
Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council - pkamb
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-of-stack-2020-plans-vision/
======
dancek
For those unaware of the context, StackExchange fired a (volunteer) moderator
in September causing a wave of moderator resignations. Now in January they
fired two Community Managers (ie. employees) and a third CM resigned.

[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-
commu...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-community-
managers-stack-exchange-is-not-interested-in-cooperating-with)

~~~
sosodev
I’m not sure how I feel about the ethics of volunteers massively contributing
to the growth of a for-profit company.

StackExchange wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are without its
volunteers and yet they only care about their bottom line.

Are there any non-profit alternatives?

~~~
dlivingston
Tesla owners once famously banded together to help Tesla through 'delivery
hell' [0]. They did this for the love of the company and the company mission,
despite not being paid and their actions only benefiting Tesla's bottom line.

Is it not fair to say that volunteers have autonomy, and that we should
respect that autonomy? In other words, if they don't feel they are being
exploited, then why should it bother us? Why should we create an issue out of
X when those who are actually involved don't see X as an issue?

[0]:
[https://www.autonews.com/article/20181008/RETAIL01/181009775...](https://www.autonews.com/article/20181008/RETAIL01/181009775/tesla-
owners-volunteer-to-help-with-delivery-hell)

~~~
Iv
I am not bothered when someone promotes their favorite brands or products. I
am however bothered when companies encourages and promotes such a mindset.

Thank the volunteers, that's fine. Incite regular consumers to become
proselyting agents for free? A bit too close to manipulation, exploitation and
cultish behaviors for me.

~~~
dlivingston
Do you have any examples where that’s been the case? I’m stretching my mind to
think of any and have come up empty.

~~~
Iv
Almost every company-sponsored hackathon is like that. And every Google prompt
to help them feed their recommendation database "to help improve their
products" is the same.

------
NobodyNada
Stack Overflow has been trying VERY aggressively to monetize the site lately.
In just the past 12 months:

\- They’ve backpedaled on their formerly strict ad policy, now allowing
animated ads [0] and trackers [1], and their quality control has become very
poor [2].

\- They changed the homepage to market their new SaaS product instead of the
Q&A site [3]

\- They replaced their CEO (who was a cofounder) with a new one who they
described as “ someone who could foster the community while accelerating the
growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close
many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very
quickly” [4]

\- They fired and defamed a well-liked and well-respected volunteer moderator
without cause, in a misguided attempt at virtue signaling, and refused to make
any attempt to rectify their mistakes until the moderator in question got a
lawyer [5]

\- They fired/laid off two longtime and very well-respected Community Managers
(employees whose job was to manage and work alongside with community) [6]

[0]:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/213770/258777](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/213770/258777)

[1]:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/332297/258777](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/332297/258777)

[2]:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=“Inappropriate+ad”+i...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=“Inappropriate+ad”+is%3Aq&tab=newest)

[3]:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191)

[4]: [https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-
overf...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-
new-ceo-prashanth-chandrasekar/)

[5]:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/258777](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/258777)

[6]:
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342039/258777](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342039/258777)

~~~
z3t4
Hopefully they wont go full circle and become what they originally set to
erupt. eg. experts exchange.

------
andonisus
> The key to Stack Overflow’s future and growth are the millions of developers
> from around the world who find the site useful, but who haven’t yet been
> welcomed into the community. We need to expand our reach and engagement to
> ensure these developers join the conversation and push their own learning to
> new heights.

The key to stack overflow's future is providing useful answers to various
programming questions, facilitating the asking and answering of these
questions, and providing an easy way to find the answers to your questions.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Your comment might be a duplicate of one made two months ago in a post about
photographing cabbages in Sri Lanka.

~~~
Zamicol
Doesn't that just drive you nuts?

Cabbages just sneak up on you like that.

I've had plenty of genuinely unique questions marked as "duplicate".

~~~
dx87
Most annoying to me is when I find someone asking a question that's exactly
what I'm looking for, but it's locked and says "This question is too specific
and is unlikely to be useful to anyone else." Last time that happened was with
gdb, and looking through the code wasn't helpful because all it said was
"unless you're a gdb developer, these header files are unlikely to be useful".

~~~
klez
FWIW that reason for closing has been removed for a long while, so new
questions asking those lines should get answers (if the question itself is
answerable).

------
fourthark
Buried the lede.

 _In the fourth quarter of 2019, we created a large task force made up of
passionate community advocates from across the company to propose solutions to
this core problem. The team’s mission is to improve our feedback loop and
working relationship with our community. We added a member of our Community
team to our leadership team and restructured the organization to invest in
Product leadership to build Community-centric features. We are also forming a
moderator council, which will include a group of users with diverse experience
levels and backgrounds who can help guide our processes. We’re making hard
choices and treating no assumptions as sacred in considering ways to evolve
the community._

 _... We want to serve all of the millions of people who use Stack Overflow,
not just those who know the most about how the site has worked in the past. To
be clear, this does not mean channels like Meta will go away, but they need to
grow to ensure that users are heard and responded to in a timely fashion._

 _We’ve completed the process of defining how our moderator council will be
structured, shared an internal framework for asking coworkers tough community
questions, defined the important functions that would be best served by more
scalable solutions than Meta, and built outlines of our new moderator training
modules. By the end of this quarter, all of these initiatives will be shared
publicly with you, our users._

~~~
dang
We're generally happy to replace bland corporate press release titles, which
always bury the lede, with something that gets to the point. But who knows
what the point is? "Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council", maybe?
Let's try that. It can't be worse than "Scripting the Future of Stack
Overflow".

Suggestions for better titles are welcome. Try to use representative language
from the article if you can find it.

~~~
pkamb
"First blog post of Stack Overflow's new CEO" or similar might help explain
why _this_ post is interesting.

~~~
dang
That's not the goal of titles on HN. If you want to say why a post is
interesting, that's great, but put it in a comment in the thread. Which you
just did!

------
ramblerman
I hope they really lose from this.

You have a great Q and A platform, that works well where most people use
aliases.

And for whatever reason they had to introduce gender as a core concept.
Whereas before nobody gave a crap if the asker or the replier was male/female
or whatever, it was about the questions. Now you have to make sure your
question is addressing the other person correctly. Putting the actual answer
in second place..

It's just so absurd. And to think they did this after taking VC money as a
means to grow faster. I can't fathom having less business IQ.

------
iamaelephant
The first half of the article contains a huge amount of gloating about the
size and reach of Stack Overflow. Then the second half of the article has gems
like

> in order to continue to fuel our growth

Why does it have to be this way? SO is an immensely useful resource and a
sustainable business. Why does every company need to continue to grow until
they lose the essence of what made them good? Why can't companies be satisfied
with making a decent chunk of change, paying their employees a fair wage and
delivering value to their customer base?

~~~
fabian2k
The company took VC money, growing in a sensible and sustainable way isn't an
option. They're targeting an IPO according to the former CEO and co-founder
Joel Spolsky, which means they need to grow 10X in the near future.

They're making around 70 million a year now, 44 million from the job platform,
16 million from ads and the rest from the private SO Teams/Enterprise software
(28 large corporations are paying 1 million+, I know this doesn't add up
entirely, but that's the only information publicly available that I know of).
The numbers are all from the following interview with Joel:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1275&v=zMfxd9y0c...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1275&v=zMfxd9y0cMY)

~~~
tmpz22
I hate how hard it would be for a competitor to come into the market now and
attempt to build the same knowledge bank StackOverflow can now gatekeep. We've
commercialized data hoarding and segregation... is the end game for
StackOverflow to become Elsevier for programming?

~~~
Macha
The knowledge bank itself is available under creative commons. You can
download it here (updated quarterly):
[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)
or query it online here:
[https://data.stackexchange.com/](https://data.stackexchange.com/)

At least until current leadership kills it. But it was one of the things Jeff
and Joel did to convince the community that that was not their goal, and the
previous market leader, experts exchange was fresh in people's minds at that
time for hiding answers behind signup walls.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
They can't really kill it, right? The content itself is licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Version... uh... well it's definitely
Creative Commons.

~~~
Macha
They can stop providing updates and let it go stale.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Someone else can create a front end to the dumped data, similar to how you can
run Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap locally (or from anywhere, really).

Good timing considering Distributed Web efforts [1]. Internet Archive is
having a Dweb meetup tonight FYI if you're in SF [2], word is Twitter's team
focused on the same goals will be in attendence.

[1] [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-
web/](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/)

[2] [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dweb-sf-meet-up-january-
tickets...](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dweb-sf-meet-up-january-
tickets-88949818301)

~~~
reificator
> _Internet Archive is having a Dweb meetup tonight FYI if you 're in SF_

I'm not even being flippant here, this is an earnest piece of feedback.

Please don't call yourselves `dwebs`. That's just asking for people to not
take you seriously.

~~~
toomuchtodo
No relation to any org in the meetup, just calling it what it was called in
the online marketing of it. I’d agree the marketing needs some tweaks.

------
brailsafe
> What became apparent in my conversations is that software development has
> evolved rapidly, and successful companies are evolving their own cultures
> and practices to keep pace.

Clearly a discerning eye

------
duxup
Interesting.

Although as someone who has been a part of a few volunteer moderation efforts.
I've found that moderators don't always act in the best interests of the
community (even when they think they are doing so) and sometimes become
greatly detached from the non moderating community.

It's a sad truth that those who REALLY want to moderate, are often pretty bad
at it.

A moderator council could be it's own field of landmines.

------
cloudc0de
Is there any community woke scolds won't ruin? (In relation to firing of SE
mod Monica).

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Communities that ignore them apparently do well.

~~~
sandoooo
Until they get demonetized and deplatformed, at least.

On that note, I've always found the continual survival of 4chan rather
suspicious.

------
Randor
Interesting.

I met Shog9 on another forum over a decade ago. I had no idea he was a
community manager on stackoverflow.

------
superflit
Can we stop the Drama?

The more SO ask for Pardon or try to appease worse it gets.

Just stop the notification "From the CEO".

And continue to provide value.

That is it.

------
protocolture
Yes but have the fires of gondor been lit?

------
crispinb
What a pitiful congeries of overweening, delusional, self-important
absurdities. I often wonder if I can come to loathe the tech sector any more
than I do, and it consistently meets my challenge.

A desire to acquire shitloads of overconsumption rights is broadly functional
within the mythological system of capitalism, but it is not a grand mission,
however blogged up.

