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It's not a secret that SE is running with multiple issues, the unfortunate loss of moderators like Aza which get escalated into the directions which nobody wanted, and the SOpocalypse. Now after a day of absence, I see a mail of getting to 100k rep on movies.stackexchange.com which I was not expecting this soon.

Now I remember childhood incidents where I will get injured and mom will give me a cookie to calm me down. Of course, a cookie can't fix the injury and is only there to distract me from the pain.

So what is this? A cookie so we forget about Monica, Aza, and the unsafe environment created for the lavender community, or it's just bad timing?

Also, it was part of the issue where community opinion was ignored, so why also have no community involvement for this big step?

I am not a part of the moderator team so am not sure if moderators' involvement was there or not, but community involvement should have been there.

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    If an official answer is posted, do you honestly believe it would say "this is a treat for you to forget past events"? The timing is horrible, and my guess is that they were working on it before the current situation, but if that's​not the case - can't admit to it publicly, can they?
    – Jenayah
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 6:46
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    Because of course it's impossible for any company to have existing projects in the pipe for months, and nobody can ever be focused on a backend task while customer service is doing their completely separate job, right?
    – Nij
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 6:47
  • @Jenayah but what about the community involvement part? That was my major point to beign with, fixed title to replicate it
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 6:47
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    The community, or rather the moderators, were consulted.
    – Raedwald
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 6:50
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    There is evidence that the original decrease in reputation for upvotes to questions did not increase question quality.
    – Raedwald
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 7:09
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    Related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/338156/…... Especially animuson's comments on that question. The simple answer is that these things were being worked on before all other things started.
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 9:33
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    @Raedwald "There is evidence that the original decrease in reputation for upvotes to questions did not increase question quality. " But does it mean that the opposite is also wrong or will an increase in reputation of upvotes decrease question quality? Maybe it could have been much worse. That's the problem with such evidences. As an experiment it's good, because now we will gather even more data, as a way to optimize the working of SO, it might be actually bad.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 10:13
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    @Raedwald some moderators were consulted regarding the message to be put out to the community, not regarding the change itself. The evidence that the decrease in reputation didn't increase question quality is very weak and wouldn't survive scientific peer review processes.
    – Alex
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 13:23
  • @Nij -- of course there can be different divisions of a company doing different things. The idea that there is no big picture person looking over both divisions, and thinking "With the goings on in division A, perhaps rolling out what division B has been working on this week isn't the best of ideas" is problematic though, and perhaps a great microcosm for some of the macro issues we've been feeling for the last few months.
    – Scott Seidman
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 13:34

2 Answers 2

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No, I don't think this is an attempt to sweeten the blow or make us forget about Monica.

I'm pretty sure this is a change they planned for long time, before this recent crisis began.

As most recent events, this is yet another poor timing, that's all.

And as with all recent major changes, this one rolled out without getting any feedback from the community, and announced only after it was a done deal, and that's my own personal issue with it, which is better be discussed on a separate discussion.

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As mentioned by Robert last week, the interest by SE Inc. already existed. And as I explained in my answer there: it must have taken a lot of effort to rec-compute all those numbers. This is for sure not something that you do within a few days.

Regarding "bad timing", what I find more worrisome: that again, SE Inc. makes a decision, doesn't ask for feedback, pushes it out, and of course, only announces it via a blog post. That is the real issue here.

And the fact that the announcement was discussed with the moderator community upfront doesn't change anything about that last complaint.

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    Well, of course the technical part takes time to be implemented, and it must have started long ago. The question is if pressing the big button labeled "deploy" at this specific moment is a distraction or not.
    – ChatterOne
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 7:40
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    @ChatterOne Sure. But about that, we can only speculate. "Unmerged code" is considered technical debt by many people, so when you have a feature ready to go, you don't hold it up.
    – GhostCat
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 7:42
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    @GhostCatsaysReinstateMonica the feedback was about public post. It wasn't about the rep change itself. The decision about this change implementation was made along before this discussion, mods couldn't affect on it.
    – Suvitruf - Andrei Apanasik
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 8:29
  • We may be idolising the (more distant) past. But there is no excuse for what they did to Monica.
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented Nov 14, 2019 at 18:30

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