Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council
stackoverflow.blog
stackoverflow.blog
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...
StackExchange wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are without its volunteers and yet they only care about their bottom line.
Are there any non-profit alternatives?
Is it not fair to say that volunteers have autonomy, and that we should respect that autonomy? In other words, if they don't feel they are being exploited, then why should it bother us? Why should we create an issue out of X when those who are actually involved don't see X as an issue?
[0]: https://www.autonews.com/article/20181008/RETAIL01/181009775...
In other cases the inevitable outcome is not desired (cddb sold to private interest, required subscription for continued use, no recognition of contributions by volunteers).
Thank the volunteers, that's fine. Incite regular consumers to become proselyting agents for free? A bit too close to manipulation, exploitation and cultish behaviors for me.
At that time, even though I knew SO was a for-profit corporation, it really didn’t feel like one. Nearly all of the staff (including the CEO) were regular users (often since long before they were hired) who were well-respected and made great decisions, and a lot of them hung out on Meta and in chat and were a lot of fun to interact with. (That’s why Shog9 and Robert Catarino’s firing is such a big deal: they were among the few remaining staff members who were from this era and still had this level of trust, respect, and friendship with the community).
My participation tapered off in 2018 because I became busy with school, but I still dropped by every now and then, and I kept up with Meta. Around this time was when the company started deteriorating — at first, we started to notice that they had pretty much stalled on improving moderator tooling (leading to serious growing pains and a lot of the “unfriendliness”). Then, they started making a series of bad decisions [2] which hinted that the company no longer understood or cared about their community. For the most part, everyone wrote these off as just mistakes or unfortunate business decisions, but our patience wore thin after repeated violations. The firing of Monica Cellio was the straw that broke the camel’s back — we realized SO was no longer the lightweight, friendly company it used to be, and a lot of high-profile users left as a result [3].
I haven’t looked much into non-profit alternatives, but a bunch of high-profile users have launched a project called Codidact [4]. We’ll see if it takes off — that’s a pretty lofty goal, but they are some pretty impressive people. I don’t plan to go back to SO, but I might join the Codidact project — after all, I was ok SO because of the community, not the corporation.
[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777
Just my personal opinion.
Wow. SO's response to the (IMO very justified) revolt of its volunteers is to simply suppress news of the disappearances.
- They’ve backpedaled on their formerly strict ad policy, now allowing animated ads [0] and trackers [1], and their quality control has become very poor [2].
- They changed the homepage to market their new SaaS product instead of the Q&A site [3]
- They replaced their CEO (who was a cofounder) with a new one who they described as “ someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly” [4]
- They fired and defamed a well-liked and well-respected volunteer moderator without cause, in a misguided attempt at virtue signaling, and refused to make any attempt to rectify their mistakes until the moderator in question got a lawyer [5]
- They fired/laid off two longtime and very well-respected Community Managers (employees whose job was to manage and work alongside with community) [6]
[0]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/213770/258777
[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/332297/258777
[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=“Inappropriate+ad”+i...
[3]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191
[4]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overf...
The key to stack overflow's future is providing useful answers to various programming questions, facilitating the asking and answering of these questions, and providing an easy way to find the answers to your questions.
Cabbages just sneak up on you like that.
I've had plenty of genuinely unique questions marked as "duplicate".
In the fourth quarter of 2019, we created a large task force made up of passionate community advocates from across the company to propose solutions to this core problem. The team’s mission is to improve our feedback loop and working relationship with our community. We added a member of our Community team to our leadership team and restructured the organization to invest in Product leadership to build Community-centric features. We are also forming a moderator council, which will include a group of users with diverse experience levels and backgrounds who can help guide our processes. We’re making hard choices and treating no assumptions as sacred in considering ways to evolve the community.
... We want to serve all of the millions of people who use Stack Overflow, not just those who know the most about how the site has worked in the past. To be clear, this does not mean channels like Meta will go away, but they need to grow to ensure that users are heard and responded to in a timely fashion.
We’ve completed the process of defining how our moderator council will be structured, shared an internal framework for asking coworkers tough community questions, defined the important functions that would be best served by more scalable solutions than Meta, and built outlines of our new moderator training modules. By the end of this quarter, all of these initiatives will be shared publicly with you, our users.
Suggestions for better titles are welcome. Try to use representative language from the article if you can find it.
But thank you, this title is way more informative!
You have a great Q and A platform, that works well where most people use aliases.
And for whatever reason they had to introduce gender as a core concept. Whereas before nobody gave a crap if the asker or the replier was male/female or whatever, it was about the questions. Now you have to make sure your question is addressing the other person correctly. Putting the actual answer in second place..
It's just so absurd. And to think they did this after taking VC money as a means to grow faster. I can't fathom having less business IQ.
> in order to continue to fuel our growth
Why does it have to be this way? SO is an immensely useful resource and a sustainable business. Why does every company need to continue to grow until they lose the essence of what made them good? Why can't companies be satisfied with making a decent chunk of change, paying their employees a fair wage and delivering value to their customer base?
They're making around 70 million a year now, 44 million from the job platform, 16 million from ads and the rest from the private SO Teams/Enterprise software (28 large corporations are paying 1 million+, I know this doesn't add up entirely, but that's the only information publicly available that I know of). The numbers are all from the following interview with Joel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1275&v=zMfxd9y0c...
At least until current leadership kills it. But it was one of the things Jeff and Joel did to convince the community that that was not their goal, and the previous market leader, experts exchange was fresh in people's minds at that time for hiding answers behind signup walls.
Good timing considering Distributed Web efforts [1]. Internet Archive is having a Dweb meetup tonight FYI if you're in SF [2], word is Twitter's team focused on the same goals will be in attendence.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/
[2] https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dweb-sf-meet-up-january-tickets...
I'm not even being flippant here, this is an earnest piece of feedback.
Please don't call yourselves `dwebs`. That's just asking for people to not take you seriously.
only if SO allows them to (by licensing the contents of SO liberally as they are currently doing). But they can stop at any time.
But the most convincing argument that they won't put up a paywall to me is that there simply isn't enough money in it. You won't get enough people to pay for it, and it will cripple the amount of answerers.
I don't know the chances of another site killing SO/SE the same way SO killed EE.. but I've noticed recently I visit SO less frequently than e.g. GitHub issues.
If they make it suck badly enough, something else will gain momentum and replace it. Get the Jon Skeets of the world onboard and you're most of the way there.
Quora had the right idea initially, by subsidizing quality answerers, but they went too broad, and it devolved to Yahoo Answers quality.
Clearly a discerning eye
Although as someone who has been a part of a few volunteer moderation efforts. I've found that moderators don't always act in the best interests of the community (even when they think they are doing so) and sometimes become greatly detached from the non moderating community.
It's a sad truth that those who REALLY want to moderate, are often pretty bad at it.
A moderator council could be it's own field of landmines.
On that note, I've always found the continual survival of 4chan rather suspicious.
I met Shog9 on another forum over a decade ago. I had no idea he was a community manager on stackoverflow.
The more SO ask for Pardon or try to appease worse it gets.
Just stop the notification "From the CEO".
And continue to provide value.
That is it.
A desire to acquire shitloads of overconsumption rights is broadly functional within the mythological system of capitalism, but it is not a grand mission, however blogged up.