Will Meta Stack Exchange be removed now?

Question

This is a question related to the new feedback procedures announcement.

This site (Meta Stack Exchange) has various functions: (per the help center)

Meta is for...

• ... Stack Exchange users to communicate with each other about the Stack Exchange network (asking questions about how the websites work, or about policies and community decisions)
• ... Stack Exchange users to communicate with Stack Overflow, the company (posting bugs, suggesting improvements, or proposing new features), and
• ... Stack Overflow, the company, to communicate with the community (soliciting feedback on new ideas or features, or discussing policies that affect the whole network)

Summarizing this, there are these main use cases for Meta:

• suggesting new features/improvements to features
• posting bug reports
• announcements
• network-wide policy discussions.

The first three of these use cases seem to be moved off, to another platform:

In early December, we are putting a strategy together for the tools and systems we’ll need. Bug reports, in particular, have been a significant pain point internally and externally! 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.

^{emphasis mine}

This leaves the last point, which also seems to be covered by the creation of a moderator advisory board:

we’re putting together a moderator advisory team drawn from our 550 existing moderators (folks who volunteer their time and donate their knowledge and leadership to the community): a small, self-replacing council of moderators who will be tasked with keeping our moderation guidance and methods up-to-date, along with ad-hoc working groups of moderators to work on specific initiatives as needed.

^{emphasis mine}

These changes seem to render Meta Stack Exchange useless.

Do you plan to remove it after doing these changes?

^{(Note: This doesn't mean I am advocating/agreeing with it. I am just curiously asking)}

Answer 1

According to Stack Overflow CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar:

We want to serve all of the millions of people who use Stack Overflow, not just those who know the most about how the site has worked in the past. To be clear, this does not mean channels like Meta will go away, but they need to grow to ensure that users are heard and responded to in a timely fashion.

Source: Stack Overflow Blog: Scripting the Future of Stack Overflow (January 21, 2020)

Answer 2

Yes, Meta is the "toxic" place and it must be eliminated.

This seems like divide and conquer strategy. If Meta is removed, no negative feedback (collected through The Loop, or otherwise) will be left in the open. There will be no community left, each and every one of us will stand alone, wondering if we are the only ones opposing some ridiculous idea or others think the same.

Anything Company decides and does will be backed up by some imaginary data collected through Surveys that can be vastly misinterpreted and manipulated. Anything they do will be because we wanted it™ and anyone complaining anywhere else will be just some loser swimming upstream.

I expect chat will be gone soon enough... but even if it stays it is hardly a place where more than handful of users can effectively criticize ideas and implementations.

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I am absolutely against removal of Meta sites including this one. I am afraid that mine and everyone else's opinion (whatever their opinion might be) will not matter one single bit.

Answer 3

The fact that this was announced on the blog, rather than MSE, speaks for itself as to whether they want to continue with MSE or not.

Answer 4

As of January 21 2020, the CEO of Stack Exchange has responded. The original post is kept below for reference.

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Reading between the lines, yes, Meta Stack Exchange may be following in Documentation's footsteps.

In the blog post, Stack Exchange discusses what they believe are the 5 main uses for Meta.

We analyzed data on how Meta is being used, who is using it, and all the functions that Meta serves. We then refined the functions into five areas:

• Self-governance discussions
• Support
• Bug Reports
• User Feedback
• Announcements

They plan on transitioning 4 of these 5 areas off of meta.

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.

The remaining point, self-governance discussion, is a bit more unclear. This may partially be covered by the upcoming moderator advisory team, but it's impossible to know for sure without more information.

Community managers will look to moderator advisors in matters that impact the moderator community, with an eye toward making sites as self-governing as possible. Our moderators are the experts here, and we want to work with them to foster a welcoming community (our community Code of Conduct provides the ground rules for that) and meet community challenges as a team.

Answer 5

We've known for a while now that Meta will be disappearing based on the comments that management has made recently. The only question that remains is "WHEN". I'm guessing the recent backlash has maybe forced them to bring forward their timelines.

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This quote from Sara Chipps should do it:

I like the idea of the SO Company account, however, it still doesn't really help with the fact that there are Millions of users on Stack Overflow whose needs aren't being met because in the past we've spent so much time on Meta which has .015% of Stack Overflow's active users and is not representative of the community as a whole. — Source

(Relevant MSO post: How was the number of .015% of Meta users calculated?)

In the question What are the effective communication channels for effecting change to SE?, Oct 24, 2018, Tim Post mentioned:

Meta isn't scaling well for any of the goals that it was originally designed to meet. I don't want to get lost in discussing all of the ways that it's just not working; I'd rather just say that our structure when it comes to development evolved considerably and meta simply didn't.

...

Meta doesn't track bugs well, it doesn't track feature requests well, it doesn't indicate presence from us well (how do you know what stuff Joe Friend has been looking at recently for distant scheduling?) and quite frankly, even working 60+ hour weeks, there's still not enough time to get everything done [...]
There's also no good way of keeping a roadmap up to date, or even tracking progress toward goals in any kind of public way.

...

I think, in 2019, we're going to have to bite the bullet and replace at least bug tracking and feature requests with something else, or have something else behind the pipeline consuming meta and making sure it gets put somewhere else in ordered form so we can work from it. I don't know what that's going to look like, I just know what we've got isn't working, and breaks even more embarrassingly by the week.

...

And I know a lot of you have got "well why don't you just ... " suggestions at hand, that's great, but they're probably not going to help because you really need to be behind the scenes to know what cogs aren't going to fit.

...

So, for now, use Twitter if Twitter is comfortable for you. Use email if you want to use email. Use meta (many people don't because it's scary) - it's not that we're deliberately ignoring things, it's that the pile is so huge and continues to get so every day we pretend Meta still works.

Answer 6

Moving bug tracking out of the domain of user feedback and closing meta will only increase the amount of work they'll have to do and slow the process of development.

Previously, bugs that were not actually bugs or just the user-side problems were addressed by meta users and left out. Bugs that were duplicates and bugs that were not reproduced were also taken care of. How will that take place when this all is shifted of meta?

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

Then what else will be left of meta to exist? I think it's pretty clear that meta will close down.

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.

Given there's a new system for feedback and meta won't be used for it, It's another call that meta is not needed anymore.

Answer 7

Unlikely

Unless replaced with something similar the child metas are currently necessary in community building (scope discussions, part of mod elections, et cetera). So as long as the network sites stay, those metas very likely stay. As long as child metas stay there's no good reason to shut down MSE. The discussions would just move.

Having all the trolls slugging it out on MSE instead of all over the network metas (or finding trolly ways on the actual sites if those were gone too) is most likely preferable to shutting it down. Just having MSE keeps the rest of the network cleaner.

Hosting web sites that are community moderated doesn't cost meaningful^_TM effort or money and SE stated as much with regard to the smaller network sites. Same applies to MSE.

MSE is currently a cheap, almost perfect quarantine mechanism for disgruntled people in a place where SE has admin powers. That's just too divine to give up.

Answer 8

I suspect that if Meta continues, the stated policy will be that Community Staff will have no interaction with it. It seems disingenuous to roll out the policy that is probably carved in stone already. I suggest that if where Meta is going is known, that information be released. I object to being "handled".