combative? Perhaps a bit direct, but not necessarily combative. But I do think it's misinterpreting things a bit, and they really never said the last bit about us being a scornful minority.
But for a company to get input, they need to listen to the other 9 too.. it's one thing even as site like IPS and the community moderating it are struggling with: How do you figure out what people think of your site, if they don't give you feedback on that site?
I guess "forward" would be to a place where we feel like we have a voice... and even if the company doesn't ultimately side with us on a given issue, they acknowledge our position and its merits. A return to something resembling a dialogue.
@IamMonica This one, we all can work on. Try to provide constructive feedback/complaints to staff members, and I'll try and poke them to react to it. And everything that's just 'infinite negativity', well... edit it, flag it, comment on it, clean it up... If you have a minute to spare, explain to people why what they're doing is only making things worse ;)
Sooo... I have a bit of a theory, don't know how much of it is true... but a lot of 'old' users seem to hang very tight to this idea of 'having a voice' in ... well pretty much anything. And that's kinda easy when things are small and new and such things are 'manageable'.
I've only been here for a little over 2 years. It seems I haven't grown up with the kind of 'having a voice in everything' that old users seem to suggest there once was. For me, this is still amazing though, as I can't see myself ever finding a way to complain about things when e.g. Facebook, Twitter changes their UI or f…
I guess what I'm trying to say is... This network is becoming so big, and is getting more and more 'loud voices', but also more and more different ways to group users into ... well, let's call it target audiences/minorities. It's kinda impossible to expect that there'll be discussions for everything these days.
@KevinB Ehh, I was thinking of what I did with regards to scope for IPS before I became a mod there, and the feedback I wrote on the CoC proposal before I became a mod here, but perhaps. If I can use it in any way to try and poke people to reply to stuff, I might :)
that in particular felt like a slap in the face. it felt like they were forcing me to pick a side. Me being someone who at the time was very active on SO, all of a sudden my support of it became tied to a political position/statement I didn't want to take a side on.
@KevinB Yep... and one thing is moderating those reactions to be still focused on moving forward, instead of just demanding that whatever happened shouldn't have taken place and time should be turned back so it didn't took place. :|
The janitorial mess is the easiest part. The harder part is... well, some moderators here were doing a lot to actually build a userbase here that would allow for easier, more open communication... that has to start over, almost, now.
When you cast the current discord in the community in a political light, you're going to lose people, because no one wants to be seen as 'non-inclusive' or as 'x-phobic'. I recommend if you're going to verbalize your anger, you focus on the non-political parts of it, the lack of collaboration with the community, SE not following their own process; the continued tone-deafness and inability of SE inc to work with their community to effect positive change.
@GeorgeStocker But also the lack of collaboration of the community with SE, the community demanding SE change their processes to suit them, and the continued tone-deafness and inability of the community to work with SE inc to effect positive change.
@Tinkeringbell Respectfully, the relationship was cut off from SE's side, not the community's side. So while you and I agree the community and Meta.SE in general's attitude should improve to effect positive change, I disagree that the community should be responsible since relations were cut off by SE inc.
If people are refusing to talk/listen to/interact with you, you might want to ask yourself why that is. Sometimes it's the other person, sometimes you can do something to find out the problem, mediate that and get things going again. A lot the times though... people stop interacting with you because you're doing something they can't stand either.
It's very easy to say SE cut off relations... but you might want to ask yourself why they were cut off in the first place.
And if not yourself... perhaps ask SE.
But finding a cause doesn't mean you've also found someone/something to blame.
@djsmiley2k-CoW Ehh... I guess you're not the end product anymore, but you're definitely still one of the ... commodities?... If a company wants to grow, it's going to need more of you to produce whatever it produces ;)
@djsmiley2k-CoW I guess Teams was mostly focused on developers that had gotten to know Q&A through SO? You need someone to know that Teams exists, and what it is supposed to be, before companies are going to implement such things....
I don't know about jobs, never tried that. I got enough crap through LinkedIn as is.
@Tinkeringbell SE inc holds the power. Where there is a power imbalance it is incumbent on the people with the power to act justly no matter what.
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If this were an equal relationship we could spend hours of not days indicating how the community has acted and why they're to blame. But... and this is an important but, the relationship is not equal. There is a power imbalance, and because of that power imbalance it is incumbent upon SE to 'be the bigger person'.
In the same way we have expectations that people in power do not 'punch down', but we're ok with people not in power 'punching up'.
That's also why it's incumbent upon Community Moderators to be seen as impartial; they hold positions of power.
It's hard to define 'justly' though, because that's primarily opinion based. And I guess with the amount of discontent still allowed on MSE, there's a lot of 'bigger person being' still going on. I personally wouldn't have accepted such levels of anger aimed at me!
You can't just tell people they need to be the bigger person, and then just continue to rage at them either. So, if SE were to be the bigger person, what would the next move be?
eh, no, we as the community is the reason companies should want to advertise here, use the jobs tool, and why they should use teams. that's the marketing pitch. The more people using the platform, regardless of the output they have in terms of quality questions and answers, the more attractive the platform is. Doubly so when it comes to how many people are "experts", aka have a lot of rep.
there's definitely value in growing the "community" at all costs
questions/answers/rep are all incentives to get people to be here, thus attracting more business
@djsmiley2k-CoW Honestly? Probably just a small part. Depends on who you include in meta crowd too, if you include everyone with an account, or everyone who has posted in the past year or month or week... or who has talked in this chat room...
I know of people on other sites that aren't active on MSE. They read, may vote... but they don't generally write.
@KevinB I guess at some point you either have to go non-profit (a bit like wikipedia) to keep the servers running and developers paid, or try to sell yourselves as a product... I guess product it was.
Now it's like... every answer i post is me helping them make money more so than me helping the community build a repository of useful content. The purpose has just been lost on me. But there are plenty others out there more than willing to provide answers
@KevinB Oh... I mean, I know I'm on a website built by a company that (tries to) earn money from it... but on that website, I still am part of a community building a repository of useful content... I don't really thing one supersedes the other for me, and if it does, I definitely thing more about the community part than the money part :|
not when very experienced users who have been there as long or longer than me are still answering and upvoting duplicates every day instead of closing them,
@Tinkeringbell honestly, this is the problem I've seen with like... every internet site like this. I don't think I've seen any corporate thing like this that works
@JohnDvorak the closest thing to a blackout that happened... well is currently happening right now where the moderators of some sites aren't modding
@djsmiley2k-CoW i'm a little active on the side of Reddit in that sphere, but there does seem to be growing discontent on part of the moderators and users on how things are run. people are getting suspended left and right for things they said years ago
for example the /r/science forum doesn't allow memes like that and they'll frequently remove entire comment threads because they're memes.
while other places are a bit more laid back
but the site administrators deciding that it's "violent content" and should be removed (with the user likely incurring a 3 day suspension (we can't see suspensions when they're temporary on Reddit)) is kinda weird
the mods do have an effective form of protest on Reddit because they can effectively shut their subreddit down. if enough mods of enough different subreddits agree (as they have in the past) they can effectively bring Reddit to its knees
some people will remain, some will leave, new people will arrive,
people are always leaving
if the people joining are finding offensive posts that they don't understand the history of... like the one you posted, that can definitely hurt growth
even if you lose a decently sized chunk of your long-term users, it's worth it if it results in continued growth. time will fix it. The problem i see here however is that everything seems to be in decline... except for the past month or so, where there's actually been an increase in activity
@KevinB i mean, a majority of the users do understand it
and the site admins that talk to the users and mods do as well
and use these types of memes in conversation as well
> it's worth it if it results in continued growth i'd rather have a dedicated core group of users that wants to have good, fun discussion (or provide good answers in SE's context) than a lot of ones that provide little to no value at all
fixing it now just kinda paints over the problem. it happened.. all we can do now is move on and push for policies/tools that will prevent it from happening again
(now i want to find a video of someone successfully putting toothpaste back in the tube just to prove a point)
@KevinB I mean... what other things are we missing? We have a policy to prevent moderator removals without full review and we have a policy to not talk to the press. I do understand that there's some trust lacking so whether those policies will be followed is in question but... we've tried to do what we can.
Can't really stop people from being upset... and we're not trying to... heck, we seem quite adroit at poking at wounds rather than giving them room to heal. But all I can do is move forward. For me, the continued anger, frustration, and lack of trust people are feeling makes me quite sad. I have many friends who are sharing in it... and I'd love to fix it all... but the best I can do is try to improve communication moving forward.
@Catija well, if you don't get that there is ongoing damage from past actions and you think it's only about trust regarding future actions, I don't know what to say.
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SE could have repaired that damage at any point in the last several weeks. They still can. They have to want to.
I don't think you meant it this way, but your comment and others I've heard sound like sweeping the current issue under the rug -- don't know how to fix it so let's ignore it and move on. Life doesn't work that way when real people have been very badly harmed.
chat's kinda... odd when it comes to flags, because often the problematic thing is spread among multiple messages. One message out of place may look fine, but in context of the other 3-5 in the conversation it becomes clear that there's a problem. could flag-em all, but then you end up with a bunch of angry 10k rep people wondering why you're filling their box with flags rushing in
