I'm pretty sure I don't want to do this every year, but I've been randomly reminded of my old post after the downsizings before last… about 4 times in the last two weeks. It seems like a sign. I feel like it's worth looking at where we are a year on, and see what's better, worse or the same since from the perspective of a community member.
One of the comments I got last year was:
@JourneymanGeek Your problem, along with much of the moderation team, is that you continue to assume you're being listened to. You're not, and the only way you can change that is by drastic action, not Yet Another Angry Meta Post. For hope to continue to live, sometimes fire must burn.
I'll leave it to the reader to consider how correct that commenter was, and what wins and losses we got as a community.
Feel free to add anything I might have missed or your own perspectives.
In the interests of starting on a high note — I'll start with positive things:
The Data Dumps were restored and process improvements made.
The decision to shelve the staging ground on Stack Overflow was reversed.
We kind of have an understanding on handling AI posts, which essentially ended up being how we were handling it before.
I'd note though, all of these are more of "not doing the wrong thing" than doing something well.
While not touched on last year, we also had a mostly successful migration to internal image hosting to Imgur. It was mostly transparent — with a few small hitches which were very quickly handled.
I'd initially called it fantastically successful but got reminded in the comments that there's one ongoing issue that needs resolution
Now onto the negatives:
We've also had multiple rounds of 'we need to downsize to keep the company healthy' which generally has ended up in the community losing the voices we had in the company, and leading to a much more difficult time in it.
Since then we lost two more community managers — Catija and V2Blast with deep ties with the community. We also lost a developer who'd spent a lot of time and effort building ties to the community — Yaakov, and the project he was working on at the time was shelved due to lack of resources - it was revived later, but this was never an ideal state of affairs.
If we do revisit this in future — I'd consider the size and composition of the team to be an essential point of reference to whether the company is doing right by us.
While the staging ground is back — that it was abandoned due to lack of resources at all while the company was putting resources into AI is unfortunate. I personally feel as a network, we have better engagement from giving people opportunities for mutual help than OverflowAI did.
A proposal is generally unpopular, or deeply popular when it has a nickname. The plan to allow users to vote from 1 rep was referred to as the other shoe. The initial plan had been to test it on smaller sites (I'd volunteered Pets cause I felt the goal of easier participation met 'our' needs, and I trusted Cat to keep our best interests at heart) but for some reason a decision was made to run it on SO first. I'd think it would be insulting to the community team to say they were unaware of how unpopular it was but somewhere along the line, someone decided to ignore community feedback and push through on it. The positive aspect might be the idea of it is now so poisoned that no one would try but done correctly, it might have potentially not been so bad.
I talked about the unpopularity of new voting buttons. Now we have new tags with the same response. Accessibility is a noble and important goal but I feel like with modern web standards, and a framework that's supposed to make for easier design, being able to switch back to design options we prefer would be nice. A year on, I'd say in this aspect we're neither better nor worse.
Going back to the core questions I had:
Are there actually long term, 'we're sticking to this' plans to get to profitability and community growth? I mean if y'all are firing people, like Meta (who made a bad bet on VR), Twitter (which was bought by someone who made a bad bet on Twitter)... It means something is 'wrong'. We're invariably told everything is fine, and then things go wrong. This isn't the first time, and it's a case of 'say hi to the new management, same as the old management'?
I think the one 'big' potential news is the tie-ups with OpenAI and Google. That said, we've seen losses from earlier decisions, and there's no obvious trickle down to the community. There's potential but we've not really seen what this means for us, either from SE or the sites they're selling their API to. Until we see benefits for the community, I'll reserve judgement on whether the current set of initiatives are a sign of more enlightened management.
Are there longer term plans to make working for SE more attractive to community members - and to make a greater effort towards hiring in the community? Seeing multiple rounds of downsizing clearly doesn't help.
We had another round of downsizing. I'd give the company an F-- here. While I don't think any specific staff member 'deserves' to be let go more than any other, that we lost folks who worked closely with us makes turning this around even harder. Even if SE has no problems attracting talented outsiders, whom we may appreciate — that the company doesn't consider the impact of this is troubling.
I also feel like the company might be under resourcing some of the public Q&A teams or putting their work into less fruitful endeavours.
Is there an actual plan for community growth as far as getting people to stick around? Sometimes it feels like it's a marketing term rather than an actual desire to do better. The community is people, not AI.
The company still seems to consider AI its main selling/marketing point, which is a little troubling for a network of sites that is very much built around people. As a smaller site community moderator I've not really seen anything concrete that benefits my community or its growth from the company's current direction. It's probably a shiny short term marketing thing when the hype's there, but Its just not we are.
I feel like there's a major disconnect, and a lack of understanding of the mechanics and culture of the communities. Are there any long term plans to improve this? We shouldn't see changes in core mechanics and community policies without consultation, and many of these seem to cater towards the 'outside' and the 'complainers' rather than the people who're active.
Not really heard anything on this. I want to say it's status quo, but there's a few recent interactions with staff (I don't want to call anyone out, but I'd say, looking at recent, poorly received posts is a good idea) which still indicates that there's disconnect between what staff are working on, their communications and the community's needs. I also feel like the default response to many complaints is 'this is fine!'
While I understand the desire to reassure the community things are fine, sometimes it just isn't and folks need positive actions to show things are fine, or efforts are made to improve things.
Is there any plan for popular community requested features to get on the roadmap any time soon?
I've not really seen anything to this angle. I'm personally convinced that at the current level of resourcing, public Q&A and its adjacent resources like chat are creaky. I do hear assurances that things are ok — but honestly, I'd like to see more.
we need a way to ensure community interests are protected
There's some movement there, but its not public I think, so I'll update once it is.
On the whole, a year on, my personal assessment of where Stack Exchange is isn't broadly positive, and I feel we're not in a better place than last year.
In conclusion:
While we've not had a major crisis, I feel like the company missed many many opportunities to do right by its community.
