13 ms·

Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council

78 points by pkamb 7y ago

andonisus 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  Your comment might be a duplicate of one made two months ago in a post about photographing cabbages in Sri Lanka.
  - Zamicol 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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).
  - andonisus 7y ago
    [Put on Hold]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
iamaelephant 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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=zMfxd9y0cMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1275&v=zMfxd9y0c...
  - tmpz22 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
dancek 7y ago
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-community-managers-stack-exchange-is-not-interested-in-cooperating-with https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...
- sosodev 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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/tesla-owners-volunteer-to-help-with-delivery-hell https://www.autonews.com/article/20181008/RETAIL01/181009775...
    - manicdee 7y ago
      In some cases (helping a favoured enterprise grow) the inevitable outcome of the effort is the desired result (Tesla increases revenue, remains solvent). In other cases the inevitable outcome is not desired (cddb sold to private interest, required subscription for continued use, no recognition of contributions by volunteers).
    - Iv 7y ago
      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.
NobodyNada 7y ago
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”+is%3Aq&tab=newest https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=“Inappropriate+ad”+i... [3]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191 [4]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo-prashanth-chandrasekar/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overf... [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
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- z3t4 7y ago
  Hopefully they wont go full circle and become what they originally set to erupt. eg. experts exchange.
brailsafe 7y ago
> 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
fourthark 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    "First blog post of Stack Overflow's new CEO" or similar might help explain why this post is interesting.
    - dang 7y ago
      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!
cloudc0de 7y ago
Is there any community woke scolds won't ruin? (In relation to firing of SE mod Monica).
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Communities that ignore them apparently do well.
  - sandoooo 7y ago
    Until they get demonetized and deplatformed, at least. On that note, I've always found the continual survival of 4chan rather suspicious.
crispinb 7y ago
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.
superflit 7y ago
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 7y ago
Yes but have the fires of gondor been lit?
duxup 7y ago
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.
WaPo16Hits1Day 7y ago
Cloud big data ai Diversity young coders When I see someone pandering i stop reading.
Randor 7y ago
Interesting. I met Shog9 on another forum over a decade ago. I had no idea he was a community manager on stackoverflow.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ramblerman 7y ago
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.

78 points by pkamb 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
Your comment might be a duplicate of one made two months ago in a post about photographing cabbages in Sri Lanka.
- Zamicol 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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).
- andonisus 7y ago
  [Put on Hold]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

iamaelephant 7y ago

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 7y ago
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=zMfxd9y0cMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1275&v=zMfxd9y0c...
- tmpz22 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

dancek 7y ago

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

sosodev 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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/tesla-owners-volunteer-to-help-with-delivery-hell https://www.autonews.com/article/20181008/RETAIL01/181009775...
  - manicdee 7y ago
    In some cases (helping a favoured enterprise grow) the inevitable outcome of the effort is the desired result (Tesla increases revenue, remains solvent). In other cases the inevitable outcome is not desired (cddb sold to private interest, required subscription for continued use, no recognition of contributions by volunteers).
  - Iv 7y ago
    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.

NobodyNada 7y ago

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”+is%3Aq&tab=newest https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=“Inappropriate+ad”+i... [3]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191 [4]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overflows-new-ceo-prashanth-chandrasekar/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overf... [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

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
z3t4 7y ago
Hopefully they wont go full circle and become what they originally set to erupt. eg. experts exchange.

brailsafe 7y ago

> 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

fourthark 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  "First blog post of Stack Overflow's new CEO" or similar might help explain why this post is interesting.
  - dang 7y ago
    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!

cloudc0de 7y ago

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

Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Communities that ignore them apparently do well.
- sandoooo 7y ago
  Until they get demonetized and deplatformed, at least. On that note, I've always found the continual survival of 4chan rather suspicious.

crispinb 7y ago

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.

superflit 7y ago

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 7y ago

Yes but have the fires of gondor been lit?

duxup 7y ago

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.

WaPo16Hits1Day 7y ago

Cloud big data ai Diversity young coders When I see someone pandering i stop reading.

Randor 7y ago

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

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ramblerman 7y ago

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.