Our CEO just posted a blog post to kick off 2020 and reflect on his first 90 days. You can see his blog post here and his Meta Stack Overflow post here. Please follow the second link to engage with him and the team about his post on MSO.
If you don't have a Stack Overflow account, or enough reputation to post there, the CMs and I will be here to forward or respond to your questions.
This is all wrong. It's on Meta Stack Overflow, which is meant for Stack Overflow only.
It doesn't mention the rest of the network.
And I can't even post an answer under that MSO thread without 5 rep on SO.
This is the best way to tell me that if I don't use SO, I'm not important to you.
I have largely held my tongue over the past few months, but this blog post just makes it clear that you fundamentally do not get, or perhaps value, the community here. You write “the work we do would not be possible without the contributions of our incredible community” as though the community is taking “little actions” that help you do your job. You would not have a job without the community; none of the bullet points you boast of would exist without the community.
That’s the fundamental disconnect here. You write of Stack Overflow as though the company did the work, as though “Stack Overflow added over 2.8 million answers.” Stack Overflow didn’t add those answers; we did. And the funny thing is that we don’t work for you, so if you want to ask me to “to maintain a growth mindset” for you, you either need to start writing me checks, or you need to explain what’s in it for me. Hint: what’s in it for me has nothing to do with your investors or profits. Here, you’re asking us to grow with you for the sake of growth. Unless you give us equity, why should we care about your growth in the abstract? Surely there should be some other motivation for us, right? We know how growth benefits you; where is the explanation of why growth a good thing for us, the community? You tacked on a sentence about “visionary companies” at the end, but this entire blog post lacks any real vision beyond, to summarize, ‘more people should use SO more often.’ A desire for a hockey stick graph is not a vision.
And that’s a shame and a real missed opportunity, because I do strongly believe that Stack Overflow has an enormous role to play in training new generations of developers. SO becoming a more welcoming and inclusive place is important not just to this company and community, but to the entire profession. The world will make better software if SO is more welcoming and inclusive. From the community’s perspective, expanding “reach and engagement” isn’t about KPI metrics; it’s about who is a part of our community and how we interact with one another. How do we create the place where the next few million people are going to learn? How does the environment of that place shape the next generation of developers? Growth, both in numbers and the quality of our interactions, is obviously a part of the answers. And those are questions anyone who cares about the future of software development can dig into; answering that creates an actual vision that we can work toward together.
You also write “We learned that we needed much better channels to listen to our moderators and community members” days after laying off several of the staff members, with years of experience, best equipped to actually work with the community.
But I’ll finish by turning back to what Joel Spolsky said last April. Is this company going to be run by “psychopath-Silicon-Valley-executives who are just in it for themselves and their stock options?” Because if you just say “yes,” we can all save ourselves a lot of time and pain right now. Reading this blog post that’s ostensibly about vision and the community but is really all about metrics and ROIs and growth, it’s hard to conclude the answer isn’t “yes.”
Related questions on Meta.SO: Where's the vision? and Will Stack Overflow remain a site for "professional and enthusiast programmers?
From the blog post:
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.
Too bad, that the most activities of SE Inc. during the last months mainly shrank the Meta communities. All of them. Because so many formerly motivated users had enough, turned around and walked away.
Also note: this isn't a code base for some software product. Those, sometimes, need to be thrown out, and rewritten from scratch.
The CEO wants to grow feedback channels. Well, his company had one of the best user feedback systems in the world. The company allowed that to deteriorate, leading to hundreds, if not thousands of frustrated users leaving the channel.
And now, instead of fixing the channel you broke, you think that creating new ones will work? Doesn't sound too convincing to me. Especially given the fact that even those that are still around ... you lost our trust. You think a different channel will change anything about that?
Nonetheless: thanks for making it clear that the metas will stay. I will for sure stay to see how exactly all you plans will be communicated and implemented.
... and that Stack Exchange got passing mention.
Sometimes, what one does not say speaks volumes.
For a "state of the future of the stack" post, which includes his point on the vision, I'll take a guess that the non-technical SEs will in time be trimmed. This Meta addresses something related to that.
For a business, that makes sense in terms of sticking with one's core competencies. There is also the matter of "returning to our roots" which a lot of businesses have had to do in order to remain effective in this increasingly competetive world.
That's how it came across, anyway.
And in the "everyone's an art critic" seat: the blog post was reasonably well written as corporate utterances go. (I had to write stuff like that in a previous career; glad that's in the past).
So the takeaway from this is that Stack Overflow is the only Stack Exchange site that matters, that Stack Exchange is hoping that volunteer mods are mug enough to pick up the slack that the fired community managers will leave, and that essentially, the floggings will continue until morale improves.
I question the decisions made but I do appreciate the clear communication.
Highlighted key points which are likely to be interesting for MSE regulars. The blog post focuses heavily on SO and Teams, with no menton of other communities, so this is probably the reason why the main discussion isn't here.
TL;DR of TL:DR:
TL;DR:
That's the takeaway message here.
Anyone who wishes to engage with the CEO or his team has to be an active member of SO. The rest of us can post here and see if the gatekeepers deign to forward our posts. Which means the CEO won't be bothering to read anything here.
This puts it into perspective. Monica was an extremely experienced and valuable moderator on multiple sites, but not on SO. So the company's awful treatment of her (ongoing treatment I will add) and the huge uproar over it is just a minor annoyance for the company to slap down as needed. Firing Shog and Robert and losing Jon is just a little trim off the top. Doesn't matter in the long run. And we moderators don't matter either.
Of course the company needs to focus more resources on the larger segments and on places that will bring it profit. I get that and don't have a problem with it. But why build these amazing communities and nurture them for years, only to watch it all burn?
It doesn't have to be this way. It still doesn't. Though I've pretty much lost all faith at this point.
I worked hard for a year, coming here every day, answering questions, making posts, welcoming newcomers, all so I could give back to SE. Then I was elected as a moderator and it was amazing. Until it wasn't. The company never had my back. They've abandoned me and every other non-SO user here. And none of it matters to them.
At least now we know.
During my first three months at the company between October and December of 2019, I (...) spent a significant amount of time outside the office speaking with (...) community members.
The fact that such communication seems to have been targeted at just a few, possibly done mostly with Teams customers, and the fact that it didn't seem to be done on Meta makes me wonder. The CEO does not use the company's own main tool for communication with its user base. The subtle message here is that Meta will continue to lose relevance within the company, even if there is an attempt to appease by saying Meta will continue existing and that it needs to "evolve" (whatever that means).
The fact that the blog post is so aimed at SO, and the fact that the official CEO post was done on MSO and not here, makes me wonder if non-technical/non-programming sites may end up being discontinued at some point. I understand that SO and Jobs are the cash cow of SE, and business is business, but I'm sad anyway. I would just like to know what the vision is for the future of the majority of sites in the network.
Gosh. I saw the headline and thought "at last, SE is responding to all the recent issues and controversy".
But it turns out it is a total fluff piece saying how great SE is, how important community involvement is, without appearing to even reference said issues at all.
This person has been in charge 90 days. It seems to be about 90 days since all this kicked off. Is that an unfair coincidence to point out?
I'm not sure what "Meta" refers to here; it might be meta.StackOverflow, rather than Meta.StackExchange, or meta in general. The context is Stack Overflow (its title is Scripting the Future of Stack Overflow).
I realize others believe it says "meta will stay", but I didn't find where it unequivocally say this. In fact, it repeatedly affirms Meta will change (into what?). This may simply be corporate rebranding of "closed down" (e.g. it "evolves" into The Loop). I guess we'll know soon...
By the end of this quarter, all of these initiatives will be shared publicly with you, our users.
Let's look...
We learned that we needed much better channels to listen to our moderators and community members. We have not evolved the existing channels of engagement for power users in our community, like Meta, or articulated how we intended to make improvements going forward. This has caused friction as our user base and business have rapidly grown. We acknowledge these issues, apologize for our mistakes, and have plans for improving in the future.
Quoting:
It does not say Meta will stay. It affirms plans that Meta will change.
Most importantly, we kicked off a key large scale community survey named Through The Loop and invited our entire community to share their suggestions, product feature requests, and ideas for how Stack Overflow should evolve more broadly. We’ve heard consistent feedback from you regarding key topics like question and answer quality, welcomingness and inclusion, and discovery for relevant questions and answers. All of this is in pursuit of new and more productive ways to work with and listen to our community in the next era of the company. 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.
...new and more productive ways to work with and listen to our community...
...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.
There's a lot of hedging: if someone wanted to say "Meta will not go away" they would write "Meta will not go away". Instead, this says:
It affirms a need for Meta to change.
We’ve completed the process of defining how our moderator council will be structured, shared an internal framework for asking coworkers tough community questions, defined the important functions that would be best served by more scalable solutions than Meta, and built outlines of our new moderator training modules. By the end of this quarter, all of these initiatives will be shared publicly with you, our users.
It affirms a on-progress process for Meta to change.
There's an apparent contradiction, at least to a significant extent, in the blog post between where it stated
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.
and the second last paragraph's last sentence where there's
..., to give us feedback through our new feedback loops, ...
I realize I should not read too much into this later sentence fragment, as it may just be poorly worded or even a mistake, but it seems the CEO is at, the minimum, emphasizing providing feedback through the new "feedback loops".
As the Nov. 25, 2019 blog post Introducing “The Loop”: A Foundation in Listening indicated, and the Will Meta Stack Exchange be removed now? post & its answers expanded on, it seems the company is planning to at some point implement new feedback mechanisms (which is what I assume the "feedback loops" is referring to) and significantly limiting, or even completely stopping, the use of this meta site for any feedback.
The past few years, and especially the last 5 or so months, have shown the company is not apparently paying much attention to what anybody writes here. Also, their official communications to here have been very few, and then mostly "corporate-speak", e.g., David Fullerton's An apology to our community, and next steps and, especially, the earlier, now deleted, Sara Chipps' An Update to our Community and an Apology. This indicates to me that the first quote is likely just mostly more "corporate-speak", with the real message being the second one.
I appreciate the CEO is communicating with us. However, I hope that the CEO's future messages to us, along with those from any employees writing other official company messages, will be more direct, clear and non-contradictory. If he truly wants to help the company win back the trust of the community, this is, in my opinion, just one of the required steps.
As someone who only joined StackOverflow as a community because I had to in order to be able to become part of the moderator team, the read was disappointing in many ways.
Firstly, it reads as though StackOverflow (the community) was all that is of interest to the CEO and his whole development team. Communication with the community, acquisition, welcoming, and inclusion of state-of-the-art professionals in order to keep the community useful etc....all this is all but exclusive to the community of StackOverflow and poses challenges to all communities in the StackExchange Network. Should we infer that all these sites and their communities and moderators are not of interest to the CEO and the company? Since this blog post popped up as a must-read on Philosophy. SE, this feels borderline cynical.
Secondly, while the CEO has liabilities with regard to certain economic conditions, one cannot speak of how great one relies on communication with the community and at the same time sack some of the community leaders and speakers who have been held in highest esteem by the community. But again, maybe they've been too mundane in their interests and activities so that the software development focus just let them seem completely outlandish and unimportant. I mean, obviously the CoC changes have been made in close coordination with the community as well, if I read the blog text correctly (which one, which part exactly? MSE in general and a certain ex-mod in particular have been quite overtaken by the events in my book).
Thirdly, you aim to retain and develop the important role of SO in the overall profession of software development. That's fine. But why, exactly, does it seem to be more promising to completely put the working structures upside down (probably losing much of the existing user base, ie. the important few users which do the important job you repeatedly praised as being so important for the company's success) instead of, say, extending working structures like "jobs" to other communities like Math.SO? What is it, except activism and new employees proving themselves to be important by using language and topics which sound important, which necessitates putting the overall quality of all new StackExchange Network content at stake for the sake of - hopefully - drawing some new software developers away from emerging knowledge clusters and into sharing their knowledge and investing their time for free on SO so that their edge in a competitive job market is given away?
Be it as it may, I have read a blog post which, other than most, if not all, blog posts before, does not feel like the person who wrote it cared for my contribution and time or the communities I am part of, like, at all. At least the pieces fall into their place when looking into recent events: It's about being hip and diverse and attractive enough for the cool kids (which is the basic message of the whole post). But it is basically just burning bridges in the hope of catching up to developments which are a) both hard to foresee where they are going to end up and b) faster than huge corporate (and especially community) structures can possibly adequately be adapted to by force.
Philip Klöcking, elected moderator on Philosophy.SE
I find this quite bizarre:
Every day, users answer thousands of questions on topics like cloud technology, container orchestration, and machine learning. There is an ever growing trove of knowledge on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
Why focus so much on a single technology, and even name three specific suppliers? Sounds like free advertising for those companies, or (worse) what some politicians do when they're asked about innovation and they've never spent any effort studying the matter: "oh yes, [something something] [desperately check notes] the cloud and AI!".
