128
votes
Stack Exchange is failing its community
A related issue: the company does not know that it does not know how to be inclusive.
Accessibility
To abridge the Introduction to Understanding WCAG 2.1:
Anyone who wants to use the Web must have ...
- 15.5k
120
votes
May 2023 layoff impacting 58 SO/SE staff
In order to support our colleagues as they go through this very difficult transition, we’re asking that you respect their privacy, and we will not be taking questions about who was impacted . . .
I ...
94
votes
May 2023 layoff impacting 58 SO/SE staff
I'd like to express my deep dissatisfaction in these events.
In the past, as a startup, layoffs were framed as something essential for the survival of the company, and they often resulted in fairly ...
- 170k
77
votes
Stack Exchange is failing its community
At the moment, Stack Overflow looks an awful lot like Twitter:
In spite of all this discussion of celebrity and checkmarks, my problem with the new Twitter is the utter incompetence of the new CEO ...
72
votes
Stack Exchange is failing its community
You're mixing a few things here that while somewhat related, are rather distinct issues. SE losing staff with deep experience with the network, and not hiring (intentionally) new staff with network ...
- 185k
69
votes
Stack Exchange is failing its community
Is there an actual plan for community growth as far as getting people
to stick around?
There is no plan. They are just winging it.
I could be wrong. I really, really hope I am wrong, but I have seen ...
- 17.6k
60
votes
Stack Exchange is failing its community
I haven't seen a lot of that from Stack Exchange in the past...well, few years, but let's focus on the last month. We've been dropped edicts in the Teacher's Lounge and then left to argue between ...
- 20.8k
55
votes
Accepted
Is "You need us, we don't need you" a difficult concept for S.E. leadership to understand?
I saw this quote from Alexis Ohanian
Everyone always asks me about community building and lessons learned from creating Reddit and the hard truth is that 99% of it is just showing up and doing the ...
- 170k
47
votes
May 2023 layoff impacting 58 SO/SE staff
Well that's a depressing turn of events.
First and foremost of course the real human impact is on the poor folks on the receiving end - and my heart goes out to them. I've been there, going through ...
- 4,289
38
votes
May 2023 layoff impacting 58 SO/SE staff
Do you know what I really like* about that blog post? It's this: when you view it on mobile, the one 'related post' (that I guess the blog software auto-picks) has this summary:
Made me laugh, ...
- 8,843
31
votes
Is "You need us, we don't need you" a difficult concept for S.E. leadership to understand?
Disclaimers: I have never worked for Stack Exchange in particular, nor do I have access to the Teacher's Lounge, so the following is based on public information and my subjective experience working in ...
- 5,259
28
votes
Is "You need us, we don't need you" a difficult concept for S.E. leadership to understand?
The profit motive is simply too corrupting.
And there is a genuine alternative. The root of the problem here is expecting corporations to be nice people. Yes, with enough isolation from shareholder ...
21
votes
May 2023 layoff impacting 58 SO/SE staff
As a woman working in a technology-oriented field, I would like to extend my support to those who have lost their job.
I have lived through several rounds of layoffs in my career so far - sometimes I ...
- 327
21
votes
Is "You need us, we don't need you" a difficult concept for S.E. leadership to understand?
I happened to watch this recently, maybe it's relevent:
YouTube: Why Private Equity SUCKS for (almost) Everyone (19 minutes)
It includes:
... superior management skills. But it should go without ...
- 10.5k
16
votes
Competing with ChatGPT Answers: An Expert's Perspective
a whole new side of the problem
New? Looking specifically at this particular sub-problem of the whole mess, it may well be the one we are most intimately familiar with. Some share senior expert level ...
- 536
16
votes
Competing with ChatGPT Answers: An Expert's Perspective
Current AI-generated answers are often "eloquent bullshit" as people put it. Being simply a language model, they do show only limited understanding and have no ability to test their ...
- 14.2k
16
votes
How can Stack Exchange use AI, and especially GenAI, to facilitate Q&A?
Given what I've seen of GPTs so far, I think it's best to set aside trying to find ways to integrate AI into the site entirely for the time being, at least until the strike is over and SE begins to ...
- 597
15
votes
Accepted
On which sites can you earn the You Got Splunk! hat?
The Data Explorer can help here; it's possible to compare queries across different sites, and this query lists how many tags contain 'data' in their name. (How many questions have the tag is more ...
GlorfindelMod
- 248k
13
votes
How can Stack Exchange use AI, and especially GenAI, to facilitate Q&A?
I think there's potential for ML to be useful in improving the quality of the knowledge base, but I don't think focusing on GenAI is useful. And I'd hope to see experimentation being done carefully, ...
- 21.1k
12
votes
The SE About page should be less Stack Overflow-focused: "The world’s largest programming community is growing"
I think this is an excellent idea.
Despite the validity of Glorfindel's counter(?)-argument(s), I think an edit would make sense.
I'm not a programmer. I program at times, but I signed up when I ...
- 6,370
12
votes
Is "You need us, we don't need you" a difficult concept for S.E. leadership to understand?
Without us, SE would not be what it is. It would just be another Q/A site with low SNR and no community. That said, I am not sure SE Inc needs us anymore. The Q/A part of SE hasn't been their business ...
- 5,863
10
votes
What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them?
Jul—Sep 2023
Targets:
Respond to 70% of Meta posts from across the network to which status-review was added during this period. [not met, got to ~61% (+9% change from previous period); see below for ...
- 1,263
10
votes
Which sites have customized their help center homepage?
Here is a userscript (a simplified version of this one here) which you can run on the site list to see which sites have altered the Help Center homepage:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Help Center ...
GlorfindelMod
- 248k
10
votes
Is "You need us, we don't need you" a difficult concept for S.E. leadership to understand?
What will it take for me to finally leave the network?
Successfully breaking bad habits usually involves replacing them with good ones. For me anyway, I think it will involve the emergence of a ...
9
votes
Stack Exchange network sites’ IP addresses may change in the coming weeks
While we don't expect any downtime or technical issues...
Such optimism! We sincerely wish you well, but everyone who has been around technology for more than a few minutes knows that such optimism, ...
- 1,451
9
votes
Why are Stack Exchange sites too complicated to understand?
This is... not an easy question to answer. The sites in Stack Exchange network (typically) require some degree of professionalism, yes. That said, a decent amount of expectations from a "be nice&...
- 11.6k
8
votes
Which sites have customized their help center homepage?
Sites with a custom Help Center homepage
Site (Link to per-site Help)
Related per-site meta post
https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/help
https://iot.stackexchange.com/help
https://latin....
7
votes
Demonym (nickname) for a Stack Exchange user?
Singular: User. Plural: Users or Community.
There might be other nouns depending on users preferred activity, specific role (asker, answerer, reviewer, moderator...) or experience, (new user, ...)
...
- 15.4k
7
votes
What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them?
Apr-Jun 2023
A note on targets: This quarter we adjusted our reporting goals in order to simplify them, and merged the reporting stats into a single one, as opposed to the hitherto breakdown of "...
- 3,444
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible