The "loop" has arrived. What does the community think about it?

Question

According to plan, SE Inc. has released a lengthy blog post about "the loop", and their vision of a new "community feedback" system. Or something:

TLDR; We’re going to be sharing our product development process with you, from feedback loops to timelines. We’ll be doing so through our new series – The Loop. You can give us your thoughts on what you’d like to see us do by filling out this survey: Through the Loop. We’ll also be releasing Moderator Training and some new feedback mechanisms to help us form decisions as we grow.

What does the community think?

And in case you want more specific "boundaries" for your answer:

• Do you see that "the loop" can work and lead us to a "place" that works for "us" community?
• If so, how does your vision "on top" of "the loop" look like?
• If not, what are your main objections?

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_{I understand that this question is pretty broad, but honestly: the topic itself is pretty "broad", and I do think: broad discussions are going to happen anyway. So why not "bundle" that stuff in one place. And as soon as more distinct topics arise, those will surely be addressed in distinct questions.}

Answer 1

The "loop" is bad news. Here's why.

• No community engagement. On Meta, we get to voice a problem, users propose various solutions and weigh them against each other, maybe we get convinced that what we initially thought was a problem is in fact a desirable, or at least unpleasant-but-necessary feature. We work together as a community to make this platform we use together better. The "loop" turns it into "Dear SE, will you fix this for me?"
• No transparency. If a complaint is voiced on Meta, we see it. We see how much traction it received. With everything hidden, SE can claim that a change was due to "multiple complaints" or alternatively that a problem "is actually very small", and we have no way of seeing whether that's right.
• No discussion. Following the above two points, now changes will be landed on us, without us having any opportunity to have any sort of public say in the matter. The King commands, the peasants bow and do what they're told.
• Race and gender segregation. All our responses to the loop will be grouped by race and gender, for SE to do with this data as they see fit. (Mind you, in my native language, the word for 'race' is one you'd use to talk of dog breeds, and only apply to humans in historic context, e.g. when speaking of Scientific racism. So I find the very question offensive and troubling.)

Answer 2

The phrase "for reasons they don't understand" is offensive. We do understand why changes out of the blue bothered us, Sara. We listed those changes for you to read. The illegal relicensing, the horrific way you slandered a user to the media, the inappropriate animated advertisements, the abrupt Code Of Conduct changes that didn't take any user input. All of them had reasons listed.

The segregation of data and input by race, gender, and sexuality is offensive.

The idea that we need to be "trained" to deal with those issues when it is them that has to be trained to deal with those issues is offensive. We as a community (users, moderators) are not the ones that led to death threats and data mining of the lavender community. They are.

The condescending wording of the article is about how we're the problem, how we need training resources and a curriculum, how we need to adapt to create a "welcoming community" and how we "don't understand" why the sudden, abrupt changes upset us.

With this in mind, their "hand selecting" individuals is not an idea that I think is useful, as I'm not sure it will be to further specific agendas and to solidify the idea that Stack Exchange is not accountable, or to actually improve site experience.

Instead of hand selecting individuals to confirm their bias for them, they should categorize the issues they think are important, and allow community feedback through a voting process of some sort. Kind of like how Microsoft did User Voice, to be honest.

Answer 3

For me the key takeaways boil down to:

Long-time users can be surprised by things changing out of the blue for reasons they don’t understand, ...

No mentioning of long-time users worry about quality and community spirit, aka working hand in hand, as promised in that previous blog article. A bit of that shows up later, but I had hoped to see it right there, as that would have shown: "you listened".

It’s been inspiring to see people from our Community Management team work hand in hand with folks from Engineering, Sales, and Marketing to come up with solutions for our community’s most pressing concerns.

That's funny. When we do "Design Thinking" in my place (and I kinda consider my company to be a global thought leader here), one of the first things we learn is: without your end users in the process, there is no point in starting. Without regarding the existing community as stakeholders that somehow participate in all such efforts, these efforts are futile.

At least: you understand that you need those people, and think about ways to get their feedback. But obviously: you didn't want them around when you started your activities. Big mistake.

We’re going to create a new system to offer training for our moderators.

About time. But yes: go for it, write down rules and practices. That also include your obligations and commitments towards the moderators! And having a board also can help. How good or bad that will work out very much depends on the subtle implementation details.

Overall: at least a clear vision, presented with the right level of initial details. But that doesn't mean I find it convincing, or especially appealing.

if our users are best served by keeping the function on Meta or if our users are best served by moving the functions to other tools and processes.

My current gut feeling is: if you decide to move the functions to other tools, in other words: in case you close the META(s), I am out. For good.

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To separate concerns: when I saw the announcement, and read "the loop", I assumed something like this:

I then clicked that link, and ended up with a simply survey, containing:

The only times in my life when I have to answer such a question, that is when writing up a visa for the United States. In any other place, I find such a question to be deeply inappropriate.

We then learned "sorry, the first version of the survey ways broken", which only adds to the impression of SE Inc. not knowing what they are doing. Not regarding "preparation", and this time: also not regarding execution. Seriously: abysmal unprofessional.

The idea:

plan how to move forward on sensitive issues involving race, gender, and sexuality.

to draw whatever conclusions from that.

And there I agree with the answer from Sextus: every time I have to look at such kind of surveys (and I see plenty of them, working in a large US based company) I know exactly that US management goes totally bonkers about such numbers. Metrics, simple numbers, and a fixation on tools, processes, rules, instead of listening to users. Thus I am really disappointed that a young striving company like SE Inc. starts to act more and more like a 100K-employees Behemoth with a higher management level that is decoupled from the needs of employees and users.

And as written: that race part alone got me, and many other folks furious for no reason. Again. SE staff member Yaakov suggests that SE Inc. is reading what happens here. Err, sorry: we repeatedly suggested to you: stop digging the hole you put yourself into. That survey, the survey content, the survey execution was the exact opposite.

And if you had bothered to ask here before doing that we could have told you. Before making another big announcement that added another barrel of fuel to the fire.

And yes, today is Other day.

Answer 4

I find it disgusting that this survey asks about race, age, and gender, and offers no option for "prefer not to say."

In other words, if you want to submit feedback to Stack Exchange, you MUST tell them your age, gender, and race, or you are not able to give feedback at all. Or, of course, you must lie about your race, age, and gender. Which may bias the interpretation of your answers anyway.

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As for the overall shift away from Meta: I might like it better if I still had any trust left for the company.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using different feedback mechanisms. I just don't trust SE to actually act on our feedback. On Meta, we can at least see how they are responding or failing to respond, and they can't hypocritically pretend they care without the hypocrisy being evident.

Answer 5

It isn't solving the actual problem

The actual problem is that you always mess up and then provide us with a solution which we absolutely hate. You didn't fix the HNQ when sites told you that it's a positive feedback loop for clickbait junk, so the solution was to kick a site off when it blew up on Twitter. You weren't careful with making sure your links to CC by SA were to consistent versions, so you re-licensed everything all of a sudden. You found that the community is generally not very nice to LGBT+ folks, so you kicked out a moderator who supports the non-binary community. And now, you find that meta isn't working great, so you say you want to stop taking the community's opinions and will instead only talk to moderators and read our opinions through check-boxes labelled by your team.

The loop seems like it may succeed in identifying problems to a reasonable extent. But that isn't your biggest issue, since meta does that job just fine. Your issue is coming up with solutions, and now you're trying to say that you won't even let the community try to help you find those.

Answer 6

If The Loop is supposed to give any meaningful feedback to the Company, we are doomed.

It is 5 minute survey about Stack Overflow (other communities... who cares... apparently SE does not)

Besides, usual demographic (age, gender, years in programming) there are two free style edits: what do you like and what you don't like about SO.

Seriously, how will anyone gather and analyze any kind of feedback from that... I have no idea.

Real feedback would be listing all planned changes and asking us what we think about them. It seems that seeking community feedback is just pretense and The Loop is not even trying to hide that.

Answer 7

Some backchannel diplomacy isn't going to work here, even if it's well meaning. We need active dialogue that's open to the community. It lacks what I've said before and will say again:

Without discussion, there can be no trust.

There needs to be discussion in the open, for everyone to see and partake in.

Answer 8

That's not why I elected those moderators

I don't like you giving moderators the updates and asking only the moderators for feedback. I trust my site's moderators with handling flags and keeping discussions and the average undeleted posts' quality up to date. I did not elect them for their role in analyzing and suggesting new features. I want to be part of that. I have ideas. I can see problems in other peoples' ideas. I want to express my opinion about how the community is run, and the moderators I elected were not chosen for proving that they make good feature requests.

Answer 9

Meta is a flawed site in many ways. But it does allow for more complex and elaborate discussions and feedback.

The feedback mechanisms I see in the blog post seem to boil down everything into something that fits into a single-line textfield. That doesn't seem all that useful except to get a high-level overview. The mechanisms that allow more feedback than a handful of words are all closed mechanisms like interviews. And even that limits the complexity of the feedback to something you can argue on the spot.

Moving all feedback to channels that can't handle even small amounts of complexity feels like a big step backwards to me.

Answer 10

Just a few random thoughts.

We have [..] north of 100k new users signing up to the public Q&A each month (coders are everywhere!)

Indeed they are. So, perhaps using the term "north" to mean "increasing value" is not very welcoming. Are users from the southern hemisphere less valuable? Let's use a term other than "north" to mean "good", because that's a very Americentric/Eurocentric idiom.

For a community, debt can take many forms: Long-time users can be surprised by things changing out of the blue for reasons they don’t understand,

Let's try to avoid categorising viewpoints from your long-term community members (read: the people who created your monetisable content) as people who "don't understand". Just because somebody doesn't agree with you, doesn't mean that they "don't understand". That's important to, well, understand.

we have come to the realization that we need to do more in order to sustain, serve and support a much larger community and keep it growing and thriving.

Yes I think that this is a good point.

We want to address all these things and be transparent about how we’re paying down some of this community debt.

Cool! Paying down debt is awesome.

A month ago we formed cross-functional teams of Stackers (employees of Stack Overflow)

Ah, my bad; I thought "Stacker" was a term meaning a user of Stack Overflow. I stand corrected.

It’s been inspiring to see people from our Community Management team work hand in hand with folks from Engineering, Sales, and Marketing to come up with solutions for our community’s most pressing concerns.

Genuinely, those people are great and they have done and continue to do a fantastic job!

Over the 10 years that Stack Overflow has been around, the way that we collect user feedback has changed significantly. [..] This shift happened quietly, and many Meta users felt understandably concerned that we weren’t listening to users or making data-driven product decisions.

Yes, you are correct. This came from direct statements that you would not be doing that any more here. That was directly communicated, thank you.

We’ll share regular updates about what we learn through our research, as well as create a new working group of users that we’ll lean on for regular feedback. This working group will be made up of a diverse group of folks excited to see Stack Overflow grow.

I am glad that it'll be diverse and exciting.

Overall, both anonymous and registered users are highly satisfied with Stack Overflow and tell us that their favorite things about our community include finding solutions to their problems, vast access to information, and the knowledgeable people who participate.

I thought everybody hated it, because of the long-term contributors being rude and racist?

I'm glad they've enjoyed the fruits of our freely-provided labour, though. We put a lot into that!

With our new mixed method research approach, one thing we lost was regular, in-depth conversation with a group of folks highly invested in Stack Overflow’s growth.

Yes, you opted out of that.

We also wanted to keep seeking out feedback from a broad range of perspectives.

No, you removed (or otherwise made feel unwelcome) the people whose perspectives you did not like.

We’ll hand-select folks of diverse backgrounds who are excited to chat with us regularly about everything from new ideas to features, to how we communicate with the broader Stack Overflow community.

I am once again glad that diversity and excitement is going to be involved.

We’re looking forward to hearing from representatives from different types of users and backgrounds starting in 2020 and regularly thereafter.

Cool! Will you be responding to that feedback?

But wait, there’s more! Moderating communities is a skill, and one that’s too often poorly documented, poorly understood, and pursued without robust best practices.

Again, lambasting your selfless volunteers as lacking understanding is probably not the best way to begin a moderation council, but let's work with it...

We’re going to create a new system to offer training for our moderators.

Training, or indoctrination?

The training will be a great way for new moderators to learn the ropes, and will be available to all moderators seeking help as they struggle to make important decisions, learn the tools available to them, and plan how to move forward on sensitive issues involving race, gender, and sexuality.

Alright, that answers that.

As an aside, I actually think it's the directorship that needs a lesson in handling these things with due care and sensitivity, but whatever.

When conversations about Stack Overflow started to happen on Stack Overflow, our founders invented a site called Meta. Meta Stack Overflow was created as a way to talk about the website without distracting us from the important things: questions about programming. Since then, it’s become almost a catch-all for everything: bug reports, general complaints, feature requests, and ideas about the site. With thousands of accumulated bug reports and feature requests, it’s a lot of community debt.

It actually isn't the debt at all. It's a sign of the debt. It's a signal.

Don't shoot the messenger, folks.

You can't fix the deficit by defaulting on your debt then letting it rack up again. But whatever.

It’s hard to capture structured feedback on Meta. There are now so many conversations that we aren’t often able to participate.

Again, you opted out. You literally said that you were going to do that.

On Meta, there are discussions, some that go on for a long time without a clear answer.

Like when you illegally relabelled the licence agreement on all our content, then ignored all attempts to communicate with you about it? Yes, I agree.

Meta tends to exclude people that aren’t super immersed in the Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange culture.

Everybody has access and is welcome. Literally all you have to do is click on a link.

Meta requests don’t integrate with any existing ticketing system, so our Community Managers need to prioritize the best they can and answer the threads deemed most important at the time.

That's true — a proper issue tracking system would be much better, and I applaud the engineering team for handling Meta-posted bug reports as best they can.

We analyzed data on how Meta is being used, who is using it, and all the functions that Meta serves. [..] We looked at the three data points—how Meta is being used, who is using Meta, and the functions—and determined if our users are best served by keeping the function on Meta or if our users are best served by moving the functions to other tools and processes.

Okay, this is starting to sound like "let's get rid of the community's most prominent individuals because they have been critical of us; how can we make a new meta-community that excludes them". But, unlike the company, I still assume good faith so let's continue...

We plan to transition things like bug reports, user and customer support, user feedback, and company announcements off of Meta over the course of next year.

I love this. A+++ would non-Meta again.

In machine learning, there is a concept called “Human in the Loop.” Some processes can’t just be done by machine alone; instead, a human adds value to the feedback loop.

Yes, we've been doing that for free for over a decade, to generate company revenue. You're welcome!

Through your help and feedback, we’ll have the best opportunity to build a better future together.

Hope so!

We’re compiling a small diverse group, including new users, power users, and moderators, to be a constant partner for feedback by Q1 2020.

Good, glad you're taking genitals and skin colour into account because that's an important factor when it comes to people's ability to form ideas.

This is our initial step, your voice matters here, and we want to hear it.

We have spoken many times. Please respond to the thread about licensing.

We want to work with you to move past focusing on what’s wrong in order to strengthen the things that are right and build the future we want together.

Yes, we want to move past what's wrong as well.

The way to do that is: fix what you did wrong.

This plea to completely ignore all the ways in which you have done serious, significant and flagrant harm not just to groups of people but also to individuals, cannot simply be swept under the carpet because you say you want it to be.

You need to take the first steps, and I appreciate the nice words and pleasing promises in this blog post, but until you actually resolve the problems that you've created, it's all meaningless.

We know that during times of change, communication is important; you’ll be hearing from us the entire way.

Thank you; as such, I look forward to communication regarding the extremely serious issues that have so far not received an acceptable level of interaction from the company.

Let's get this ball rolling and move into 2020 with a renewed sense of co-operation!

Over to you!

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tl;dr ignoring everything, making a system to get rid of us, then asking to move on from "the past" is offensive when you haven't fixed what you did wrong.

Answer 11

This is kinda difficult to write. I know there's good folks out there who I actually think believe in meta and the community - and yet, this didn't seem a priority.

It is rather ironic that the new initiative is called "the loop' when for a good chunk of the past year, at least some folks, both in the community and outside it were struggling to break the negative feedback loop between folks in SE and the community.

I've been here a while. I've possibly been active longer than some of your employees. (Though not so long that it was just when you didn’t need moderators, as you had Joel, Jeff, Jarrod, and Geoff, or even Rebecca and Dori and I cannot remember the other one). And yes, SO had three whole CMs at one point. And yes, I once had an argument with Jeff... and kinda had a stalemate. And well, this is kinda what real community is

I do remember though, when folks actually talked. Not at. To. Actual folks (and there's a few folks I feel are genuine and lovely and I trust). It feels like SO has taken to the idea that communicating to people is too hard and would like to stick to nice, neat things like focus groups and surveys. Sometimes, in this mess there's a few hard, but useful truths.

Community is people.

The risk with any one source, meta or survey, or even starting with an idea of how either of it is is sometimes we fit the data to try to fit our views. There's a lot of folks who want SE to not just survive, but thrive, and... they're tired.

Do y'all remember you used to use UserVoice? And it sucked. Meta was better... and that's getting replaced by... SurveyMonkey?

I wonder if I've been tilting at windmills - reminding folks that we could be better, and trying to help deal with at least the worst of what was going on here over the past few months.

I've read through the blog-post and I look around. I see many of our most active mods demoralised. There's a site with a single moderator or less. I'm not entirely sure what our moderator community will look like in 2020, a little over a month from now, or what it will look like. I took this role in an instant, came back because I had faith in meta as a resource - and, quite honestly, hoped we'd get the help and good news we needed to get it back on track. Doesn't feel like this was it.

Many of the older CMs have probably heard of me complaining that the company didn't seem to care about the smaller sites. As a SU moderator - admittedly a pretty drama free site, we've run with a huge amount of autonomy. Reading through the blog post, as someone who isn't a developer, I guess I'm excluded again from the next stage of SO's growth.

I'm not sure what meta means to the company any more.

Or the diverse communities that make up the broader stack exchange network - I had a little faith - stuff was looking up, we had a few folks I felt got it - but clearly too few.

Practically, this was not the investment in the community and goodwill I was hoping for.

Answer 12

The loop is anti-transparent.

For a system that considers itself community-moderated, this is a giant step in the direction of removing community discussion on moderation and policy decisions over the whole SE network.

They may as well make the diamond moderators paid positions. I suspect this is the way things will go in the not-too-distant future, anyway, as if you kill the community feel, there will be little reason to volunteer time.

Edit So, after trying "the loop", I'm quite underwhelmed. First, after completing the survey, I can't take it again to make more points. They only want to hear from me ONCE, apparently.

Many of the questions were of the "nonyabusiness" category, and I answered as such.

There is NO WAY that this can be considered a Meta substitute. It solicits info on what the staff wants to hear, not on what the staff doesn't want to hear.

I think this is a HUGE step in the wrong direction. Meta has served the community very well. Essentially, Meta is the person that brought SE to the dance, and they should leave with that person. It's brought the platform to a tremendous level. If the feeling is that Meta hasn't scaled to the platform, the answer isn't to taper off Meta, it's to add mechanisms to get the feedback needed.

I've never been a particularly big meta contributor, but there have been periods of time where I've interacted, and periods of time where I just read. Until recently, all of the interactions I've seen with staff have been respectful. There isn't always agreement, but there has always been an acknowledgement that opinions come from someplace.

Lately, I've felt active disdain from staff for users. I've never perceived that before.

Answer 13

Software developers often talk about technical debt, the little bugs and shortcuts that you don’t have time to fix, and which over time, can slow, hamper, or completely cripple the system in which they reside. Just like a system can accrue technical debt, as a 10-year-old company, we have accrued community debt.

It appears that Stack Exchange thinks human relationships are like neglected, crappy code that can be fixed whenever you get around to it.

"Hey Valued Users, sure we've insulted you and abused your trust but we promise we'll put fixing the problem with your feelings annoying us into sprints 43-46 next quarter. Also, please self-identify your demographics so we know exactly how valuable you are and can prioritize your concerns appropriately."

Someone seems to have forgotten that they're talking about people, not page views or bug-ridden software.

Answer 14

It sounds to me like a thinly veiled attempt to shut down opposition to corporate interests.

Have a problem? Concerned about SE as a corporation? Meh, here's a private survey. If meta still exists, which is a huge "if", then I have a hunch any type of community issues will be flagged as off-topic, closed or removed. From Sara stating in the past that employees have panic attacks when posting to meta, to the Monica debacle, to licensing issues, these public conversations will no longer be able to exist.

Moderator training = you must do as we say. Feedback loops = no public discourse.

It sounds like SE doesn't care about the community. On one hand, I kinda get it - they're a business that needs to make money. On the other hand, I don't see how removing public discourse will foster a better environment.

Answer 15

The SO blog page Introducing “The Loop”: A Foundation in Listening states:

A month ago we formed cross-functional teams of Stackers (employees of Stack Overflow) to create strategies to start addressing some of these concerns. It’s been inspiring to see people from our Community Management team work hand in hand with folks from Engineering, Sales, and Marketing to come up with solutions for our community’s most pressing concerns. We’ve worked together to build new communication frameworks that take into account how we’ve scaled and to replace old frameworks that don’t work now that we’re larger.

The themes these groups took on are:

• Better mechanisms for community feedback
• Building a moderator advisory group
• How we communicate and interact with Meta sites moving forward

I find it troubling that the company seems to be taking only a top-down approach to "come up with solutions for our community's most pressing concerns". The blog page says they've worked with different groups within the company, but it doesn't give any indication (and I've not seen any particular evidence either) that they've even asked, much less tried to work with, members of the "community", e.g., most of the people reading this or other more particularly involved members, about what "we" consider to be our biggest problems, as well as how any of their (or, especially, any of our) suggestions about how the company can best solve "our" problems will address these issues.

Another example of their top-down approach is regarding their proposed feedback mechanisms, where the blog page states:

That’s why we’re creating a working group of users made up of people from all corners of the developer community — from folks new to programming, those who don’t participate in Stack Overflow but are passionate about programming, experienced Stack Overflow users, frequent contributors, and more. We’ll hand-select folks of diverse backgrounds who are excited to chat with us regularly about everything from new ideas to features, to how we communicate with the broader Stack Overflow community.

I added the emphasis on "hand-select". Instead of perhaps having an election or some other community-based selection method for determining who "we" believe can best represent & communicate our needs to the company, they will instead choose whoever they want to. No indication is given of what criteria they will use to decide this. Although they may often make good choices, I believe they will likely not choose anybody who decides to question what they're doing too much. An excellent recent example is a certain former moderator who, based on the best information I was able to find, was "fired" just a few months ago for doing this.

Nonetheless, being an optimist, I hope that what they implement will help improve the situation for us, or at least not make things too much worse. Also, where any particular changes are generally detrimental, I hope they will realize this quickly (e.g., through their various surveys or feedback from their "hand-selected" group) and then try to improve the situation. Although what the company wants compared to the diverse (including even sometimes rather contradictory) needs & goals of the "community", especially the generally most active members such as those on this meta site, don't always coincide, I like to believe the company will at least give reasonable consideration to what we're asking to be done, or not be done, before they make their decisions, and then change them afterwards if need be.

Answer 16

The Community Is Dead...

This change makes me feel more and more like the community is being pushed out of the loop.

As others have already quoted:

We’re compiling a small diverse group, including new users, power users, and moderators, to be a constant partner for feedback by Q1 2020.

By this, it feels likely that those who are unwilling to share their gender, race or age with you will not be considered for the role, and that (taking into account recent actions of yours) those who have opposing points of view may be at risk of not being accepted either.

You're shrinking your own feedback loop in an effort to understand our feedback in a more concise manner, but that's what voting on meta is for. That's what your existing moderators are for. You have built a feedback machine, and you're abusing it.

You should not be compiling the group, the community should be (in a moderator election styled event), so that they can vote on the members who have the ideas that resonate the most with them.

We're retracting because what we have here is a democracy. Everyone has an equal voice. Everyone has the chance to vote. Everyone has the potential to create real change. Everyone can make a post and make their feedback known, and those in charge (you, The Company) need to take into account those votes and pieces of feedback, and use that information to enact the change that the community needs.

To fix the community, you need to address the problems that we are voting most about. Things like the re-licensing, the moderator firing and subsequent resignations and the community's outcry for more communication from the company in a genuine feedback loop, perhaps by using your own, pre-existing meta.

So what do you say?

Long Live The Community?

We plan to transition things like bug reports, user and customer support, user feedback, and company announcements off of Meta over the course of next year.

If this plan goes ahead, I fear you will lose your community, I feel these changes will create an environment where moderators may as well be employed by you. Some people may be passionate enough to contribute, but behind the scenes (in the land of Meta-believe) when the communication between other members of the community has died off, the decay will creep into the other sites, and there won't be a reason for the majority of long-standing users to contribute.

That is, unless you allow us to continue to view others issues and allow us to show our response to your announcements using upvotes (or similar) paired with a publicly written feedback loop involving the community wherein we can remain megaphones for the issues that we (as content creators for the site) find most pressing.

Answer 17

We know that during times of change, communication is important; you’ll be hearing from us the entire way.

So... starting now? This seems to be a large effort to hit a "reset" button and make the last month of Meta disappear.

Answer 18

_{Yes, this is a sock account. I've deleted my previous account but could not resist answering this.}

"You", unless otherwise specified, refers to Stack Exchange, not the asker of the question.

When I saw "feedback mechanisms", the first thing that came to mind was a much needed improvement to the way new users get feedback. Especially when announced alongside changes such as the vote value change and the post notice update, that's not too unreasonable. Is it?

Apparently, it is. I'm not the only person to suspect that this means the end of meta as we know it. To a certain degree, that would've been fine. Meta has not scaled well at all. SE has complained about low participation on meta, but how is this supposed to improve anything? You're not just removing the ability to participate, you're weighting it by gender, race, and age. One fantastic thing about meta was that the identity of the person asking was never of any significant concern, with a few exceptions like questions where for an instance LGBTQ+ members were asked.

Other people have already raised the same concern as me, but for what it's worth, here's another voice:

Please don't do this to the community!

Leaving a tiny group of people to make decisions will only lead to further exclusion, where which group that is at risk is at the hands of whichever mods are in charge, and whatever messed up system you're using to determine which feedback matters more than others.

We've been ignored for years. By taking feedback out of sight, it just means it's harder to tell when things are ignored. Does that seem fair to you? Our moderators are amazing people, but they are still human. They make mistakes, they have opinions. If moderator elections turn into an entirely political election, what's the point? Moderators were elected to moderate and help as exception handlers.:

From the very first version of Stack Overflow faq way back in mid-2008, our goal has always been to give power back to the community:

...

Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt — if you don’t have human exception handling in place.

You're now stripping the community of its power and diverging from the path you originally set out on. You need to think about what you want to be when you grow up and share it with the community instead of quietly pushing change after change without listening to the main group that drives this site: the community.

Answer 19

There are already many great answers so I won't repeat what's already been said.

I am all for inclusivity, but the Through the loop survey makes me feel excluded.

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"8. How many years have you been coding (including formal education, self-taught experience, bootcamps, MOOCs, etc.)?"

And really, after taking another look, all the questions are worded "Stack Overflow". My last activity there was 4 years ago. I can't and shouldn't be answering what I like/dislike about SO because my experience of it is incredibly dated. So... what am I supposed to answer? Are my answers going to be considered if I specify that I'm answering the question with my little corner of Stack Exchange in mind?

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I did find out about the Stack Exchange communities because I had questions about code, but these questions are a minor reason of the reason why I'm here. I've asked questions about all sorts of topics here and always found great people to help me. By focusing on users' coding experience, you run the risk of alienating many other great communities hosted on Stack Exchange.

Please lead by example and be inclusive of all of your communities.

Answer 20

The Loop is an attempt at silencing the community

"The Loop" is not a product designed to solve a problem that the community is facing, but a problem that Stack Exchange, Inc. is facing: The Community.

By implementing "The Loop", Stack Exchange, Inc. can avoid listening to Meta completely. They can quarantine Meta away, as "a toxic place where toxic people meet to discuss toxic ideas about how toxic they are towards Stack Exchange", and instead implement any feedback via "The Loop", a process designed to completely eliminate discussion, accountability or transparency.

The Loop removes discussion

The Loop doesn't give users the ability to make their voices heard. By placing everything into a pre-formatted questionnaire, SE, Inc. controls precisely what is being asked, and who gets to hear it.

Questions that would sound overly critical of SE, Inc. as a business, such as "Is SE, Inc. still interested in cooperating with the community?", would simply not be there.

Furthermore, there is no way for the community to talk to each other, and for SE, Inc. to be a part of that. A clear separation between community and staff is what SE, Inc. wants, but it's not in the best interest of the community.

The Loop removes accountability

On Meta, questions and answers are public and for everyone to see. If staff makes a controversial decision, people are aware of it and can voice their criticism. It can be shown, in hard numbers, how many people are for or against something.

The Loop aims to remove this "problem", by giving SE, Inc. the ability to just refer to "the Loop" as the be-all-end-all entity that governs all decisions.

We here at Stack Exchange, Inc. are happy to announce [whatever thing] because the data we gathered through the Loop indicates it's the best thing to do.

However, we can't see that data - only SE, Inc. does. So it's impossible for us to verify if any of these statements are true or not.

The Loop eliminates transparency

In a rather controversial decision, the loop requires participants to disclose race, age and gender. Now imagine, for a moment, SE, Inc. would decide that the opinions of certain groups, such as straight, white men, just doesn't count, and filters all of them out.

I'm not claiming that this is what SE, Inc. does, just that the Loop enables this kind of behavior much more easily. With their recent focus on "pronouns", it's not too far off to claim that SE, Inc. represents a very liberal (in the US sense) ideology, focused more and more on minorities they perceive to be "victims" in one sense or another. It's not too far-fetched to assume that SE, Inc. has implemented "the Loop" and it's required identification of race, age and gender, in order to "give marginalized groups a bigger voice" - which is their euphemism for "giving everyone else less of a voice".

Answer 21

Apparently, I belong to a minority:

There is more to the Stack Exchange network than just Stack Overflow.

If the goal of this survey was to make me (along with the users of the vast majority of SE's public sites) unwelcome, unwanted, and discriminated against -- by the very company that's making such a big show of patting y'selves in the back for working in the name of welcomeness -- then that goal was definitely achieved.

There's plenty more to find offensive in that blog post, and I'm staggered by the amazing amount of additional community debt that SE is taking on with its refusals to listen, but this one here really takes the cake, I must say.

Answer 22

For once, I don't hate the latest (community-related) blog post… It sounds promising. Just promising, but promising nonetheless.

People at the company seem to have recognized that users of these sites — and these sites in particular — are not easily spoon-fed sweeping statements along the lines of "We know because they tell us," as Jay Hanlon did in April 2018, regarding "those in marginalized groups" feeling "less welcome". Without any data to back that up.

Or as Sara Chipps did earlier this year, in July 2019, singling out statements such as "Caustic community for new users" from the developer survey. As if that's representative data.

Now, at least, there is data. "Unwelcoming community" tops the list of frustration with 10.6%. That's a number I can believe. That's about the number of people, in my personal experience, whose ego easily bruises when faced with the reality that they're not as smart as they think they are. 10 percent, give or take, that checks out.

For the record, I do not think that this number varies in any significant way across different demographics. In fact, I'd stipulate that it would be sexist / racist / whatever-ist to assume otherwise.

But it is a noble goal to try and get that number down. Not to zero, that would be an illusion. But maybe… 5%? 2%? Something like that.

And the only viable top-down approach is to improve the site's design, mechanics, usability, tools, feedback, etc. That makes sense.

Because let's not pretend that Meta is the best tool for… any of those things. In fact, it's a poor substitute for almost all of them. Like, nobody in their right mind tracks bugs on a Q&A site. It's just not done. You want representative user feedback: run unobtrusive surveys. Instead of letting a few extroverts in the community speak for everyone else.

This is a step in the right direction. I'm curious to see where they'll go from here.

Answer 23

I want to respond to the "fundamental challenges on Meta" named in the blog post:

The problem

We have identified these fundamental challenges with Meta as we’ve grown and accrued community debt:

1. It’s hard to capture structured feedback on Meta. There are now so many conversations that we aren’t often able to participate. As a result, users end up not feeling heard and a lot of confusion (including some misinformation) is generated.

It's hard to take this problem statement seriously when your first survey in "The Loop" has exactly two questions asking for feedback:

What do you like best about using Stack Overflow?

What do you find most frustrating or unappealing about using Stack Overflow?

How exactly is that "more structured"?

How will users "end up feeling heard" better by using a black box to drop their feedback into?

2. On Meta, there are discussions, some that go on for a long time without a clear answer.

Why is that a challenge? Unless you're trying to use Meta as an issue tracker. But that was never its purpose.

3. Meta tends to exclude people that aren’t super immersed in the Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange culture.

I believe that is true of almost any feedback mechanism. Why do you imagine you'll get a greater response rate from some other mechanism, or that it will give you more valuable information than reading what your most engaged, community-oriented readers have to say?

4. Meta requests don’t integrate with any existing ticketing system, so our Community Managers need to prioritize the best they can and answer the threads deemed most important at the time.

This seems a somewhat valid concern, but the votes on Meta posts should give you at least some indication of importance and community interest in problems raised.

Answer 24

The last time I filled in a questionnaire for stack overflow it contained a question about gender. I filled in the gender non-conforming option (effectively turning me, a white male, to be classified among the gender minorities in the statistics).

We all know what happened after that.

Stack Overflow found out that 1.2% of their visitors/respondents do not associate with the standard male/female category boxes (instead: Non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming). Besides that one question, the report of that questionnaire is loaded with gender aspects (making it appear as if the decision about 'gender=important' was made before the results of questionaire). It seems like that (among other things) steered them into making extreme measures to make non-binary people feel more welcomed.... regardless what the outcome of the questionnaire does!

And now it is a mess.

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We want to address all these things and be transparent about how we’re paying down some of this community debt.

Questionnaires like these are just hiding the issues behind a pile of imprecise numbers and allows management to make decisions without actually talking to the users of the websites and the contributors that generate the content of the website.

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So what do I think about this questionnaire:

The more distance the better.

Questionnaires like these make sure that no staff member needs to go chat with people on meta or elsewhere. A management tool to hide incompetence in communication.

Answer 25

How was it decided that the following three should be grouped together: "Native American, Pacific Islander, or Indigenous Australian"?

Doing a google for this phrase gives pretty much only Stack Overflow/Exchange results, from the results of surveys from past years.

If the answer is “We consulted expert X and they said Y and Z”, that’s fine, I don’t expect Stack Exchange to do their own research, but I’d like to know the rationale.

Update In the 2020 developer survey, the following option was given, to a question which didn't use the word "racial" or "ethnicity":

Indigenous (such as Native American, Pacific Islander, Or Indigenous Australian)

This would suggest that in 2019, the designers of The Loop thought back then that the three groups had that characteristic in common.

Answer 26

So, hot on the heels of the sound condemnation SO Inc received for using some highly sketchy gender profiling data as their driver for the recent Question reputation changes they decide that it would be a good idea to do some straight-up ethnic and gender profiling data gathering of their own.

This time it's in the form of a yet another word salad blog post and a survey that would fall short of the quality I'd expect from an intern on their first day.

The blog post hits many of the talking points that have become de rigour in recent times, and to my ears they are sounding increasingly hollow -

create an experience that works for all users

Just so long as "all" doesn't include the experienced and long serving members of the community who have been leaving the network in droves, the members of the lavender community who have felt driven from the network, the moderators who have been disenfranchised and cast aside and so on.

We’d like to share with you some of the reasons why we make decisions and what inputs we listen to

I'd sarcastically quip something like "that would be a first!", except SO Inc used to do just that. Using the "Rewarding the Askers" fiasco as the most recent example I think this actually translates as "We'll come up with whatever saccharine tripe we think will make us look good."

as well as give you a place to weigh in

What a brilliant idea! Perhaps you could have a Q&A site for the network where users can weigh in and staff (sorry Stackers - so. much. cringe.) could see what the community thinks and respond where appropriate. Think about it - you could even have a separate such site for each of the sites in the network to let the differing needs of the sites be reflected.

show everyone how we think about serving the larger developer and technical community

Finally something that actually sounds like honesty - albeit in a backhanded, inferred way. It's no secret that the non-SO stacks and the non-technical ones in particular aren't anything more than second-class citizens at best. Tolerated in order to keep precious, precious traffic from disappearing off to Quora or Reddit when they have a query that's not coding related. It's a good thing that SO Inc aren't bothering to keep up the pretense of caring. It must have been so tiring for them.

be clear about the “why” behind our decisions

Oh, my sides.

If you’ve been with us for a long time, you may remember when our research process involved regular, direct exchanges between users and staff on Meta. Today, this process has been largely replaced by 1:1 user interviews, as well as other methods like surveys and contextual research.

So SO Inc.. how's that working out for you? Obviously not great since they now want to "fix" this by creating a working group of users to ask them things, essentially like meta but with one key difference that is shown by these two phrases:

We’ll hand-select folks..

and,

identified the people we would like to recruit

Factoring in the ethnic and gender profiling from the Loop survey this means either a) they want to do some good old fashioned virtue signalling and show off how they've got this special group of wonderfully diverse people that they engage with and trot them out in front of the world like show ribbons on a prize hog or b) they want an echo chamber sitting ready to rubber stamp whatever plans they have and are covering themselves from any accusations of discrimination.

I'm not racist, some of my best friends working group members are black!

Of course if the are to do this they need to get rid of the inconvenient existence of Meta. And yes Meta isn't working great right now - but the reasons that the blog gives don't quite hold up.

It’s hard to capture structured feedback on Meta. There are now so many conversations that we aren’t often able to participate. As a result, users end up not feeling heard and a lot of confusion (including some misinformation) is generated.

Users aren't feeling heard - because they aren't being heard. Staff don't need to participate in all conversations, that's just a Nirvana fallacy, the voting system and other activity metrics already give them a good guide as to what threads are worth looking at for them. In the last three days or so there has been <50 new questions posted on MSE, heck many people get more emails than that a day. It has nothing to do with ability to participate in what's important - it's all about a willingness to participate.

On Meta, there are discussions, some that go on for a long time without a clear answer.

Maybe, maybe if someone at SO Inc decided to step up and provide some clarity that would help? Others are discursive and will never get a clear answer, but that's okay - they can be disengaged from if necessary.

Meta tends to exclude people that aren’t super immersed in the Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange culture.

In many ways this is true - but how do you solve a problem of exclusion but creating a system that excludes even more people? Both the putative users working group and "moderator council" are by definition going to be even smaller subsets of users than those who engage in Meta.

Meta requests don’t integrate with any existing ticketing system, so our Community Managers need to prioritize the best they can and answer the threads deemed most important at the time.

You mean, paid employees might actually have to do some work? Things aren't just going to be delivered neatly wrapped in a big shiny bow?

Not that this matters anyway since..

We plan to transition things like bug reports, user and customer support, user feedback, and company announcements off of Meta over the course of next year.

So that's that then. The decision has been made, the gish has been galloped and RIP Meta. It wasn't perfect, it could have been better, but I guess we'll never know.

PS: Such a minor thing in the context of this car crash of a blog post, but I do wish they'd stop it with the pathetic twisting of everything into tortured IT analogies "community debt" (like technical debt..see! see!) "human in the loop" (it's from Machine Learning, that's hip now right?). I'm not sure whether it's because they think that their entire audience is made up of developers (not true) and that developers can only understand things in IT terms (also not true) or whether they think it's "cool" or "quirky" or something. Either way it's almost as cringey as "Stackers" (which is surely the cringiest term for a group of employees since Apple started referring to their in-store support staff as "Geniuses") and I wish it would go away.

Answer 27

My feedback to their feedback:

A subset of users with more influence (aka Working group)

It seems to destroy the cohesion of the community and puts the company in control of the whole process. Feels a bit like unpaid beta testing to me. I would have the feeling I'm working for the company, not for the community and I wouldn't probably want to do that.

Not even sure I understood what the problem is. Somehow they are not able to process all the feedback that they are getting through meta??

A subset of moderators with more duties (aka Moderator advisor group)

It seems to destroy the cohesion of the moderators and puts even more working burden on those moderators. I genuinely hope they get paid for this because doing it is a lot of work. The community moderator roles here become more and more like the role of company employees.

I understand the problem though. Documenting the moderator experience and process is nice. But I thought that is a task for employees of the company.

Migrating bug reports and other stuff off of meta (but where?)

"There are now so many conversations that we aren’t often able to participate." I don't understand what the problem is. I thought SO has grown a lot in the last time employee-wise and so the ability to participate in conversations should have improved. Is the problem too much feedback?

"Meta requests don’t integrate with any existing ticketing system" That could probably be achieved with reasonable effort. Just scan meta once per week and update/synchronize with any existing ticket system.

As a complement to meta I can see many good things coming from ticketing systems etc. but otherwise I feel like the cohesion of the community is destroyed and discussions will be almost impossible then.

Just think about what you give up in return. All the good ideas of the community. In a way that is like the opposite of listening.

Miscellaneous issues

Some users may value their privacy (like their gender, age, ...) and by asking them for it or weighting feedback by it, you may miss out on them. For example, the exact gender composition of the users isn't really known and also shouldn't be. That may be a problem for the whole process.

The name is very fancy and may be misleading. Why do cooperations always come up with a fancy name for something that turns out to be just some ordinary kind of survey?

It became clear in the last years that feature request are largely ignored. I fear the new system will not change this much. Surely a ticketing system gives some kind of statistical overview but it doesn't magically increase the number of technical people working on the stuff, or does it?

By relying on a selected subset of users for feedback instead of the whole community you kind of lose signal. I understand the idea to kind of make it more representative of the whole community, but depending on the size of the subset (should be at least some thousands of users to be diverse enough I would guess) the loss of total signal might still outweigh any improvement in composition.

Taking more control might speed up the whole process on the company side, which might be a good thing, but it decreases the sense of community and self-determination of the community. Will I be happy to be a small input sensor with all the subsequent analysis and decisions be made by someone else? Now at least I can vote on things a bit. And if the whole community members aren't happy, will they participate? Will the result be as good as before or maybe even worse?

"..north of 100k new users signing up to the public Q&A each month.." This is somewhat misleading or not very informative because the net inflow of new users is probably much smaller (would need to account for all the old users not being seen any more). A historic trend series of net inflow of users would give more context here.

Answer 28

I think everything has looped back to Meta is Murder phase. Wondering how long it takes to get back to

When the co-founder of Stack Exchange responds to your meta post – even if it wasn't exactly what you may have wanted to hear – I hope it speaks volumes about how committed we are to really, truly building this thing alongside our community. [1]

If ever. Because at the moment we're more like at

When the employees are exempt from participating in to meta discussions – even if you'd like to hear literally anything that isn't marketing/corporate lingo – I hope it speaks volumes about how committed we are to really, truly building this thing alongside our community.

Answer 29

I'm not a fan. Now I don't have a crystal ball to see what they're going to do with this data, but in light with recent events and the general tone deafness they've displayed this doesn't bode well for us.

I guess time will tell what comes out of it, but it's not a great look to start "rebuilding of trust" by snubbing everyone openly. I'm not a fan of even less transparency, which is what this is. I hope at least the working group will be public in who gets to be a member, why they're selected and their recommendations and feedback will also be public.

We need substantially more transparency at every step of the decision making process, and this is a way in the opposite direction.

Answer 30

I love the fact that, at the time I'm writting this, the loop has absolutely no comments.

For something that is supposed to enhance communication, that is incredibly ironic.