0: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...
Such an elevation may require some small edits. This adds all sorts of benefits:
1. Given that it is now clear that the question is moving from 'this answers the question asked by the original poster' to 'this is now like a blog post, generally useful information that should score highly on google', it is completely fine to edit the question and turn it into something that no longer entirely matches the original asker. I'd even go so far as to clone the question, and leave the real question unmolested.
2. The question (or, better yet, an answer) can be marked as obsoleted or outdated. There are huge swaths of questions on SO that have a ton of votes and an answer that was fantastic in the past, but is now flat out misleading or wrong, but it seems both onerous to begin the path of finding a few thousand people to downvote it, as well as 'mean' to the poster of that answer, and tricky for the historic purposes of the internet (imagine a fix in some source code has a comment that links to this answer!) - and for similar reasons, editing the answer so that it is nothing like the original answer is also flat out bizarre. It'd be so much better if it was possible to vote an answer as 'obsolete' or 'outdated'. But that doesn't work if SO is at odds with itself and at once a repo of common questions AND a specific question->specific answer forum.
3. Given that an SO community now has a presumably much smaller set of questions-with-answers that have been elevated to 'commonly asked question with great curated answers', they can 'police' their fiefdom of curated general knowledge vastly better, with mods and random passersby invited to ocassionally inspect one of these curated answers and see if it still seems useful, applicable, and correct in the current day and age. It also becomes far more feasible to browse through the entirety of the curated questions list.
It seems like a useful feature that often has a positive effect. It's not clear to be that it's improved the general attitude of the community or of management.
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-comm...
I'd describe as every question starting out as a forum post and only upvoted questions become Questions.
No one's question gets deleted. Question quality doesn't get diluted.
But does it matter? The SO I know still aggressively hints at the 'I dont know what we actually are' problem; if you answer very obvious questions, you get downvoted with notes to 'VTC and move on', for example. I also get no option to vote to promote an answer into the wiki.
The community wiki feature as implemented does not fulfill what I'm proposing, I'd say. Or at least, the current policies do not mesh with the existence of the wiki in a way to solve the dilemma.
You're left with a golden nugget of interaction with most answers, and that builds up over time.
I would switch too, but they do provide value as of today, even while your first few interactions might be more unsavory, because at the end of the day, as far as I can see, the people giving terrible first answers are regular people, and if so, the value they're providing is finding the good answer in a sea of awful people.
A moderator had questions about / issues with a new Code of Conduct policy change which would “apparently force” moderators to use preferred pronouns of users, while the moderator preferred to use “they” to avoid using the wrong pronoun. StackExchange abruptly demoted the moderator before the change was published, and have since failed to give a good, evidence supported reasoning why. StackExchange attempted to apologize, multiple times, escalating to its CTO. The moderator still feels hurt and has not been reinstated.
- The moderator in question is a professional writer and preferred to avoid using any pronouns at all. She emailed SE to ask if that was acceptable, or if the new policy was mandating that she go out of her way to use pronouns. SE did not respond to her emails at all, then several weeks later they revoked her moderator status on a Friday night without even telling her — she figured it out when logged into the site and saw that her moderator tools were gone.
- Stack Exchange then went to the press and called her a transophobe and a bigot. They did post several “apologies,” but they weren’t apologies at all — they simply restated the (false) accusations and said they weren’t going to do anything to fix it. (See https://web.archive.org/web/20191005000615/https://meta.stac...)
- SE didn’t retract any of the accusations until the moderator got a lawyer and prepared to sue for defamation (SE’s accusations were the top Google result for her name for months)
- Then when all of the outrage started to die down, part 2 began when SE fired two long-time community managers who were just about the only staff members left that the community still trusted: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342039/258777
Between that and their CEO retiring, it's clear that the site is moving to a new way of working, and it's one that isn't beneficial to their actual users. If they're having trouble making money the way they previously did, then I guess they have to try something new, but it sure is sad to see this happen.
My question is, why can't SO make a profit? All the substantive content is given for free by the community, and it's a widely known, relied-upon site. How is it so hard to cover operating costs from ads and whatever related sources come from that?
I’m purposefully not choosing the latest quarter that looks worse. I don’t think it’s fair to judge whether a company has a sound business model based on the effects of Covid.
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
Adjusted EBITDA. We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), excluding (i) income (loss) from discontinued operations, net of income taxes, (ii) net income (loss) attributable to non-controlling interests, net of tax, (iii) provision for (benefit from) income taxes, (iv) income (loss) from equity method investment, net of tax, (v) interest expense, (vi) other income (expense), net, (vii) depreciation and amortization, (viii) stock-based compensation expense, (ix) certain legal, tax, and regulatory reserve changes and settlements, (x) asset impairment/loss on sale of assets, (xi) acquisition and financing related expenses, (xii) restructuring charges and (xiii) other items not indicative of our ongoing operating performance.
Also, Uber has raised 160x as much capital, which makes the comparison slightly hyperbolic.
IMO, they should not have created non-technical sites. This is where the danger lies, but they were confident they can handle it.
The mistake was to treat each site as a separate community and expect it to eventually grow to an SO-level success. In contrast, Reddit's subreddit approach is much more scaleable and can tolerate niche communities. Reddit is strong not because of any single community, but because of the combination of communities to grab inbound traffic and keep users engaged. SO partially missed out on this.
I don't believe this is true. At least as of 2016, the various sites were on a shared codebase [0], and there were two SQL Server clusters total [1], for all the various sites, chat, devops, other systems, etc.
[0]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
[1]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
Sites don't need separate database servers but separate database schemas, which is also why migrations between sites are still quite broken. Many processes around launching a new site appear to be very manual.
Of course, something like politics.stackexchange.com would be a suicide.
What makes Judaism as a topic more heated than Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, all of which also have their own Stack Exchange sites?
If so, what and why?
If not, what are you talking about?
That’s because it’s difficult to unseat an incumbent in a market where there are strong network effects, which is also the same reason that investors are willing to invest. The fact that they have lost brand trust without losing traffic is a positive, not a negative.
I think you just answered your own question on why people are willing to throw money at them.