing our communication strategy made some time ago, but the generics of it still pertain to active ideas.

The problem is that meta, as-is, doesn't work as a single all-encompassing archetype because what you 'should' or 'shouldn't' do varies more on what tags are applied than anything the user interface actually hints or enforces. Meta is also not keeping up well at our current scale being used as a bug tracker.

So, of all the sort of fundamental changes we know we need to make to Meta so it serves all of its designated purposes more consistently well for our and your use cases, a blog channel is pretty high on the list, and actually the easiest to implement.

In the interim, we'll probably try experimenting with a special blog or announcement tag to alter certain behaviors; like preventing closure of 'blog posts' because that would effectively stop others from being able to add to the discussion under them.

Once that's in place, you'll see a lot more informal but frequent posts from people working on our product and community teams, because we often really need input on stuff. As it stands now, it can take up to two weeks just to get a post scheduled to go out on the blog, since we have so many teams using it. We need to bring back our ability to just kick off a discussion 'off the hip'.

I'm putting a on this, but it's probably more in the distant (as in end of 2018) future.

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    When the previous announcement tag was rolled out, it seemed to me that a lot of the negative response to it was colored by people conflating the specific thing being announced at the time with the announcement tag mechanism itself (and, to some degree, that the meta proposal didn't communicate as well as it could have). I continue to believe those things; support the idea of a better announcement mechanism; and am glad to hear that you're still working on improving and restoring the feature.
    – SOLO
    Jun 22, 2018 at 17:38
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    Might I suggest preventing such questions from being removed from the active page for being heavily downvoted? One thing that I find quite troublesome is the difficulty of finding unpopular ones... but these posts are important and shouldn't be hidden merely because they've dropped below a cumulative score of -7. If you only look at the site from the "Active" or "Home" page, you may never see these posts, be aware of new answers, or edits to them.
    – Catija StaffMod
    Jun 22, 2018 at 18:51

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