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I just posted to our blog about our Fourth Quarter Community Roadmap for 2020.
Please see the post for details on the projects that our Community and Public Platform teams aim to deliver this quarter. We are interested in your thoughts and questions regarding our upcoming projects and priorities on the roadmap.
...can I give feedback this time? Because over on Stack Overflow, y'all didn't want feedback on the survey.
This downvotes survey is asking the wrong question in the wrong way.
Many users report feeling confused and discouraged when their posts are downvoted. What’s more, they often don’t understand why they are getting downvoted, and they often don’t get guidance on what they can do to improve their posts.
This listens to the wrong side of the concern in that users are feeling confused and discouraged. That is to say, the users who are coming over here, asking the kinds of questions which would get downvoted, are feeling discouraged from posting more questions. (That would almost sound like the system is working as intended.)
The users who come over here are asking questions. Those questions are meeting the wall of curation. The users who are upset with this wall of curation are asking why it exists at all, rather than realizing that we've left a dozen or so signposts on how to go through the front door. It's not even a gate, and there's no moat; it's literally just a door.
Users do have guidance, but not only is it not entirely obvious, it's buried in parts of the site that Stack Overflow doesn't make apparent. I made a remark in another community that putting information about a site's expectations anywhere other than right in their face when they're about to ask a question is just setting them up for failure.
But, uh...I'll get back to why this is the wrong question.
This quarter we are running a short survey to gain insight into why users downvote questions and answers on Stack Overflow.
You're asking curators why they downvote.
You're breaking the long-standing convention that votes aren't explained.
This perspective of question makes it seem like the curators have to justify why they did what they did.
Worse, you don't explain what kinds of questions you're trying to gather feedback on.
You know how you guys said that you had some kind of question quality score back in the day? Do you factor this into the survey as well at all, or did you not know about it? I would imagine you would get far better signal-to-noise if you paid attention to questions which the system didn't believe were crap but were attracting downvotes anyway.
I get the very strong feeling that you're going to try and break downvotes, or at least make us explain why we downvoted the content in an effort to "provide guidance to the user", which - and I cannot stress this enough -
to commit to.
If you want to provide guidance, then link them to the guidance we've already got. Lots and lots of it exists. Don't then turn your attention to us for cleaning up the mess that's left behind because you're not doing enough to explain what you expect of these users.
I hope this is appropriate timing to make a actual difference, but in auditing the CM workload, it's worth considering the standard of care we had in the past, and the sacrifices made in the name of "efficiency" and "needing resources elsewhere".
I've worked in the trenches of IT my entire career, and much like ground level IT folks, community moderation is seen by much of the social software industry as a cost center. Big sites with millions or billions of users... kinda gave up, outsourcing it to poorly paid sweatshops and focusing on content not culture. SE's Community Management and Moderation system has always been about our communities and people, and you can't really scale that by throwing more process at it.
On the other hand, the team's kinda strange structurally. I'm under the impression that it's been shunted around different orgs (at one point being under the engineering team) and at least for now, it's a little top heavy. We've also lost CMs so that other orgs (that are revenue centers - and ought to sustain themselves) could get headcount. Our CMs can't really work in the room under the staircase, with the risk of getting evicted. I hope part of this process is getting them a home and some degree of safety from their team being downsized, or attritions not replaced.
In auditing the workload of the Community Management team, it's worth considering that the reality of them being insanely busy - due to both attrition and 'realignment' - means some of the workload never reaches them. I've had a few situations where a fellow mod brings up something that ought to be escalated but wasn't because "The CMs have enough on their plate" or worse, they did and the item got backlogged.
Essentially, I'm hoping y'all realise that many things that ought to be done are missed and need to be taken into account in figuring out the workload and numbers of CMs.
In engineering, one of the ways cost is removed is to remove components from the reference schematic till something breaks, then add back the last thing that was removed. Only that the other components are there for a reason.
Many of the functions and roles of the community management team, as well as some of the people, have been removed, and even if things 'work' they're not working to the 'reference' standard they ought to be.
In deciding on the workload, in addition to the 'mechanics' and 'governance' of the network, things like "how things work" and formalising various policies, it would be nice to consider having the bandwidth to directly engage with the communities, and sometimes find problems before they happen.
Celebrating 10th Anniversaries
This is an exciting year as we have a bunch of sites hitting their 10th birthday! We’ll be working with those sites to give them some special flair to celebrate such a big milestone.
Of the five sites that are slated to turn ten years old during the current calendar year (Physics, Information Security, Homebrewing, Writing, and Video Production), the latter three still don't have a design. Also, two additional sites are already ten years old and haven't received a design yet (Board & Card Games, and Sound Design - counting the time it was a Stack Exchange 1.0 site).
All of these sites are no longer in beta, which means they should have been placed on the backlog to receive a design.
Are there any plans to additionally deploy designs to them in the near future?
(I'm aware that in the current configuration, deploying a design is also correlated with raising the site's privilege levels to those of large sites, but looking through the Area 51 stats for each of these sites that have one, all are "Excellent" in terms of avid users.)
I really appreciate the focus about downvotes. And I somehow disagree with the other answer that stating that asking the curators for their reasons to downvote is a bad thing.
Of course, that survey itself should be fully optional. The system should NOT force you to answer the questions in order to get your downvote out. Meaning: after one votes, then there is a "your vote has been registered, are you willing to answer a few short questions about it now" moment.
Nonetheless, that other answer has a good point: the amount of information that you can gather that way is very limited. Making a bold statement, I would claim that 90+% of all votes on stackoverflow are just legitimate curation. People notice low quality content, and they want to tell other users about that, and give an incentive to the author of that content to do better.
Thus: as long as A) users come in and are able to drop low quality content and B) that downvote system is in place, there will be that conflict. Coming from there, the only true value I see in this survey: it could help you to better understand to categorize downvotes, which could help you to implement a system that can better categorize itself. In an ideal world, the "new question" wizard has a final mandatory step were some AI tells you for real "your question doesn't meet our quality standards" ... and where you have to click like 5 times to still post it as is. (and if you do that, and then the post gets downvoted, closevoted, ... that means you get question banned the 2nd time you do it or so). Of course, getting such a system right is still hard, but probably more "doable" than 10 years ago, given the progress that AI brings to the field.
Coming back to the other answer: I started to do more curation on stackoverflow on the java tag for the last weeks, and seriously: downvotes aren't the problem there. The biggest problem: tons of low quality questions, and maybe: not enough upvotes on the few good questions. So, yes: it is great that you look into downvoting, but the downvotes aren't the problem. I very much prefer to click on a question, find it "valid", and "worth answering", and putting down an answer. Compared to downvoting, close voting, delete voting it. And commenting it, to almost never hear back anything from the OP dropping their (home)work onto other people.
The other part here: I am quite grateful that you will continue to improve the "review" queues. Where: UI changes are the smaller thing for me, it would be much more important to revisit the definition of these queues, and understand if there is actually any sense in doing things that way (please remember that many many people have complained about the utter failure that triage+help and improve have lead to). But of course, that would be a real piece of work to tackle.
