Is Stack Exchange still planning to respond to the community's open letters?

Question

On October 6th, moderators, ex-moderators, and members of the community published two open letters to Stack Exchange Inc.. These letters have, as of today, been signed 768 times (general letter) and 173 times (Lavender community's letter).

On October 8th, SE's Director of Public Q&A commented:

I said this in the thread on Teams but wanted to say here as well. Thank you for getting this together, we are working on a response. – Sara Chipps♦ Oct 8 at 2:32

I pinged @SaraChipps a week later for an update and this was her reply:

Hi Nate, we are working on the draft now. We want to be thoughtful in how we approach just as you were all clearly very thoughtful in putting it together. Some of that involves changing how we do some things, so we're getting our ducks in a row to make sure we can back up any commitments we make. – Sara Chipps♦ Oct 15 at 18:49

Then, on October 17th, @CesarM posted a partial response to the letters, basically stating that SE heard our concerns, and promised to respond more fully later (emphasis mine):

Thank you for writing to us about this. This isn’t our final response here, but in the interest of being transparent and keeping lines of communication open, we wanted to respond with something as soon as possible. While this isn’t the answer you’ve been looking for, we wanted to update you on some of what we have been doing and what we have been working towards as an answer to these letters. ...

It has now been more than a month since this last post, and despite many pings to Sara, there's been no answer if SE is still planning to respond further, or about an ETA of when that response might come. (To be fair to Sara, she's had zero network activity since that last comment, so it's possible she hasn't seen the pings).

In mid-November, however, SE has posted they're removing links and discussion about a certain fundraiser, and for legal reasons are unable to answer any further questions. Some have speculated that this may also apply to any further response to the open letters, but so far SE has not clarified that.

Therefore, the question is,

Is SE Inc still planning to respond further to the community's open letters? If not, why not -- have SE's lawyers advised you not to? Or if a response is still planned, when might we expect it?

Answer 1

A member of staff just posted:

This has taken a legal turn and we want to be as transparent as we can. Under guidance from our legal team, we are not able to respond to anything regarding Monica's situation. We will not be answering any questions or comments about that going forward.

So I guess that's a no. Though as the letter concerned more than just Monica's situation, I cannot conclusively say so. But since it plays (at least some) part in it I would not hold much hope.

Answer 2

The unfortunate truth: nobody here can say.

Your question is another one, in a lengthy lists of requests to a company which said of it "we are listening". To a company that right last week made statements mentioning our respected moderators and working hand in hand with the community.

Yet, what we can observe here: a few crumbs here and there. Nothing substantial, nothing addressing the various, well written, polite requests from the community. Nothing.

Leading to endless speculations, and more and more sentiment within the community.

I think the German author Bertolt Brecht wrote a matching poem almost 70 years ago, named the Solution:

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By increased work quotas. Would it not in that case be simpler
for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

From that point of view, I fear the answer you are looking for will be reduced to

along with some new feedback mechanisms we will be announcing next week

(from the already mentioned blog post announcement on question-weight changes)

Edit: me personally, I am convinced by now (December 2019) that there will be no more answers. SE Inc. has shown us that their priority is on "the loop" now. No more pesky open public questions, letters, discussions, nothing like that.

Just individuals sending them nice little one sentence feedback, to be processed behind closed doors.

Answer 3

There is the beginning of an answer to that over here:

We did post an answer to the mods' letters, @Zoe: in it we made reference to our next steps "entail[ing] structural change, [and that] it may take a little while." As Sara noted at the very bottom of her latest blog post, though, we're hoping to be able to share some progress on that next week. – JNat♦ 54 mins ago

(I bolded what I believe to be the important part).

---

Update:

In a later comment, JNat (tried to) clarify and said:

Sorry, @terdon-stopharmingMonica: I didn't mean to say that we'd answered the letters — I said an answer, as in we engaged in conversation, and as far as I know have no plans of ignoring it. Sorry if that wasn't clear enough. – JNat♦ Nov 14 at 20:45