Who is the intended audience for the Stack Overflow blog?

Question

So I can't make sense of the blog. I just don't understand who the intended audience for it is. The blog has posts about:

• Ads for Teams: 1, 2
• Ads for other companies/organisations: 1, 2, 3, 4
  • including product recommendations: 1
  • Some of which are helpfully tagged as "partner-content": 1
• The podcast: 1
  • Most of which are IMO partially ads for other companies/organisations: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Site announcements: 1, 2, 3, 4
  • And some for features only available on Teams, which is half an ad: 1
• Posts from SE's researchers about the SE sites and communities: 1
• Two different series of post roundups:
  • StackOverflowKnows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
  • The Overflow: 1, 2, 3
• Ben Popper is the Worst Coder
  • Ben is a SE staff person (though you wouldn't know this from the posts) who for some reason wants us all to know how bad he is at programming. 1, 2
• Posts targetting
  • people learning to program: 1
  • developers doing security audits: 1
  • front end developers: 1
  • senior developers: 1
  • interviewers: 1
  • sad developers??: 1
  • developers who want a misdiagnosis of impostor syndrome: 1
  • developers at any level: 1, 2
• Technology introductions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Weird fiction: 1

So who is the intended audience of all this? Why are there so many disparate categories of posts all in one place?

In writing this post I also realised there's no way to go back to see any more posts than what is on the front page of the blog, other than following tag links from those posts.

But, if you did want to read more, it's not like the tags are used sensibly either. For example, the Announcements tag includes posts about:

• ads for bootcamps, other education organisations, and programming languages
• weird fiction
• The Overflow post roundups, not just the announcement of the The Overflow, which was a legitimate use of the Announcements tag, but the actual The Overflow posts: 1, 2, 3
• And StackOverflowKnows: 1, 2
• SE traffic analysis, 2
• Developer survey analysis
• JavaScript frameworks
• The postcast/the growth of the programming language R

Sorry, but while there may be some individual articles of gold on the blog, there are way too many ads, and the rest of it is such a scattered and mismanaged mess that I could never subscribe to the blog's feed. The posts that get shown in a site's side bar seem to be taken from the announcements tag, so half the time its ads or something else that's not actually an announcement, and the announcements bar usually just shows the podcast instead of announcements. So I avoid visiting the blog and rely on seeing important posts discussed in chat on here on MSE.

It doesn't have to be this way! You could target the blog to a clearly defined audience. I'd encourage SE staff to consider this.

Also, sad feels only: the company pays people for these confusing poor quality posts even though half of them are ads.

Answer 1

The question is tagged discussion, so I think that blog readers (not only authors) are asked to chime in here, too.

You see, I honestly do not mind that SE Inc. tries to address a broad audience here. The essential thing for me isn't that there are plenty of different topics. I do not expect that all posts on that blog matter to me. Nor is it mandatory that there is even one reader out there who really cares about all posts.

Instead: it simply needs to be easy for readers to get to that content that each reader cares about! And there is a simple solution for that: consistent and meaningful tagging.

From that point of view:

• Yes, having a clear understanding about the intended target audiences is a very reasonable starting point.
• But beyond that, what is much more important: that a specific audience can easily get to specific content.

Therefore: the solution might rather be:

1. To make the existing blog tags a central element of navigation
2. Ensure that blog tags are meaningful, and applied consistently.

Example: the (in)famous the-loop post shows three tags: announcements, stackoverflow, and uncategorized.

The first one is helpful, the second has a bit of a "fishy smell" for me (as in: isn't it the Stack Exchange network of communities), and the last one is close to nonsensical.

So, as said: I think SE Inc. should focus on defining a clear, crisp list of tags, and then make sure these tags can be used with ease to get to specific content. Before I answered this question, I wasn't even aware that the blog uses tags. They just show up at the bottom of posts, and there is no overview anywhere that tells us about the existing tags and so on.

(You know, there is a reason why "we" have tags for our questions, and why "we" together worry so much about meaningful tags, don't "we"?)

Answer 2

So I can't make sense of the blog. In addition to not showing the posts in order, I just don't understand who the intended audience for it is.

I’m not so sure the blog is intended to ‘make sense’ as a whole. The posts are just a loosely gathered bunch of stuff that happened.

The blog exists partly as a outlet for people to write the odd creative idea, partly because someone in the hierarchy figures a site like SE ‘should’ have a blog, and partly because it’s a convenient place to make announcements in a write only format that avoids having to engage with the community (and if SE hadn’t spent the last few month putting out fires with gasoline, I could even argue that a place to make announcements without them being drowned in debate is necessary).

Answer 3

The intended audience for our blog is anyone who visits StackOverflow.com or who is interested in coding, software engineering, or the industry around it.

We deliberately cover a wide range of topics that may be of interest to different types of readers who work in development or who are developer-adjacent. We hope that our recent redesign helps to reflect this.

Since we have started posting more regularly and with more diverse content, our overall traffic is up by about 4x.

(Just about all of the usability issues on the blog reported in the question have been addressed by our recent redesign, so I am deliberately not talking about them in this answer.)