Is SE admitting they don't deem recent issues as important?

Question

In this recent blog SE lists out some of the problems with meta. They make some great points, but this one in particular stood out to me:

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.

Given the silence around licensing concerns, empty "apologies", Monica's situation (of which they have time to actively remove links to her legal fundraising page, but not to talk to her), and (ironically) concerns about the loop feedback survey itself, is it now safe to say these issues have been deemed not "important at [this] time"?

If so, when will they become deemed "important"?

If not, they why are they not being addressed? Especially the irony of concerns about the survey itself, is that not important to address at this time?

I think it would be helpful if we could get some clarification from SE: what exactly is the priority queue?

• Are these issues coming from C-level desks, or are they left up to the individual community managers?
• If these issues are not deemed important, is there a way to make them important to SE?
• If so, how do we go about that?

Without direction, feedback, or responses from SE, we don't have a lot of opportunity moving forward.

It's important to emphasize - we really want to work with SE, it just seems like they don't want to work with us!

Answer 1

Here's how I see it.

Stack Exchange doesn't see any of your concerns as "winnable." They've tried apologizing with the usual corporate-speak (why companies think that kind of verbiage is anything but demeaning, revolting and insulting is beyond me), but they're fixated on this idea of "social equity," and they can't let go of it, even though they're monumentally bad at executing it.

Since their platform actually has real problems that need to be solved, and they've apparently concluded that these problems can't be solved by engaging with the community (some of them might not actually be), they've chosen a different road.

That's all there is to this. If you're expecting any more meaningful communication about the new CoC or summarily kicking a mod to the curb that didn't deserve it, or any of the other issues that seem important to us, don't hold your breath.

Remember, at the end of the day, the people who frequent meta are a tiny percentage of the user population on the Q&A sites. We're probably not representative of the "general population;" we still believe in things like quality Q&A.

Answer 2

I've never been a particularly active user on metas, so, perhaps, I'm missing a lot of things. Anyway, here's my humble take on the subject.

Priorities

The main priority is right there at the top of the blog post. Here, I added emphasis to the first paragraph:

Since the early days of Stack Overflow, our community has seen a lot of GROWTH and change. As we reflect on 2019 and start thinking about 2020, our company also continues to rapidly GROW. We have new leadership, amazing partners using our Stack Overflow for Teams product, and north of 100k new users signing up to the public Q&A each month (coders are everywhere!). GROWTH on the business side of our company enables us to do more for our community, like relaunching the Stack Overflow podcast, creating a newsletter for developers by developers, and launching new features like authentication with GitHub, which is exciting for everyone. With so much change and GROWTH, we have been reflecting on how we can improve our communication paths to and from our community.

The subtle message is that Stack Overflow is growing. It's growing very, very fast, no doubt about that. The growth is tremendous, super, fantastic. I've never seen anyone or anything growing that fast in my life. So much growing, folks. Did I mention that SO is growing? Also, SO for Teams.

The takeaway here is that Stack Exchange is a private company and the Company's main priority is to inflate its own value to potential buyers. To inflate this value they need to show not only that SO is growing, but that the growth accelerates over time.

Posteriorities

Recent skirmishes on MSE don't have any short-term effect on the majority of users on SO. Most of the users are not even aware of the existence of MSE.

Some things to note:

• Most of the sites on the network don't bring profit. Hence the focus on SO and only on SO.
• SO has a search-optimized database of ~20 million questions. It generates ~11 million page views every day. It will continue to bring a steady supply of new users, even if the quality of questions/answers declines.
• The training for moderators is going to be expensive. The Company doesn't have a business case for spending additional resources on growing the network.
• Only ~2% of users visit Meta sites (the concrete figure is old, but it shows the scale).

I strongly believe that feedback from moderators and MSE users is crucial to the long term improvement of the network in the most idealistic sense. However, their voices don't have a direct impact on the bottom line. The Company can afford to spend most of its resources elsewhere.

The calculation is simple. The sheer amount of traffic from SO will ensure that the Company will have enough user feedback through any channel they deem appropriate. And a lot of poor tortured souls willing to do menial tasks (SO is moderated by YOU!) in exchange for imaginary points. They've been doing it for 11 years, there's no reason for them to stop now. Over the years SO evolved into a frighteningly beautiful system of behavioral control.

This calculation is based on multiple assumptions. For example, that the lack of feedback from active users will have a negligible impact on the well-begin of SO. But even if this assumption is wrong, the effects will not manifest themselves immediately.

So, back to your questions:

Questions

Are these issues coming from C-level desks, or are they left up to the individual community managers?

Neither? We don't have any indication that these questions are going to be addressed. There's little to no reason for the Company to care about them.

If these issues are not deemed important, is there a way to make them important to SE?

Yes, to do this, one has to build a business case for improvements and present it to someone in the Company. Or, alternatively, figure out a way to somehow damage the Company's growth indicators. Frankly, none of these options looks like a good use of one's free time.

If so, how do we go about that?

Sorry, I don't have a working solution at the moment. It'd be nice to have a comparable non-profit Q&A site, though.

P.S. I'm terribly sorry, everyone, just couldn't resist.

Answer 3

They actually really don't care.

There's a big polarising bias happening here on meta, both ways, but if you look into the blog of one the founders, the future direction of the company becomes pretty clear:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo/

we want to make it possible for knowledge workers everywhere to use Stack Overflow to get answers to the proprietary questions that are specific to their organizations and teams

They're after the enterprise customers now. They don't seem to particularly care about the free communities that actually got them initially famous. Sorry, but that's just the truth as I see it.

Answer 4

In a way. They say the important issues for SE are the issues that are important for the users. They made a survey and summarized the results:

Apparently not many people complained about SE infringing on their copyright or publicly maligning mods, or al least not according to SE's interpretation of the data. So no, these are not important issues for SE.

Now this has taken a legal turn and that means that SE has to pay some attention to these issues, but that also means that they won't talk about them. And probably they will do nothing unless the legal turn forces them to.