Tavern on the Meta

12:50 AM

@Magisch sooo... Saying "I told you so" is an awful thing to do and I'm really trying hard to avoid it, but... I'm weak.

146

A: Retiring New Navigation (beta) in preparation for Navigation 3.0

I just posted this as a comment on an internal research document, but I'm gonna post it here too because I think it's something critical to keep in mind as we venture yet again into redesigning navigation: For the vast, vast majority of our users, Google is their navigation. That's true even ...

I pointed this out a lot.

And... Looks like someone else finally noticed. To wit: activity is, uh, not at all evenly distributed across "active" SO users.

FWIW, I went through a heck of a lot of SE logs over Christmas to pull numbers on this for the CM team; the number of heavy answerers who read meta would fill a small city. A small % of total activity on SE, but... That distribution is incredibly uneven

When you set out to measure activity... You got a lot of work to do up-front to define what you're looking for. Skip that... And you're in for a bad time.
Looks like someone skipped that...

And so now, upon realizing that pissing off the 30-some thousand people who keep SO afloat is maybe a bad idea... They're re-thinking their strategy. Good for them; even if a bit late, revisiting bad analysis is always a good choice.

21

Bryan Krause

1:55 AM

So much that isn't working/gets broken stays that way because of the barriers to exactly that: rethinking and revisiting decisions (and often admitting you are wrong along the way, whether externally or internally) is really hard for (people/groups/companies), one of the most prominent bugs in our source code

V2Blast

3:22 AM

192

Q: What is a "closed", “on hold”, or "duplicate" question?

This FAQ is currently outdated due to the new post notices rolling out. Members of the community are working on updates here, and the Stack Exchange team has been asked to update this FAQ here. In the meantime, the information currently in this FAQ is outdated and other reference pages sh...

Apparently this has had a "currently outdated" notice (in the text, not an actual post notice) slapped on both the question and answer since December

And it links to a Github revision(?) saying "Members of the community are working on updates here"

but it doesn't actually seem to have been updated at all since then, and that was December 6th

Feeds

5:37 AM

Podcast: Coaching a Developer Interview

Ben Popper on February 18, 2020

We try to climb the teetering tower of abstraction, examine a human readable magazine on computing, and prepare for Y2038.

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

5:54 AM

@V2Blast De-facto FAQ maintainer (and adder of the notice) speaking here

I added that notice for two reasons, the first of which was that the new notices were, well, new at the time, and were still being refined. I didn't want to unnecessarily bump it with edits as more refinements were being made.

The second reason was because it would require considerable research on my part to update as it would have to be rewritten almost completely given the new notice logic, not to mention having to capture new screenshots and study minute behaviors.

I posted a request asking for the SE team to update the FAQ (linked in my notice) since I noticed they were fast at updating the help center articles, but it resulted in no action.

At this moment, I don't have the time to work on a complete rewrite of it. I've also deferred working on it due to the recent controversy blowup.

Maybe later, at some point, I'll do it.

But until then, the request to the SE team to do so stands.

@Shadow9 About you being the ultimate lifeform?

Journeyman Geek

6:18 AM

@Shog9 I think someone was trying to find facts to fit a narrative 😁

Magisch

@Shog9 I'm genuinely interested how it came to be that CMs knew all that was going on, and told people internally that they're making a terrible mistake, and they still did it

Why even have a highly qualified CM team if you're not going to listen to them?

I could understand (even though it would still be a failing) if everyone at the company was just out of touch with this, but they evidently had people around that knew exactly what was going on and how this would turn out

Journeyman Geek

@Magisch Egos 😁

Magisch

competent management uses the resources they have and know how to delegate. If I'm paying people who can help me deal with stuff like this I'd utilize them surely

V2Blast

6:35 AM

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Which one? :P

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Fair.

rene

7:37 AM

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