I'm somewhat underwhelmed.
The return of the Staging Ground is literally the unshelving of a shelved, very popular idea that, while Stack Overflow Jobs is pretty much a less interesting revival of an old, sunset product lacking most of what stopped it from being yet another job site - assuming that it becomes more than a thin wrapper for Indeed.
A GitHub extension to direct users to Stack Overflow to ask their questions here if they aren’t finding the solution they need using CoPilot.
I'm not a dev, but wouldn't you use Stack Overflow if you needed an answer, and why would you ever want to be the second place someone looks for answers?
The recent changes to the data dump access is a slightly neutered version of the 'idea' that resulted in a strike, and honestly, I'd back another strike if it came to it.
Let's talk instead about
A key takeaway is that Community is and will always be at the center of everything we do. The community and shared knowledge on the platform are irreplaceable.
We were told the company would put 10% of its resources into AI for... no real benefit, and we lost a lot more than that
The return of the Staging Ground isn't a triumph, it's a small bright spark in an otherwise dreary outlook for us, and the company hasn't really shown the community to be the center of what we do. You had a good plan, and lacked the attention span to see it through. While its back in some fashion, the manner in which it happened shows it wasn't a priority.
In the past year, we've had more folks who were active on the community downsized in some teams than they have active on the staff now Former staff who acted as a bridge between the community and company left - potentially directly due to - the staging ground being shelved the last time. These people were community, and they weren't so much replaced, as dropped. We're not likely to find another Cat, V2Blast, Nicolas or many of the other community managers we lost over the years, and the pool of optimists who believe they can make a difference isn't infinite. The company has a clear disconnect from the community
This has been an ongoing antipattern for many years. The company acts against our interests and theirs, fails in their grand plans, and somehow expects us to trust them when they do either the bare minimum, or the exact same thing again with minor changes.
I fear for my community - while my little corners of the network do alright, a good amount of it is due to the work of the moderator teams. We listen, we earn trust, we engage, but a big enough mistake on the company's side could ruin what we've built. I've seen places lose a lot of familiar faces and I don't really see the same level of engagement we used to. I said years ago that the smaller communities didn't get any love, and I think the bigger ones feel it too.
SE isn't a welcoming place for many of us, and the close links between community and staff we once had get more and more tenuous. I quit as a moderator on this site in protest in October 2023, and the company has literally made zero progress in many aspects. We see neither actions aimed at improving trust or community health nor any clear investments in the community. I'd note that our data is literally the next revenue stream, and folks who post quality content leaving would hurt the value of that substantially.
From the perspective of a core community member, over the years we've seen a company that's not held up to its social contract, often ending up being a hostile environment for community members who are staff, lack of care for the health of communities, and a dwindling level of trust.
We need data dumps the company does not control precisely because the company constantly keeps breaking our trust. Maybe some day things will hit a tipping point and some scrappy upstart will end up doing to SE what SE did to the hyphen site.
The company has lacked long term vision for a very long time, and it feels like the folks in management don't want to run a healthy community run social software site - they want a SaaS business where people pay money and don't ask questions.
Unfortunately that's kind of hard over a decade of broken promises and alienating the core community.
I don't want to see the talk. I want to see action. I want to see healthy communities, respect for our needs and for the company and its management to take a good hard look at the mistakes they have made over the last decade and change. Frankly outside the inevitable downsizing of line staff, I feel like the current initiatives failing would be potentially positive for the community if it made management realise things were going wrong. I guess I'm an optimist - since I'm sure folks will tell me nothing will change, and we'll just go through another cycle
I want to be able to work with staff I know for the good of my community, see community members step up to work at Stack Exchange and know they're not going to get the chop the next time the current or past CEO doesn't make their numbers. The company has not valued your best advocates to the community, and we lost ours.
For that matter I'd like to know the teams I directly work with have sufficient resources to do their jobs and are able to attract the people they need from within and outside the community. I've complained about the community team being understaffed a few times and honestly, I'm worried the next time there's a failure elsewhere in the business we'd lose more people we can't afford to. I'd love more direct staff engagement too, but I'd start with knowing that the people on the back end have what they need. The company has historically shown they're very happy to cut down some teams to the bone (we had 4 community managers at one point).
(Full disclosure - I applied to be community manager about 4 times before changing requirements made it impossible. I'd note competition and excitement within the community got less and less, and you'd be lucky to find anyone within the community if you opened up a role.)
I was asked at a recentish job interview about what I did as a moderator on the network. I like what I do, but I do feel like a lot of it was holding things together and keeping folks informed of what was going on. (I was vaguer than I liked.) I'd like to say I was reassuring them - but I need reassurance myself. What I couldn't do was talk about how SE was a shining example of social responsibility and great ties between community and commercial interests... because it isn't.
So, stop saying the community is the center of what you do. Make it so. Show the community is the center of what you do by listening and understanding our needs and building trust before demanding it.
Stop to listen to the sentiment about AI (mostly negative), and try to understand why people are hostile to it. If you can't win over the community to it - most of these initiatives will fail.
I'd note the title of Prashanth's talk was "The future of the internet and the open web." Do stop and consider how the current way that data dump access is structured is the opposite. I grew up on the open web - I missed the walled garden era, and the diversity the web had then. Many current actions - nagging about logins and closing off the data dumps is the exact opposite of what the open web is.
Make the network something people care about again - look at things like community applications and hires for open roles. Have people who are good at actually communicating with the community and can give and get real, unfiltered feedback.
Act on this feedback, not what you want to believe is right - the current obsession with AI is just the latest in the company focusing on something other than the network, to our detriment.
If you read all this way, GG. Gimme a ping somewhere to let me know :D
