Internet QOTD: Do you see a man running away?

@Rob I... see both

Its more 'manlike' at small sizes though

@Rob I saw a man running away from being chased by a dog at the same time

...!?

@Rob ah, yes. That makes sense.

Who knew there was a few dozen definitions for the word.

@rene I guess the expression: "The works" makes no sense to people outside of North America.

It is not something I would use. At least if I haven't seen it used before.

Do not annoy @adam ...

That link was less than the works.

@rene lol

I am pretty sure Adam has the keys to knock something off our imgur instance

Yeah.

What is the real reason why a lot of mods are leaving SE sites?

@JudeNiroshan Well - The root cause is - well, SE's not done a great job in supporting the community in the past half decade or so. There's a couple of well documented things - publicly removing a fairly well respected mod, firing CMs and so on....

And well - it depends on where you feel you can do the most good, and whether you feel being a moderator here is part of that

All I know is this started with Firing CM Monika

1. Monica was never a CM

bit of a pity really

but it definitely didn't start there

I couldn't find any meta post that explains the real reason

@JudeNiroshan I've literally worn out a keyboard over the last decade talking about these things :)

I know when Bill the lizard stepped out, but for me, it was kinda his personal decision

@JudeNiroshan any mod quitting, or staying or coming back is a personal decision

I quit because I didn't agree with the manner of Monica's removal, and I came back, rather oddly enough, because I didn't trust SE's stewardship of meta in the period immediately after.

but many of those posts mention the reason was the community was transforming into a company. I guess it is supposed to happen, otherwise, such a large community couldn't be managed properly

hmm

So, there's three different visions for what SE should be

Some folks are entirely focused on it being a profitable, money making concern, even to the detriment of the community.

Others feel that the company (which has always been a 'thing') hasn't done a great job at being the stewards of the network, and we should have a more independent structure to run the network

I personally believe to various extents, they're both right. But the two sides see each other as enemies, and mutually parasitic, while what we need is something in between, with the community, and corporate goals being mutually beneficial things.

aren't the mods get a stipend for their commitments?

Nope

No, they're just volunteers

For most mods - their commitment is entirely because they care about and want to steward their community. (or POWER! GLORIOUS POWER!)

at the end of the day, SO is a business. It has expenses and revenues. Commitment will along pay bills. So believe if the company earns revenue, it should be shared across the stakeholders

You do get a one time swag shipment (was better in my day...)

@JudeNiroshan personally - I'd rather they invest that in resources that benefit the community

More CMs for example, and development on the public Q&A (and adjunct things like chat)

@JourneymanGeek yeah, that's great.

It would have more impact than whatever amount spread amongst say, 500 mods

@JourneymanGeek Isn't it the usual business strategy for any company? Increase resources and reliability. I wonder who really doesn't give attention but want to run the business for future :D

@JudeNiroshan the 'revenue' side of the business was at first mainly careers, and now teams and SE enterprise

'Direct' revenue from public Q&A is mostly ads

careers would have easily overtaken LinkedIn. 5000 USD membership is a joke to many recruiters

So public Q&A , is one of those things they never quite got a grasp on, especially for the smaller sites on the network

IMO Careers was a dumb bet

extremely crowded market

I think every company passes its climax. I never used teams, but I don't think it's a useful product at all

Oh - it has its purposes

We use it for a few mod-internal things and its reasonably handy if you want to share knowledge in a restricted group

So, the initial idea of the company beginning from the time Jeff left was to focus on the overall SE network of sites and try to make that the core business while subsidizing it through Careers and ad sales, but then after VC investments happened in 2015, they essentially directed a refocusing of the company from SE to SO

This blog post goes through the specifics of that.

(though a quick note: the actual company name wasn't changed from "Stack Exchange, Inc.", merely its brand name)

TL;DR this was the original idea, but then they changed to this

@SonictheCuriouserHedgehog I heard various stories about that

ok, so changing name isn't that bad. huh? Adding new products to the platform is also a good move.

Something about SO having better brand recognition

@JudeNiroshan hm... Documentation, dead, careers... has a slump every few years, and is slightly tarnished...

@SonictheCuriouserHedgehog the second picture has aged poorly

I also enjoyed the Documentation back then. I wish I could still have it. It was to the point, no jargon

I think we come back to "problem looking for a solution"

SO's big hook was it filled a need

SE did learn this lesson, but chose to go about it the hard way instead of the easy way.

@JourneymanGeek ahhh, this could be a problem for the investors

SO teams product is kind of a new solution for confluence for companies

there was already an incumbent with issues (Experts Exchange) - SE did it better, had a fairly charismatic leadership to bootstrap things...

Building something new from scratch is hard

yeah, true

Also - in a sense, SE posts are documentation

anyways, it's pretty shocking sometimes many great people are no longer helping to build the SO community

@JudeNiroshan - Well - its up to the company to earn their respect back

and this also means there's a few interesting options coming up if you don't want to use SE

reddit is not meant to replace SO, IMO

lol

Codiact's explicitly an SE clone-workalike, and they're apparently doing some interesting stuff

(and Monica's involved there )

there's a few others

I mean, if there's a point where I give up on here, I could start an SU alternative there ;)

Never quite got into reddit personally

@JNat cross site spammer: stackexchange.com/users/20578513/md-masum

@Luuklag Did he do something on SO? Usual image link silliness on MSE, nothing on SU

A question:

When a post is migrated to another website with a positive score etc., the votes are attributed to Community...

But doesn't that mean you can upvote the post twice?

Once on the website where it was asked, and once on the site where it was migrated to?

@Ollie yes! Voting fraud!

@rene And it's allowed?! ;)

Mind you, you can also down vote twice. Some posts deserve that ... even after migration

@Ollie try it, and if you don't get suspended it is allowed ;)

*decides not to tell @rene*

I expect it not to be a problem.

@rene I confess, I have tried it. Although the recipient of my two upvotes was a CM, so I doubt that ;)

@rene Shouldn't there be some sort of check to keep you from voting multiple times on the same post, regardless of site shuffling?

CM are just in on the voting complot

@Ollie no, why? I can totally see me downvoting a post here on MSE and upvpoting it once it gets on the right site.

I can cast a vote per site. Seems legit to me

I meant two votes of the same kind. You can still switch votes on a post in 5 minutes on the same site.

So it's not 1 person giving another 20 reputation.

Or 1 taking 4, etc.

And as migrations are so limited and the number of vote "abuse" even lower it is not worth having an insanely complex cross-site voting check.

Technically the post gets removed from one site. So it wil be gone in 60 days and so will its votes.

There is no gain

Badge gain, and possibly a privilege

... and the up/down voter keeps their badge too.

Posted site rec

Okay. Would that work on IPS?

> "Please I need help on how to start the conversation and end it."

Great conversation starter

Along with the rest of the question, it seemed to meet every requirement listed in the Help page linked to; assuming that they compose the question properly.

Okay, we'll see what happens

🏃‍♂️💣

They'll invite them to go bowling.