My reading of thousands of posts here, from over most of the time period going back to shortly after SO started, indicates the company has often not done a particularly good job of communicating with the community. Nonetheless, it seems that, over the past few months, the company has been particularly bad, even rather unnecessarily secretive, regarding communicating about issues that are quite noticeable and/or important to the community. Two important examples are:
Stopping the quarterly data dump. This was asked about at June 2023 Data Dump is missing a couple of days ago, with it first getting an answer by AMtwo, who was just recently let go by SE. This answer states that
The job that uploads the data dump to Archive.org was disabled on 28 March, and marked to not be re-enabled without approval of senior leadership.
Note this disabling occurred about 2 1/2 months ago. The question then got an answer from the CTO, i.e., Jody Bailey, with it saying
Stack Overflow senior leadership is working on a strategy to protect Stack Overflow data from being misused by companies building LLMs. While working on this strategy, we decided to stop the dump until we could put guardrails in place.
and
We are looking for ways to gate access to the Dump, APIs, and SEDE, that will allow individuals access to the data while preventing misuse by organizations looking to profit from the work of our community. ... We will provide regular updates on our progress to this group.
I find the last sentence, i.e., "We will provide regular updates on our progress to this group", rather ironic as they didn't even announce doing this until well after they decided to implement it, i.e., on or before March 28.
About 4 days after Jody's answer, Philippe wrote What is the current (June 2023) status of the data dumps and the company’s commitment to them?, and an answer stating
Our intention was never to stop posting the data dump, only to begin to collect more information on how it was being used and by whom - especially in light of the rise of LLMs and questions around how genAI models are handling attribution.
with the emphasis being mine. As written by itself, this states there was never any intention to stop posting the data dump, but these posts were specifically stopped. Relatively shortly after, Philippe's question was merged with June 2023 Data Dump is missing, and his answer was deleted. Instead, his earlier, basically same, answer there was updated to now state
Our intention was never to stop posting the data dump permanently, only to pause it while we begin to collect more information on how it was being used and by whom - especially in light of the rise of LLMs and questions around how genAI models are handling attribution.
with the emphasis showing what was added. This, for me at least, resolves that particular discrepancy. Nonetheless, there are still several others ones (as well as other issues), but I won't address them here as that has already been quite ably done in the other answers there.
The company basically unilaterally changed, without following proper procedures, the diamond moderator policies to largely prevent them from taking appropriate actions regarding users writing posts (and their associated posts) which basically came from AI (I assume mostly from ChatGPT). There was relatively little notice given, and parts of it were private, regarding this change in policy.
This was discussed, such as at Stack Exchange is failing its community (although this also deals with several other, possibly related issues) before there was an official statement by Philippe at What is the network policy regarding AI Generated content? (with this then also being discussed later, e.g., at Why wasn't the guidance to moderators on how to moderate AI Generated content made publicly available?). However, this had an official post lock, and discussion wasn't supposed to occur (with answers deleted by a staff manager, but fortunately a regular member created Discussion: Network policy regarding AI Generated content for that purpose), even though it originally had the discussion tag. Also, Philippe's answer, according to several diamond moderator statements, did not particularly accurately describe what the diamond moderators were told in private.
In addition, the answer starts with "We recently performed a set of analyses", but it didn't give very many details about it. Instead, they weren't provided until a couple of days ago (after a moderator strike, e.g., as discussed at Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers, had already started) at GPT on the platform: Data, actions, and outcomes. It was relatively comprehensive but, as many of its answers indicate, there are quite a few weaknesses with the analysis. Regardless, this information should have been provided (at least to the diamond moderators, but preferably to the entire community) while the moderator change policy was being considered, and especially well before any such change was implemented.
I hope this apparent degradation in communications quality is temporary, with the company improving the timeliness, and level, of notifications with the SE community in the future. Since this post is primarily about the company, in particular the management, I would really appreciate them noticing this and responding, ideally to give some reassurance to us that the situation will improve.
