Timeline for answer to What we really need to know to understand your community by HolyBlackCat
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Oct 24, 2023 at 15:26 | comment | added | user400654 | [cont.] If the sites stay as they currently are, they will continue to be less of a revenue stream YoY and never get the support they need. Is there a future for a library of detailed questions and answers existing? who knows. but if the community is going to continue to exist, the site needs to adjust to the needs of the community. | |
| Oct 24, 2023 at 15:26 | comment | added | user400654 | @Pekka That's why bringing the engagement metrics up for SO and other public sites is paramount to the public sites remaining relevant and receiving updates/improvements. Whether that be through improving what we have, or providing more reasons for people to join and participate (such as a return of careers that actually supports developers looking for jobs.) | |
| Oct 24, 2023 at 15:21 | comment | added | Pekka | Building a library of detailed questions cannot be the company's central goal anymore. Its central goal is to provide a ROI for the organization that paid $1.8 billion for it. The best you can hope for is temporary alignment where building a library of detailed questions and answers happens to be beneficial to the central goal. If you're happy to bet your time and energy on this alignment lasting a while to come, then that's fantastic. Seriously! You'll probably help a lot of people. If you're not happy with the bet's odds, you should consider investing your time and energy elsewhere. | |
| Oct 24, 2023 at 15:10 | history | edited | HolyBlackCat | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 24, 2023 at 15:10 | comment | added | HolyBlackCat | @BryanKrause Exactly. | |
| Oct 24, 2023 at 14:56 | comment | added | Bryan Krause | I think probably what HolyBlackCat means by "to help people" is that the purpose of this library is to be helpful, broadly. Not that we help every person who thinks they need help in the way they think they want to be helped. There's a genuine purpose to it. | |
| Oct 24, 2023 at 12:16 | comment | added | Thomas Markov | @HolyBlackCat I can see both sides of it. I’ve encountered users that blatantly ignore our question quality standards in the name of helping the user, to the point that they perform closure reviews wrong to try and prevent question closure. But I’ve also fought for repealing policies that artificially obstruct our ability to help users. | |
| Oct 24, 2023 at 6:54 | comment | added | HolyBlackCat | @Tinkeringbell I believe "to help people" part is necessary. It's not a permission to blatantly break the rules, because we agreed/determined that following them is the best way to help people on this site. Forgetting about the goal to help leads to problematic behavior. (Such as closing questions with vaguely related duplicate targets, when it's clear that OP with their current level of knowledge can't possibly understand how they apply to their problem, without leaving even a comment setting them on the right track.) | |
| Oct 24, 2023 at 6:27 | comment | added | Tinkeringbell Mod | The implied 'to help people' is not great, it's problematic too. On one side, this leads to entitled users thinking their question has to be answered and they have to be helped, on the other side are users not looking enough for the quality of questions, wanting to answer everything to 'help' someone instead of focusing on building that library. If there's a way to get rid of that implied 'to help people', both of the aforementioned attitudes should become less of a problem too. | |
| Oct 24, 2023 at 4:49 | history | edited | HolyBlackCat | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 24, 2023 at 4:44 | history | answered | HolyBlackCat | CC BY-SA 4.0 |