might have even been the board insisting someone from outside coming in
As someone who's seeing the 'upper' management being rather shook up because the investment firm who invested are now eyeing the company and flying people in.... it smells very much like this
eh, depends on what you consider... an impact. i mean, I for example feel far less inclined to participate, far less likely to suggest others use it, far less likely for me to want to use their non-Q&A tools, but if you mean impacting the avg user asking/answering, i'd say no none of this is going to have any significant impact on them in the near-term. What it will do long-term is anyone's guess
What's certain is that some portion of disgruntled users will continue to participate, this problem isn't going to just disappear if left stagnant long enough. Each successive wave of new users every year will learn about the past failings and make their own decision about how they feel about it
i can't begin to guess how i would have felt seeing SO for the first time as it is currently
When i joined in it was far less ad driven, the home page wasn't a marketing page for teams, the majority of questions weren't dupes, and I felt that by answering questions I was learning to be better at what I do
almost every question asked today, if broken down into it's base components, has been answered by 1-3 previous questions
"I need teh codez for building Facebook but like Twitter and Instragam and for Dogs not people. Answer needs to spell everything out exactly because I only bid $20 on RentASucker. Plz its URGENTSZ" /s
Thanks for taking the time to provide a response, Teresa.
I'm going to be honest here. The last time we went down this road, with the CEO communicating with us, I felt like there was something at least positive.
Then, it felt like the Meta community was blindsided in a horrible way. Any stand...
at the very top of the email they sent there is a url that looks like this: imap://YourGMailAddressHere@gmail.com@imap.gmail.com:993/fetch>UID>/INBOX>450#
Our motivation for the change was to recognize that both question askers and answerers are a vital part of our ecosystem and to reward them both equally.
Having examined the data from before and after the change, we haven’t seen any lasting impact (positive or negative) on voting behaviors for q...
The revaluation of question upvotes didn't produce any positive or negative effect on usage patterns (voting, privilege use, etc.)
I have no doubt the company is trying to earn profits first and foremost, it's just evident now, that's not the problem though, they can earn money all they want, just not too much at the cost of… their own ability to earn money long term
you gotta be a bit smarter and see a bit farther ahead and you'll know undermining your core product (by firing CMs, etc) is not going to help even your profits
it's kinda sad that they can't even go for profits as efficiently as they could, and that both the profits goal and the community's goals could be achieved better if the company just read meta more often
for me it's more a case of... it feels like the standards have dropped drastically over the past 4-5 years. I don't know if they're trying to chase the dollar, trying to resolve the declining answer rates, or... what. but they keep going down this rabbit hole and claiming everything is great, but, the numbers don't reflect that reality.
but that is not new, companies have done this kind of mistake before, so just look at their postmortems and learn from their mistakes, thankfully there are articles online written about this phenomenon about other sites by now
I think the main point is that public Q&A is an afterthought for the company. It is not the "main product" as you said. It is just the showcase for the product.
by standards i didnt mean just quesiton/answer, i meant their use of ads, their self promotion, the super marketing-focused approach that they seem to have for everything
it didn't feel this way before
it didn't feel like every other company who's focusing on the bottom line
and just a bit of a ranty point, nobody who's a regular user has any insider knowledge of what's allegedly "actually" going on inside the company, we can only judge their goals and skills and will by their outwardly visible actions
I feel like too many people who care about these problems forget this
i originally liked the idea behind jobs, i just didn't like it showing up on the page, at work, as i felt that could cause an uncomfortable situation where someone i work for sees me viewing what looks like a job site
try using a private browsing mode and browse StackOveflow like a new user, and see how it feels to get blocked by all the limitations that are imposed on newbie askers
@user1306322 Well, it kinda always was like that: they never made money off of the public Q&A. Even in the very beginning, the only serious money was coming from licensing the software to big fish like Microsoft who ran local instances. Either way though, it clearly isn't the main product now. That's just the way it is.
not only is it expensive, but in this rural area, it's pretty much never going to find a candidate willing to work for what we pay. it's hard to convince people that the cost of living and qol here more than makes up for the lower wages
Back when I liked this company, I convinced my boss to use SO Jobs for recruitment but they were asking for way too much money for way too little service. We found we could get much better people through normal recruiters and for less money.
@MadScientist Remember that talk Joel gave that resurfaced recently? He said there that they were selling private SO instances from the very beginning but in an unofficial capacity: only to really big fish who could afford a few million for it and needed no support. Enterprise is a different beast.
@user400654 We're actually getting to the point where it could have been useful, but I'll be damned if I'll enter any sort of legal arrangement with this company. I wouldn't even trust them not to steal our PII from the teams/enterprise instance.
@MadScientist Oh, yes indeed. Not the same at all. But it was, I thought, a source of some non-negligible revenue even then.
The impression I got was that they hit a wall with Careers, and simply couldn't get more marketshare there. And this derailed the original plan for growing revenue
well, the way of the future is not trusting anyone and just running your own instance to contain PII and sensitive business data, so why not just give in earlier and use open source products instead of paid service when you can't possibly trust the other party as much as your own hosting
@user400654 I don't see how you can call something that doesn't bring in revenue (apart from ads) the main product, when they have other things they actually sell.
It kinda does though. You have a company that has three main things it does: i) public Q&A ii) Enterprise/Teams and iii) Jobs. Of those three, the first is given away for free in the hopes that it will funnel people to ii and iii. So I would argue that i is just the door, and the main products are the things they sell.
@terdon I don't think SE would do that. I would trust them reasonably far in that regard. But I'm still disappointed with the reaction to the mass email export I complained about. That would have been easy to restrict, but as long as I still was a mod nothing happened there
Q&A is their product. the people with questions and answers is their audience. From that audience they try to prove that private Q&A is worth paying for.
And it's obvious the company feels that way: just compare the number of people whose job is to deal with public Q&A and the number of people who are in sales or marketing.
@MadScientist Given their complete lack of action over that, I wouldn't even feel safe sharing data with them anymore. Granted, I don't actually think they'd steal it, but only because it would be a huge risk for very little benefit. Not because I trust them implicitly.
You're essentially saying what makes money is the product
that's not what i'm talking about
literally, why do people come here
why is stackoverflow a thing
it's not because it offers teams or jobs services
I'm here because i believe there's still hope for the largest developer community around to get back to it's original goal of helping other developers prosper.
@user400654 I hear you. But I think this is a misunderstanding. I am trying to point out that the fact that people come here is not very relevant. It isn't the main thing the company cares for (surely that's been made very clear by now). So sure, you and I come here for the Q&A, but we are not the people the company is interested in.
i don't not understand that the company cares more about the other initiatives that make them money, i'm not disillusioned. i simply don't care, and push for what i want to be better
i can't fix that they're a for profit business
i can't fix that ads aren't enough to support it
I can push for changes that will support the community
The community is like the structure of a building. You can keep making profits renting out spaces in the building, but if you don't take care of the structure, it will eventually all fall apart.
also important to note that none of this is happening in a vacuum. None of these suggestions/initiatives are going unnoticed just because the company decides not to pursue them. The people building the communities of the future are watching
@terdon Doesn't make much sense to handle those differently. The Teams part might be different, I wouldn't be surprised if they exluded Teams users. But that doesn't change anything about the general issue. I was quite curious on whether some rate limiting would prevent the worst case, but the only way to test it would have been to actually try to access the emails of almost all users, so I never tested that part.
That doesn't mean much if I can perform enough queries. I can't be sure how many are needed to dump most users of a site, that would have been a far too invasive test I never dared to do
Thanks for taking the time to provide a response, Teresa.
I'm going to be honest here. The last time we went down this road, with the CEO communicating with us, I felt like there was something at least positive.
Then, it felt like the Meta community was blindsided in a horrible way. Any stand...
