Tavern on the Meta

2:23 AM

wow....I picked a good time for a meeting. Gotta miss all the fireworks it seems (and I don't like spiders :P)

0_0

camel spiders in the middle of the night when in flip flops (cause our showers were outside) - nope, not doing spiders unless they are of the Man, Gwen, or other comic variety

DK Bose

Mini-spam attack over at Ask Ubuntu. Can someone help?

oh, someone used Dick, meaning something beside Orwell, in reference to SE (company) that's refreshing....except they used the movie not the book.......

Minority Report the book is lightyears better than the movie

Gwideon

Hmmm

2:41 AM

@Gwideon If "hmmm" is in reference to me: I'm just a huge fan of the book Ubik and other works by that author :)

Gwideon

Sorry for my blathering but I just realized something. I um can’t leave the drama alone. Also yeah I get that.

@LinkBerest eh...

PKD's stuff tended to be complicated and 'high concept'.

Nearly no movie adaptations really caught the feeling of the books

yeah, love it

but sometimes were good on their own

Blade Runner (original haven't seen the new one") was pretty awesome

2:44 AM

(Bladerunner for example... strangely there's a book called bladerunner which is totally different and pretty good)

Well have you read the book it was based on?

Electric sheep? yep, love both (then again on that one Dick had a major say in the screen play)

Yup

but many elements were different

yeah, love 'em for different reasons

Also the different cuts of bladerunner had very different 'feels'

one of these days I'm going to see all the versions

2:46 AM

So - essentially

I watched bladerunner in 'parts' over a decade

and re-watch the anime I mentioned earlier

so my memory of it was basically several cuts cobbled together

and .... clone myself so I have time to get everything done

including the original voiceover one

I eventually managed to watch the director's cut

Actually - I love that about Bladerunner. The cuts being different, making it feel like different realities, is just sssooo Dick like :)

fyi, the Amazon mini-series (Electric Sheep) was also pretty good but not the level of the movie

2:48 AM

yup

but electric sheep was more of an anthology

and nowhere near as good as love,death and robots

lol...my wife hates when I watch that and it is one of my favorite things on Netflix (after Stranger Things....or Seven Deadly Sins....depends on my mood)

is there a meta post somewhere that has a detailed timeline of the whole situation with Monica? I vaguely remember a MSE post with a detailed timeline. but my search fu is failing me

Actually the 20 minute an episode format too

@enderland one moment

I'm not going to disclose how much time I've spent searching for this, to protect the innocent :v

@enderland this answer meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/…

2:52 AM

also meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334399/…

@enderland it would beon the front page but someone decided flooding it would be a great way to protest

ah was thinking of this meta.stackexchange.com/a/334417/193412

thank you both!

.....I think there are like 3 other ones too (if not as detailed).....lol, anyone else find that kinda sad?

Not really

Its what interests folks who are here for various reasons

whether its due to an interest in the community as a whole, events with specific people or just to watch things burn

or people who just care about a friend going through a hellish situation :\

burninate meta

3:04 AM

hmmm....I moved from Herbert to Lovecraft and am about done with my last Lovecraftian book. Maybe its time for a Dick book

oh! Neuromancer - forgot I found a copy of that at the library book sale. Yay! time to get lost in another world for a while

@enderland yup

That falls under the second :/

@StephanS not helpful

yeah, I kinda meant that in the "its sad that we need to keep putting this point forward" (WB lost a lot) but to save my sanity I'm focusing on some of the best World building books I have (for at least a bit) - or in Dick's case "world building then tearing down then re-building then...wait? where am I?!"

5:13 AM

This recent PSA video by a certain gaming YouTube channel was eerily familiar: titled "Be. Nice. Our Philosophy on Elitism & Toxicity" youtube.com/watch?v=bSO-EC4hT2E

The gist is: Our purpose is to put out accurate information. We don't want anyone to force certain ways of doing things. We object to the view that we are the cause of unwelcomeness: as the larger community grows, there are bound to be new people who bring different mentalities and cause cultural clash. (By the way, we aren't saying all of our community is behaving in an unwelcoming way; just that there's a vocal minority among us)

Hi

o/

@ento there's also an increasing amount of fatigue over this

And its kinda worth remembering we basically had a massive influx of people into meta because of this

and other controversies

and well there's three different things going on

5:34 AM

@JourneymanGeek and it's wrong. Meta is supposed for discussing the software, by its own labels. CoC should be discussed out of Meta. Out of SE. --> Downvoting every further bit.

Yes, it's been escalating and seems unsustainable - in a very broad sense. I've been trying to write a summary in my native (non-english) language and it's been hard trying to keep it short.

@202324 I disagree

but if I flagged off topic and gets rejected, problem are moderators; labels are obsolete

One of the critical uses of any meta is to help set and communicate site culture

Or network culture

that was not properly labeled, learned through flag rejection, not cool

5:36 AM

it is a useful way to get feedback as well

@ento There's literally 2-3 long running issues, 4-5 current ones....

its in no way simple

Lets say SE reinstated Monica - that and the new framework for moderator removal covers much of our issues on that side

The new Ad system has very bad optics and ironically - is probably going to need a fair bit of effort to fix for what could have been a low effort way to add ads

The pronoun thing? I'm pretty sure that some folks are mainly here because of the controversy, and when it dies down I'm sure we can try to hammer out a much more nuanced way of looking at things. We'll be bothering the CMs with the painpoints all we can ;p

We did also fail a few people

that... needs work

that's actually the really important thing

We also have had a bit of a adverserial relationship with the company and some benign neglect

that... might be tricky to fix

They would have to fix like a dozen things for things to go anywhere near back to normal

quickly too, like within a couple weeks

@Magisch This will not be quick

this will certainly not be painless

And you don't solve problems at once

@JourneymanGeek not going to happen.

you need to break it down into managable chunks

@202324 there's also the view that you can't separate software and culture. By Clay Shirky (originally), I think

5:44 AM

@202324 I don't know it it can't

@ento SE has a monumental depth and breadth of talent on the software side

Even when there was no development on the core Q&A engine, stuff was happening ;p

On the cultural side - I feel to an extent they scaled it badly, assumed it could be shrunk and things would take care of itself

user204841

6:06 AM

Good morning!

6:18 AM

Morning!

6:34 AM

morning

morning

Kevin B

Goodnight

o/

6:50 AM

@JourneymanGeek reinstating Monica at this point seems pointless. Also, were I Monica, I would certainly not be an unpaid moderator. In fact, I resigned.

@Sklivvz Her decision if she wants to come back

But at least offer to

I don't think it's feasible

Such an asian concept ;p

lets not beat around the bush they need to issue full retractions to all the newspapers that picked up this story

thats the actual kick of the teeth that they havent done that

@Sklivvz Its worth remembering the concept of face works both ways

One can give face in order not to lose face

6:53 AM

That takes leadership

That is one thing we have never had control of ;p

Or even an avenue to post Jeff

I think we'll get a nothingburger in 4 weeks or so and after that nothing else

would you like some nothing fries with that nothing burger

First Jeff left, then most employees who understood Jeff's vision and were loud about it left, now it's the time for community leaders.

@Sklivvz There's only so much we can do

@Sklivvz don't forget all the things in between

You have to understand that SE was once a company with zero turnover, then starting in 2017-ish turn over went up, both because of the layoffs and because of the restructuring

6:56 AM

@Sklivvz Monica demanded reinstation several days ago

@Sklivvz and both of those kinda were cause of the direction the company took

Of course in any company this leads to a loss of culture

The pivot away from public Q&A started before that

6 months before

documentation, old teams, developer pages

I think that was late 2016

yo

6:59 AM

@Sklivvz I was also thinking the big careers pivot

what, bringing in jobs? yeah that was decided and built at the same time we started those three projects

I'm not a dev. I'm not really the 'core' market everyone talks about

bringing in? sure

but that was basically the product that got the most focus

still the whole animated ads thing stings a little

As much as the company lost mindshare, the community lost mindshare too

all this spam fighting but they allow paid spam

7:01 AM

And tbh, things did get better a while

@Sklivvz I doubt that SE is going to go "Hey, we shed a lot of you, come baaaaaack"

Even if it would be nice

first there was SO with a SaaS model; then Careers; then Stack Exchange; then localized SO; then SO with Enterprise (plus docs/jobs/developer pages); now SO with Enterprise/teams/jobs

and rebuilding community culture in the company is...

... not happening

I wouldn't know how to do that

It's really just a matter of time before the hypen site story repeats itself and something better comes along

at that point, we'll all be gone to that place

7:04 AM

@Magisch rehiring folks? Never say never, but I doubt there would be a organised effort to

nah, short of the shareholders pulling the plug that is not happening

@Magisch I think there's a few misteeps left for that

do you have any confidence they won't make those too?

@Magisch is SE a public company?

@JourneymanGeek Given the current leadership, there's a distinct possibility. The new CEO seems to be a "technical" CEO focused on profitability, not a "product" CEO focused on market fit, IMO

7:05 AM

I don't know what mistakes there would be

we had this exact discussion a year and a half ago and most of us were still optimistic back then, but the pessimists proved to be 110% right

@Sklivvz wait....

Are you saying te new guy could try to rebuild community culture inside the company or no?

The new guy will bring his own culture

@StephanS I'm a shareholder on a private company. One doesn't rule out the other.

Ah, but what kinda culture?

That's a critical thing

7:07 AM

That remains to be seen

Ya

To quote an old TV show...

at least the content is cc licensed

"I don't know you"

so we can keep it for the next iteration

It's telling though that the CEO has not said anything to the community yet (not even introduced himself when Joel blogged about him). Yet he talked to BI already.

7:08 AM

@Sklivvz I wouldn't be surprised if all that was lined up in advance

The new CEO has a background in marketing mergers and acquisition at a private fund iirc

@rene lol, I know, maybe my link to that message was misleading, but I thought he might know (more an actual question than a counterpoint)

that's not the kind of person to talk to anyone but investors and investor relations

@Magisch eh, maybe?

But also seems to be a techie at some point

ANd well

Its probably a pretty bad way to start a job

Reminds me of a story a co-worker told me...

server room was right next to our office and the UPS caught fire on his first day

@StephanS SE is privately held and also VC funded.

7:12 AM

@Magisch also his careeer is all over the place. Actually very typically of folks in the indian tech industry

So honestly

really don't have a measure of him

modern SE does not get the benefit of the doubt from me

4

I'll believe the new CEO is not a hedge fund liquidator when he proves otherwise

And in the current situation it makes a lot of sense to keep him out of it until things cool down

@Magisch snort

@rene interesting. Does Jeff still own a part, or did he sell all of it?

Its ok, I don't work for SE, and I haven't had a company I work for close down in 2 jobs anyway ;p

@StephanS I don't think anyone really knows

He seems to still promote it so maybe

7:15 AM

@StephanS he opines on it ;p

@JourneymanGeek let the users and moderators together elect community-selected teachers/companions who could best teach staff members about how the site works and what users want, and let them work together for a couple weeks or as long as needed until they are sufficiently in tune with the community values. Quite easy. Staff just has to want to do it.

It's really a shame they went the VC route

@user1306322 eh, so, there's a few people I've interacted with

should have gone and made like wikipedia instead and went nonprofit

So here's kinda the thing

7:17 AM

@StephanS and that is why it is private ... we shouldn't know

A: What does the Stack Overflow dev team spend their time on?

there's a ton of us who would happily teach and help out staff unfamiliar with Q&A

Sébastien Renauld

serious question time

5

not a lot of (visible) features are being added to the Stack Exchange sites Do you have many suggestions for "Visible" features? Or any in mind? Are there pros / cons to these ideas, are they really needed, is the network broken without? On the other hand a few long-standing problems are...

But tey need to ask for help

Sometimes we do

Sébastien Renauld

how does that statement at the end not fall short of the rule regarding noise

But well - that also needs an investment back in the community

Oh

@SébastienRenauld it was done as a protest

He was asked to stop.

7:20 AM

There are a couple personality traits that unite all elected moderators, which make all of this work. They want to learn and improve. Staff doesn't share this desire, so we are unable to move in the right direction.

@user1306322 It isn't so simple

There's a few things I guess

I suppose there's also money involved and years of technological debt around the site engine :p

I share the pessimism of most people regarding current management

Most of the folks who @Sklivvz talks about didn't learn about the culture from us

there needs to be a major change in management to have any chance at turning this around

7:22 AM

they were part of our communities

But what's the value in hanging out on chat?

right now I don't see any meta posts by staff members who are decision makers asking for community input or outright for our help

The original CM team were kinda hybrid devs, which then pivoted to what was essentially a huge (temporary) community evangelism team.

CMs are not decision makers, so that doesn't count for that purpose

@user1306322 there's a poor sentiment about meta over time

@user1306322 Depends on your value of what decision makers are and real power is

whatever the sentiment is, how else are key staff members going to communicate with the community?

7:24 AM

@user1306322 Jeff used to hang out on chat

send everyone an email or something weird like inbox notifications?

@user1306322 can you blame them every time they say something we mob them (myself included )

Is this a friendly enough community for that?

@JourneymanGeek yes

@user1306322 I considered this a work in progress when I was a RO first, then a mod

I feel like I'm 10 steps back and everyone's sitting around a hospital waiting for their favourite grandma to die

Or that scene in red dog.

7:26 AM

have you seen reddit? facebook? yahoo answers? (rhethorical question) -- what we have here definitely is friendly, yes because I'm comparing it to the other bad examples, we can't evaluate such things in a vacuum

@user1306322 Its not what it was or what it could be

I can even understand why its so negative

it is not hard to ignore non-constructive comments when the percentage of constructive ones is so invaluably high

this is why people stay on StackOverflow for programming answers even though the reception is so cold most of the time

@user1306322 some stuff hurts

it's invaluable, despite the cold reception

Some stuff might need to but ... you still need to build folks up not tear them down

7:28 AM

we can all improve together, but (dear staff) please understand this is not a special place on the internet where you are 100% guaranteed nothing will hurt you

@user1306322 "Hurting' folks should hopefully never happen

agreed

We're unhappy about events and even decisions

I mean, in a lot of situations we often make things worse trying to make things better

maybe things need to get worse before they get better

@JourneymanGeek same thing can be said about both the members of community and staff

7:30 AM

@user1306322 have you ever been on club penguin?

no, it was primarily an american thing I believe, I'm not a US citizen

that place was 100% safe

I heard it closed down

@user1306322 It could

I have no real influence over many of them

I have a little influence here

@user1306322 then I guess you're right there are no more safe places on the internet

7:33 AM

@StephanS there's different sorts of safe spaces

leaders among any corporation have to be able to face their customers/clients. If they are unable to do so, I don't know how to react. Usually such businesses bankrupt and dissolve rather quickly or nobody heard about them if they're able to survive quietly under the radar.

@user1306322 we are neither

I'm looking for interactions ending with positive results. So far we're mostly getting no interactions and negative results.

And I don't think any other platform has the sort of relationship we do with the company

so.. where are we going wrong?

neutral results are not good enough at this point

@JourneymanGeek we?

7:34 AM

Sure.

We

if you pose the current situation as a challenge of sorts...

none of that is on us

@Magisch well not in terms of blame

in terms of our actions and the effects

we are not good enough at persuading the decision making part of SE corporation that they need to do things as we tell them to

we're not the ones who are going to be stuck fixing it

this gets bad enough, we'll all be gone to the next thing that puts up a sign "I'm not going to self sabotage quite as much"

7:36 AM

if that is the kind of challenge you wish to attempt, that is

at this point I can't think of anything the company could do to earn my trust back, I'm just sticking around to see what happens

6

none of us are personally invested into making SE's shareholders happy

hell, this place can go bankrupt for all I care once something better comes along

@user1306322 sure, so how do we get better at it?

Their saving grace so far has been that it's really hard to move the core community somewhere

Personally, I don't have a goal to stay on this specific site, under this specific leadership. My goal is to have my personal contributions and contributions of other users to remain out there in the worldwide internet, and to have the same or better tools to do what we have been doing for 10+ years. It does not have to be here.

7:38 AM

which is getting easier by the day :P

@Magisch its happened a few times

@JourneymanGeek I don't have the particular skills gears towards fixing broken corporate leaderships, sorry. Maybe try your luck with shog or other CMs

yesterday was sort of an inflection point

@user1306322 Well, its more the willingness to re-examine yourself

because so far there isn't a SE 3.0 under better leadership, I still have to consider this current site as the best available platform, today

and so I have no other choice but to try and fix parts of it that I have the skill to

7:40 AM

I don't think people really understand how special it is for people to work for free

@Magisch mmh?

like small edits, calming down people, asking for clarifications where I feel it is important

my goal is to make sure the contributions aren't wasted and the people here who had nothing to do with this mess don't feel it

but I have 0 loyalty left to the company itself

@StephanS I don't see my activity as working for free, I'm working for the good of the humankind. It just happens so that my work is being hosted by one particular for-profit business entity. That is all there is to it.

my work pays me back, I've seen it

@202324 the last person I trusted from the community apparently also lost their faith in the company's direction

7:42 AM

ah ya

you know how you publish something on github and a couple years later you see some cool app or script that uses your past contributions, especially as a critical portion of its code?

I'm ready to write SE off as a standin only until something better happens

@user1306322 yeah I'll give you that, it's a cool feeling

I don't trust just google to have my files, I also sync my cloud folder on other platforms that provide the same free cloud space. If there were other sites like SE, I would cross-post all my contributions across all of them so that the knowledge would not disappear forever is one site shuts down.

@StephanS I've never considered it work. I enjoy the community and many of the spaces.

7:47 AM

@JourneymanGeek you right maybe work wasn't the best word for it

@StephanS I get paid for work

I'd hope so

I don't have any illusion that I'm putting in whatever time I'm putting in here cause well - I feel like it

discussing how we can fix the leadership of SE is like discussing how we can fix leadership of say Github or Gitlab or SourceForge. I don't think it's in our powers to do such things. But there are more platforms such as Github to which we can go if we disagree with one of those sites' leadership. With SE there aren't any alternatives on par with its outreach and functionality. If anything needs to be changed, it's this.

other than slowly educating staff, what other routes exist, theoretically? hostile takeover? buying out the corporation and firing everyone, replacing all staff? that's not realistic at all.

@user1306322 I doubt we have the money ;p

7:51 AM

on the other hand, creating a new platform? though hard, sounds much more realistic

@user1306322 lets consider what SE took...

about 300 million in funding.

@JourneymanGeek mm, but if we'd ran some of those objectionable ads for a while... :p

Assume we keep it lean and cheated...

SE still had about 2 devs (including Jeff) and 3 CMs (+ Jeff)

for one, I think the new iteration would have to be open-source

Joel probably was in it too, and probably supplied some of the funding and fog creek's resources

They also had almost a dozen CMs at their peak I suspect?

7:53 AM

@JourneymanGeek Jeff is an amazing coder but I don't think he holds water to some people on this site

I think the idea of such a platform is generic enough that it should belong to the entirety of mankind, and specific implementations can be forked

But that was SE 2.0

@StephanS Jeff's big gift was being the frontman

I think jeffs big gift was to own his mistakes and keep his pride and arrogance in check

@Magisch Jeff has a lot of that too ;p

that's true, he knows how communities work

7:54 AM

@Magisch that is a very rare but very valuable set of traits

But Jeff at that point also had not much to prove and was a BDFL

@JourneymanGeek yeah but he never gave up on us. current management have given up on us

and I don't think those same skillsets would work the same way now

we're officially the enemy of management now

@Magisch eh, some folks.

Even then

7:55 AM

no, everyone, including you

lol

snort

I don't think anyone hates me

I'm just a wierd proxy for the company for a few people

not you directly, but what you represent and what you support

I do not understand why

@JourneymanGeek are you saying you're not getting paid by Soro? lol

7:56 AM

@Magisch uhm. Fairness, hope and sheer doggy adorableness?

@StephanS .... No.

no, some hope in the community

XD

I still can't believe that was a question on meta

you don'T share the view that everyone who is against whatever SE is doing at any point is problematic and needs to be gone

and management shares that view

that makes you also their enemy

Gyromagnetic

exodus to an SE clone

management wants all users who are stirring up any kind of fuss out, which is understandable as far as heartless corporate interests go

7:59 AM

@Magisch I disagree with some of it

but that's also the mindset of a "want food, eat now" animal with no foresight into long term profits

@Magisch I fear worse

@Gyromagnetic we can all just go to the site SE copied, Segmentfault, the freest site out there

that the problematic ones stay