Let's talk about (community) health

Question

In my team, we spend a lot of time thinking about the nebulously defined concept of "community health". It seems to be one of those things that everyone knows is important, but nobody can really define it.

That made me curious: from your perspective (whatever it is, moderator, community member...) how do you define a successful community? Are there any obstacles that prevent your community from being successful? (I'm particularly curious if you have insights on specific Stack Exchange communities you are a part of). Do you think these obstacles can be solved either by tooling and/or by help from the Community Management Team? What would it take to accomplish that?

As always, I'll be monitoring for the next several days to read/respond.

Answer 1

Here's what I think makes a community unhealthy

• Announcing significant platform changes to the outside world without saying a peep to the core community.

• Limiting the community from performing its work and accusing it of abuse of privilege without engaging with it to understand why they use their privileges in a certain way, or giving sufficient evidence that that abuse has actually occurred (Ex. the historical policy on handling AI-generated content and its initial announcement).

• Not engaging with requests for more transparency or clarity on controversial policies with confusing rationales / interpretations of backing data (Ex. Can we please get more information on the "network policy regarding AI Generated content" post?).

• Not following your own policies for announcing new policies.

• Trying to cover up the fact that the community is extremely dissatisfied with company actions (Ex. unfeaturing strike-related meta posts).

• Taking down symbols of the platform and community's mission without telling anyone (Ex. the data dumps- well- it's not just a symbol, but it is a symbol of the mission).

• Firing CMs (Catija and V2Blast) who have a good understanding of the community, and who hold their trust and respect (a respect which unfortunately is something I find noteworthy- rather than a norm).

• Ignoring popular, long-standing feature-requests and bug reports (see on MSE and on MSO) and launching changes with tons of new bugs (Ex. new colours, new inbox, and saves).

  Update: Community Asks Sprint. Very exciting. Hopefully this initiative stays alive long term.

• Continuing to say tone-deaf stuff like this. And

  • We’ll be working closely with our customers and community to find the right approach to this burgeoning new field

  • We have the domain focus and community trust to responsibly deploy generative AI to improve our existing suite of products and lead to new solutions and revenue streams [...] We want to be able to continue to invest back into our community, and that's why we're also exploring what data monetization looks like in the future. LLMs are trained off Stack Overflow data, which our massive community has contributed to for nearly 15 years. We should be compensated for that data so we can continue to invest back in our community

  • In terms of self reflection, this year we did scale back our go-to-market team to focus on our core products and engineering efforts. This effort is not only part of our path to profitability, but a reinforcement of Stack Overflow commitment to the long-term success of our customers and to our public platform community

  • To our community members and customers reading this note: you are foundational to our success. Thank you for your continued partnership as we enter this next phase.

  Stop telling us how thankful you are for us and how much we matter to you and doing things that say the opposite. Like- seriously- how can you say "we want to invest back into the community" and then go ahead and fire Catija and V2Blast? Like- imagine someone cutting your brain through your skull into two with a bandsaw, and then ripping the halves apart like spaghetti with their bare hands. That's the level of cognitive dissonance I experience putting your words and actions side by side (okay, maybe not the best imagery, since the brain is already mostly separated into two, but I think the message gets across).

  If you want to say that you appreciate us and value us and want to invest back into us, show us.

I haven't even mentioned anything that happened further back than a year ago.

TL;DR Making valuable people feel like they're fighting an uphill battle against those who should really value them is unhealthy. I feel like it's a weird time to dream about what healthy looks like. Maybe things should stop being so unhealthy first.

But I do have one ask right now

I'd like there to be more staff working on testing and approving AI-detection heuristics.

Right now, it's just Slate. Don't get me wrong- I really appreciate Slate and the work they're doing, but a lot of the work in moving things along in the approval pipeline is stuck on having to go through staff, and that's a significant bottleneck.

There are several very useful heuristic proposals that are stuck in backlog hell that'd I'd like to see being tested.

I have one particular heuristic proposal of my own which I put a significant amount of effort into acquiring statistical data about, and which I think would be very useful if approved. It's sitting there. It has been sitting there for three months now. It's not that Slate doesn't want to get to it. She gives periodic updates to the heuristics group about her todo-list, and it's on there. But things just keep coming up and she has so much on her plate. All the while (and I am not trying to cast any negative light on Slate- this isn't her fault- this is why I'm asking for more staff to be allocated to this), more and more posts which match this heuristic pop up every day. It's frustrating.

Answer 2

You are asking the wrong question here.

In order for something to be "successful" that implies that there's a goal to achieve, a finishing line to cross. Individuals have goals. Communities just… are. And they'll continue to be until they die.

It's important to remember that a community is an organic thing that is larger than any individual that makes it up. It grows. It changes. It adapts. It evolves. Often not because of any individual goal, but in spite of it.

Gardening analogies have a long history when talking about Stack Exchange sites, for good reason. I will continue that tradition here:

One thing about growing a garden is, a lot of people will look at a meticulously maintained garden full of bright green herbs and red tomatoes in perfect lines and think, "That is a healthy garden." They are unlikely to think the same when they look at an abandoned plot full of weeds and wildflowers, of thistles and thorns, of detritus and decay.

But the truth is, both of these are perfectly healthy. If anything, the weeds and wildflowers are healthier because they continue to thrive in the absence of maintenance, whereas the former requires constant tending.

Are they successful? That depends entirely on what your goal is. Weeds and wildflowers thrive in the prairies, where they provide a diverse and vital ecosystem for countless species. If your goal is the overall health of the environment and the planet, it's incredibly successful.

But if your only goal is to have bright red tomatoes to feed your family in the fall, weeds and wildflowers make a terrible garden.

So asking us what makes a community "successful" is missing the point entirely; success and failure is defined entirely by whoever is tasked to tend the garden, not by the garden itself. The garden is just gonna keep growing and adapting to fit whatever environment it finds itself in. Either that or it will find itself deprived of essential nutrients and just die.

So I'm gonna have to throw the question back at you: How do you define a "successful community"? We used to have a strong transparent relationship with Stack Exchange the Company and a good idea what our shared goals were, but that hasn't been the case for many years now. Many of the goals that we took for granted have apparently been abandoned and replaced with arbitrary decisions we don't understand. We no longer have any idea what your actual goals are, what you're trying to accomplish here, so how can you expect us to know what counts as "successful"?

Answer 3

I'd say real engagement and a 'sense' of community.

I'd also say it depends on what sort of community you want to build. I get the impression the use of community as used by company leadership is very focused on 'anyone who could be using the network'

I'd say that to best serve the 'broader' communities who might use our sites - we need to foster healthy communities of experts, communities of purpose and communities of people.

I'd probably point at my answer here - and point out that well, we don't have healthy communities because the community structure and what anchors people to the network has consistently been undermined by attempts to meet short term goals. Communities don't respect fiscal quarters and damage to trust takes time to heal.

I'd have three soft metrics for what a healthy community should look like

• As a community of purpose, folks find value in being here. They are here to acquire or share knowledge. The Q&A sites are our core here, not teams, or whatever genAI project or other fad. Unhealthy main sites would likely affect teams take up, but that's out of the scope here.

  With the public Q&A sites marginalised, people end up going elsewhere, and sites lose their sense of purpose.

• As a community of experts, there's value in networking here with others in the same field. It would be nice if my Super User experience or Meta.SE experience could help me land a job for example. If not, at the very least picking up useful bits of knowledge from subject matter experts. Many of the experts who used to be on say Server Fault are no longer on the network or peripherally active.

• As a community of people. I've known of couples who met on SE. One of my local former SE users invited another one to be his best man. Healthy communities are communities of people even online. I think that's one of the main things lost with the focus on product/revenue/profit at all costs.

An unhealthy community also tends to have 'leaders' who are, well, hubristic. I've literally seen someone drive two communities to the ground because he was so convinced 'his' way was right, and in the second, basically replaced a (admittedly somewhat flakey) hub/directory for a community with a 'basic' forum, refusing any help... driving users away.

Leadership means listening and doing. Not enough is done to keep communities healthy, and many actions done in the last decade have actively sickened communities.

We don't have healthy communities because a lot of core users were driven away, people who provided leadership, guidance and empathy were removed and a good many attempts to make things better were, well essentially sabotaged cause "We know better". I'd say the blind focus on products--previously careers, now genAI--is part of the source of alienation, but only because its been at the 'cost' of the sites when it fails. I'm expecting the genAI push to fail - and hoping the fallout isn't too bad. We've lost too much already. I'd also argue that the relationship between the company and community has been somewhat abusive, and while there's bright spots, the company has been sinking back to the exact same behaviours that ruined relations and communities in the past.

While to an extent the folks who lead within a community can do our best, after a while without the support we keep asking for, we get stretched thin. Most of the folks I consider 'my' community are on Matrix, Slack or Discord - and sometimes conversations of value end up staying there cause my folks are burnt out by the actions of SE's management.

I'd love to see people actually choosing to hang out on SE, be it chat, meta or main sites but over time the desire for it for many has been eroded.

Answer 4

This is one factor of many but I think it is important.

Trust

The Community must be able to trust wherever they are meeting/whatever (platform) they are using. Similarly, both Community members and the people running the place should be able to put some trust in the Community overall (not necessarily in every Community member but the Community overall)

With SE (When saying SE here, I am referring to the SE network), that means the Community would need to be able to trust you (In this post, "you" refers to SE Inc., not Phillipe or any specific person) and the site-moderators for it to be healthy.

Unfortunately, there have been some things where this trust has been lost (in the context of the SE network - I don't think I need to give examples, there should be many obvious ones). It's easy to lose trust but it's very hard to build it. There are a lot of issues regarding that on SE (not just recently but also previously) and this hurts the Community.

Please, work on rebuilding at least some of the trust you lost. While I (and probably also many other Community members) understand that you want to make money, please don't let SE/the Community suffer for it. For example, you could put some effort into improving the site using things like the Staging Ground (As one of the beta testers, I am biased in that regard) or act on things the Community demands (for a long time). You will probably not get to the same level of trust with that but you might be able to regain some trust or it might be easier for the Community to accept your efforts into GenAI if we get improvements to the public site as well.

Do you (again, this refers to the company and management, not people like Phillipe who I am sure care about the Community) care about the Community? If so, show it. We want to see how much you care about the Community.

Answer 5

Activity levels

While an active community may not be healthy, some communities are unhealthy because they have extremely low participation.

For many small sites, I can identify a combination of factors that probably contribute. For example, some sites are limited by their subject matter (the death blow to Windows Phone SE) and others are limited by the rules they enforce (which can be either arbitrary or important). However, even when none of those factors seem to be in play, there are some sites that just aren't thriving. (Which would indicate that removing all those arbitrary rules from a site that has them may not cause that site to gain all that much activity.)

Look at Writing SE, where I'm a moderator. It has an almost universal subject matter, rules that (I think) can easily be explained, and I can't really identify anything in particular that would be holding it back currently. It's just that there's hardly anyone there, which causes problems (e.g., lack of upvotes and comments). After experiencing an extinction-level event in 2019 that wiped out all the moderators and many of the active users (metaphorically of course; they're alive but no longer on SE), the site just hasn't bounced back. Activity may even be atrophying a little, despite the fact that what happened in 2019 has been resolved and shouldn't be causing new problems. And when you look at the activity levels on much of SE, even the most popular of sites are also decreasing in activity.

Where are the people and why aren't they coming to the site? I'm not sure. We could probably find users on other SE sites who would want to participate here, but I'm not sure how to effectively do that. And I'm much less sure of how to get brand new users to SE.

Answer 6

Long-time user here.

I used to be more active on Stack Exchange - Specially on Worldbuilding, Workplace, Software Engineering and RPG. I'm usually a commenter/lurker most often, but I try to engage when I can to help others, if possible.

My interaction with the Stack Exchange Network has been dwindling down for quite a bit for some time, now. I use it only for personal reasons, and I almost never touch it for work-related reasons, even being a user of Teams in the past.

This "distancing" from Stack happened because of a multitude of reasons, but the most important one is that stack had become more stressful than it is worth - and not because of the community, but because of management.

I've seen beloved members driven away either by changes that were detrimental to the software, or by direct action by the staff. I've seen a couple of hires that are honestly mindboggling, which made me wonder if those in the wheel have tried any sort of background check before putting them in charge of anything. I've seen the rug being pulled from beneath the community's feet with strange policies, broken promises, ignored requests.... It's difficult to be a user of Stack Overflow (Or the exchange as a whole) when the site is this badly mismanaged.

Worse yet is having to use Teams at work when I'm extremelly pissed at the company for what they are doing to the places that I once called home. Suffice to say, we don't use Teams anymore.

What makes it even worse is that this placed used to be THE place to find what you need knowledge wise. Now, however, I have a far better chance finding what I need by joining someone's discord or asking directly on their github. Or, heck - reading the documentation, even. Modern frameworks and languages are leagues above what we had 10 years ago, documentation-wise. We now often have live samples, tools to try out code, and a bunch of easily available complete guides on how to use things.

Stack used to be a beacon of light during a very dark and very foggy era of the internet, where knowledge was hard to find. Now, the times have changed - the skies cleared and the sun rose, and we can easily find our way without relying on that single beacon of light in the dark.

Why I would be coming back, then? What makes this place better than, say, Discord, Reddit, or whatever? Honestly, very little nowadays.

Mostly the other users.

But, as the company actively makes decisions that move then away to other places, the siren song that calls us to leave gets stronger. Each good user, each good CM that leaves or is driven away makes the song louder. Why stay, when the reason of me being here left?

Why stay, if the people I looked after were driven away? Why shouldn't I follow them?

My hype with the Stack Exchange Network has been negative for the best part of a few months, now. I'm still here, hopeful to see change, but... each day that I log in and I see our requests ignored, strange changes pushed forward, wonky priorities and tone-deaf blog posts, the temptation to drop everything and give in to the siren's call gets stronger and stronger.

Answer 7

I am sorry to say this, but this question feels like another time waster.

Let me go thru a small thought experiment.

First: Why are we here asking this?

If we are asking ourselves what an "healthy community" is it is safe to assume that we think that what we have now it is not an healthy community.

Second: What is our Community?

Let's start with another assumption. We are not a group of friends. Actually, many users even hate to be called "friends" by others. Our community is just a bunch of strangers gathered on a network for some reason. There are no other ties between us.

Third: What keeps us here?

If we exclude collateral thing like "I am friend with some other specific users and love to chat here" and "sunken cost withdrawal syndrome" that we can't really expect to work at large we are left with a question: Why should a bunch of strangers that feel nothing for each other want to stick together here? There is only one answer. The strangers have a shared objective and they gain something from being here together.

Fourth: What makes the community "Healthy"?

Considering that the strangers "tolerate each other" just to reach an objective, it is clear that what really keeps the community going is the ability to reach that objective.

Fifth: Are we healthy?

Our group of strangers is actually TWO groups of strangers: the "users" and the "company". Based on what we said before one would expect that to be "healthy" these two groups should also be willing to "tolerate each other" and "stick together". Therefore I will identify three sub-questions.

Fifth point One, Is the users community healthy?

I will be blunt here. Ironically the users community currently is quite healthy. Not only they recognize their objective, but the recent events even managed to make them reflect and polish their understanding of those key values. The strikes should also prove that those strangers have come together closer than they did before, because they fell like they have a shared enemy. You.

Fifth point Two, Is the company community healthy?

I fear there is not need to answer here. The company doesn't appear to be healthy. Between lay off, employees not happy with what they are forced to do and ex employees openly talking against the direction the company leaders are taking... the scenario we get is quite objectively one of a company that has much internal fighting.

Fifth point Three, Is the company and users bond healthy?

I think it should be clear by now: we would not be here asking yourself all of this if it was. The bond between the company and the user base is severely damaged and bleeding

Sixth: Why isn't the company and users bond healthy?

Again, let's think back at point four. We are not zealot that would buy a company product base on their name even if it is bad. We aren't friend or relatives of the company that will stay here because of our ties. We are strangers. And in order for a stranger to do something, that something must be useful to them in some way. It may be an actual quantifiable monetary gain or it may be a "spiritual gain" ("I know I helped someone" for example) but there must be a reason or some sort of gain for some unrelated strangers to be willing to work together

There is therefore only one conclusion left.

The users objectives and reasons to be here and the company ones are not the same

I am sorry, again, but I don't think this is going anywhere. People already told the company multiple time why we are here. Joel original launch announcement is still there. And every site Tour Page starts with the same formula.

[...] is a question and answer site for enthusiastic [...]. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about [...].

Therefore, my humble conclusion is that the question you should ask is just one.

What can I do to make my objectives and the users one go hand in hand?

Sadly, the only thing I can make out about "Your" objectives right now is something like "make money with AI, using SO data as training data" so I can't really help you there.

---

PS: as usual I have to add this line specifying that "You" means "the company" and is not aimed at any specific individual.

Answer 8

from your perspective (whatever it is, moderator, community member...) how do you define a successful community?

A community people want to be a part of for more reasons than sunken cost or it being the only place where one could hope to maybe get a response from a real human being.

Are there any obstacles that prevent your community from being successful? (I'm particularly curious if you have insights on specific Stack Exchange communities you are a part of). Do you think these obstacles can be solved either by tooling and/or by help from the Community Management Team? What would it take to accomplish that?

At this point? I don't know. The problems Stack Overflow has have been problems forever. As a long-term user who's been here for a while, we have a set of tools we can use when someone posts something that is off topic that in their entirety are overwhelmingly seen as negative to the rest of the community. We're left with just ignoring that people hate us trying to preserve what this site is and continuing to dig that hole deeper year after year... or just giving up. There've been dozens of initiatives over the years to work on the close reasons, to change how close reasons are presented, to coax people into "being nice" or leaving comments more often... but none of it really addresses the hatred that is planted squarely on us for using the only tools we have.

We've just shrugged it off this whole time as people just being lazy, but in the end... if more people are giving up year after year than are joining/participating we're moving in the wrong direction.

What frustrates me about all of this is instead of working on tools to address this... we continue to instead work on segmenting the community, or getting people to click more things rather than work on this image problem.

---

There aren't less devs out there with problems to solve, nor are we reaching some kind of "complete" state where we have all the answers, people just aren't joining/returning. Maybe some percentage of dummy questions are being answered by AI, sure, and that's a fun thing to point at as a cause of less activity in the past year, but we've had dropping activity since 2014. Adding in our own chatbot won't somehow fix this or alleviate the long-term problems we've had for nearly a decade. It's just another toy.

Answer 9

There are many factors involved with the general SE community, such as trust described in dan1st's answer, with two other important ones for having a successful site community being:

1. There is a general consensus among the members about most aspects of running the site. Too many significant disagreements can create a lot of acrimony which makes it harder for the community to work together to help make the site successful.

2. Most major disagreements among members are resolved relatively amicably. Especially in smaller communities, having even several members significantly not getting along with each other can tend to dampen the overall community spirit. This is where having actively involved diamond moderators can make a big difference.

A couple of specific tooling and/or help from the Community Management Team that would make a significant difference with these particular factors are to provide appropriate moderator tools (such as the fairly recent Plagiarism flag and moderator tooling has launched to Stack Overflow!) and to ensure there are always enough active diamond moderators for each site, e.g., promptly organizing and running an election whenever there needs to be more. In addition, have enough Community Management Team members to be able to provide good support, not only for the diamond moderators, but also for ensuring prompt handling of most general community member contact support requests.

Answer 10

Based on the wording of the question, I'm going to assume that a "healthy community" and a "successful community" are the same thing. I'm also going to specifically talk about healthy and successful Stack Exchange communities, which exist to build libraries of questions and answers (and, in the case of Stack Overflow, with Collectives, Discussions and Articles).

I don't think that defining what a healthy or successful community is as difficult or nebulous as the question makes it out to be.

Some aspects of health or success are easily quantified:

• Total number of open and active posts. This is the overall size of the library and how much information the community is currently curating and managing.
• Number of new posts. For all sites, this is questions and answers. In the context of Stack Overflow, I'd also include discussions (and responses to discussions) and articles. To build a library of content, people need to be contributing to content. The most basic measure is the amount of content being contributed per unit of time or as a rolling average.
• Number of posts closed or deleted. It is insufficient to just have contributions. The contributions need to be curated. This is ideally expressed as a ratio of the number of new posts. Not all contributions will be accepted, but the majority should be. Ensuring that visitors understand the nature of the library being curated, the minimum quality bars, and can be onboarded to be contributors and curators.
• Curation activities. Libraries need curation. Curation activities include edits (perhaps splitting out edits to closed questions as a separate measure), votes to close, votes to delete, moderator flags, up votes, down votes, review queue reviews.
• Community members. There are quite a few ways to slice participation. Rate at which new people join the community. A raw count of people active per unit of time. Number of people contributing questions. Number of people contributing answers. Number of people who contribute N questions or answers in a unit of time. Number of people performing each of the curation activities. I'd even suggest tag-level participation metrics to understand the actual activity within the scope of the site and if there are participants with knowledge in those tags.

These are the five biggest types of things to monitor to understand the health or success of a community, quantitatively. Some of this data is even available on a today. Exactly what healthy numbers look like will vary by community.

But there's also a qualitative aspect. I think dan1st and starball nail this one. All of the quantitative metrics are about people giving up their time. A lack of trust between the owners and operators of the platform and the individuals who's activities would be measured would drive down participation. People don't want to participate and freely give up their time and knowledge if they don't see it as advantageous. And if you don't have the experts contributing their knowledge, people seeking that knowledge won't see the value in asking their questions.

I would suggest that regular surveys and questions to understand the biggest problems would be the right way to make sure that the relationship is healthy and find problems. However, I don't think you need a survey - there are plenty of actions that are still identified and open - starball's post highlighted several recent items, but even more recently, you still haven't addressed how you intend to work through the backlog of (the, as of the time of writing, 208 Meta SE) status-review posts following the recent layoffs as well as the remaining items from the mod strike.

Answer 11

How do you define a successful community?

Pretty simple, a healthy community is a community where people participate. The most important tendency that affects participation of any community is that users tend to leave at some point. As a result the goal of the community team should always be to make it so that your community has more users who start contributing than users who leave your site.

If you would like to be more precise in the type of users you need, you can do a breakdown by the level of user engagement and see how many users leave or join a particular engagement group.

Are there any obstacles that prevent your community from being successful?

I think the first question to ask here is why do people join a community and keep returning to the site. For a community of practice (any Stack Exchange site is a community of practice) the answer lies in the space of mission and goals of the community. If one cannot articulate the mission to the users, they do not have a clear answer to “why” they should join the community at the first place.

Do you think these obstacles can be solved either by tooling and/or by help from the Community Management Team?

Better software never leads to a better community per se, though it helps a lot to keep a community being good. So it is not about software, software is just the means.

I think the CM team needs to focus on making the mission of the SE communities more visible through storytelling and direct the work of fellow employees to support the narrative the team tells to the community.

What would it take to accomplish that?

Besides a ton of work on reshaping the way the company makes decisions at the moment, I think you will need to invest a lot in educating moderators (create or lease something like this), if you want to grow all SE sites. You cannot grow a couple hundred of communities with the team of a dozen CMs without help of volunteers. To make the volunteers successful in what they do, you need to prepare them for the task.

Answer 12

Chat

All answers seem to focus on the main Q&A site so far. However, chat is important as well, and should not be forgotten about.

Chat can be a good place to talk about the site and other related things in a more lenient manner.

Answer 13

I was relatively long deciding, to answer on this OP or not.
I am not maybe an active user for a long, but I am a passive user of SO for years.
I patiently waited to join only after I could write something useful.

From my point of view a successful community is able to correct itself up.
Such as a healthy body is able to cure itself from a disease.

That takes me to thought about revision of a downvoting mechanism.
When I first looked at reputation gains and loses, it surprised me, that you get -1 rep. for downvote but 0 for upvote. That effectively restricts ability to downvote to users with higher hundreds of reputation points, whose are much less frequent than users able to upvote. According to statistics by an order.

When I did some research, I found that I am not the only one confused by the downvoting mechanics.
People complain, that downvoting is often politically driven, presenting options, how to handle that.

I agree with the idea, that downvotes should be conditioned by an anonymous comment, explaining why post was downvoted.
To mitigate "xxxx" and "Because you're a buffoon!" type of comments, they will have to be shown publicly.
It does not duplicate simple comments functionality, because nobody read comments on the first impression, but upvoted posts are preffered.

Please do not hurt me, if you do not aggree with me🙂.
It is relatively possible that I will have a different opinion after several years of active using SO/SE.

Answer 14

First, I think we should acknowledge and appreciate that this is a very difficult problem. Stack Exchange somehow manages to turn a large number of individual volunteer contributors into a functional entity. This is already a miracle.

Second, these people are not just answering questions, they training future generations and probably future AIs too. The work people do on this site is extremely important.

Third, we want people to feel like they are part of a close-knit community and we want a diverse range of opinions to be represented. These may appear to be opposing goals but they are both important. To make that work, I think we need to find ways to get people talking more to resolve conflicts. For example, breaking off to have a private chat with someone or even initiating a voice call like you can with colleagues at the office. Right now you can't even ask someone "Why did you downvote my post?" There is just not enough open and meaningful communication going on. Lots of people are jumping to the wrong conclusions. Others are acting based on their suspicions rather than facts. This can only lead to chronic and pervasive distrust.

A tweet from Jeff Attwood, Stack Overflow Founder

Fourth, in the interest of increasing communication and mutual trust among members, we could reward people more for making constructive and actionable comments and for successfully addressing concerns that are raised by commenters. This might involve decreasing voting button relevance and increasing comment relevance since the voting buttons exchange less information than the comments. People won't stay in the community long if they get hammered with negativity when they post. Or, worse they will stay but learn to only write bland and boring posts that don't add as much value. Or just engage in what is essentially circular reporting. Basically "slow death" activities.

Of course, the way we got this job done was with meetings - big meetings, little meetings, hundreds of meetings! The thing we always tried to do in these meetings was to encourage everyone, no matter how shy, to speak out, hopefully (but not always) without being subject to ridicule. We wanted to make sure we had not overlooked any legitimate input.

NASA SP287, "What Made Apollo a Success"

My recent experience with how some people write comments today:

"That is a myth [referring to the notion that anything launched from a railgun will burn up when it hits the atmosphere] perpetuated by certain people who are interested in defending the status quo of launching payloads with chemical rockets." That is quite an accusation. I would ask for evidence for this assertion, but I won't bother because I know there is none, because this claim doesn't pass the giggle test.

(Note: I did respond to this comment with evidence, which you can see here.)

Fifth, change "vote to delete" to "vote to hide". When someone is actively trying to improve an answer that has received some downvotes, it's unfair to delete it. Let them continue to work on it to make it better. Hide votes should expire after a while if they are not renewed and if there were changes to the answer.

Sixth, hold an open conference so that people meet each other, see each other, and talk about some of the deeper issues we are facing. It could be held online, but it needs to be live presentations with lots of Q&A and break-out sessions.

Answer 15

Defining a successful community is tricky, but here's my take: a good community is where people feel welcomed, involved, and respected. They share ideas and help each other out.

In Stack Exchange communities, challenges can pop up. Things like keeping discussions helpful, dealing with different opinions, and making sure everyone feels heard can be tough.

We can tackle these challenges with both tech solutions and human touch. Better tools can make things smoother, but it's also about how people manage the community. Clear rules, fair decisions, and listening to what users need all play a big part.

To keep a community strong, we need to keep learning, talking, and finding ways to make everyone feel like they belong. It's a team effort!

Answer 16

Are there any obstacles that prevent your community from being successful?

I'll just raise one particular issue: excessive commenting. This may arise in various ways:

• Someone has their personal idea of how a site should be run, and copy/pastes a comment whenever they perceive a violation. This results in hundreds, if not thousands of such "don't do this" comments. This is especially frustrating when no consensus is established.

• Someone feels that virtually no questions (except maybe their own) are on-topic, and no matter what question you ask, and no matter how much effort you put into your question, they'll explain why it's off-topic and poorly written. At the smaller sites, they can leave such unwelcoming comments for every single question.

• Someone feels they're in a kind of "competition" towards another particular user, and comments on practically (if not literally) every single one of their posts. If you reply, they're guaranteed to argue irrespective of how wrong they are, just to make sure they have the final comment and therefore "win".

• Someone overestimates their expertise, so leaves comments that they think are helpful, but are totally useless or even time-wasting.

A small number of users, when I see their name pop up in comments, make me groan "oh, not again". In this way, a single user can make me not want to use an entire site.

In my mind, comments should be far more heavily throttled. It shouldn't be possible for a single user to comment on virtually every single post at a site, nor on virtually every post by an individual user. It shouldn't be possible to copy/paste comments en masse. It shouldn't be possible to post many comments without also posting many questions and/or answers. To inhibit arguments, there should be a time delay (say, half an hour) before someone can add a second comment on a post [learn to say what you want to say in one comment then move on], with the time delay redoubling for subsequent comments. And it should be possible to block users.

But if not those features precisely, it would be nice to have some kind of mechanism to combat excessive commenting.