How about skipping these fuzzy psychological experiments and focusing on features? As in not just empty words but things that actually happened.
As I've repeatedly pointed out before, communicating with private companies is a huge waste of time as they'll have their own private agenda carried out regardless of anything said in public. Therefore listening to what's said, trusting things promised or attempting any form of two-way communication is one huge waste of everyone's time. There are already endless discussions and feature requests all over the place, yet another won't make a difference.
Instead do not look at what the company says, look at what the company does. Specifically at which features it actually implements. The most recent such major features:
- Voting experiment to encourage people who rarely vote to upvote
- Upcoming Experiment for Commenting
- Question assistant and staging ground changes
- What does a new user need in a homepage experience on Stack Overflow?
- Misc strange UI changes and AI experiments during 2023.
Apart from the staging ground which is something originating from the community through all the various "wizard" and "on-boarding" experiments over the years...:
- None of these things were requested by the community.
- None of them seem particularly urgent or obvious to prioritize.
- All of them just popped up out of the blue.
Conclusion 1: it doesn't matter what anyone says to the company because it will just carry on it'sits private (lack of) agenda, which is all about rolling out completely arbitrary and often pointless site changes, with no long-term plan or goal.
Conclusion 2: whoever interacts with the so-called "community" on the various metas either don't have a high enough position to influence anything or the company simply couldn't care less about what the community says. My impression is rather that random teams/random middle managers go about and do whatever they like at a whim, completely detached from the rest of the world, except perhaps with a bias to encourage AI-something-something. And so random features and experiments appear, randomly.
Conclusion 3: Notable from the above links, all new features and experiments arrive on Stack Overflow, which is a site that has apparently gone from network flagship to network guinea pig. Since all new features are rolled out and discussed there, we should seriously close down meta.stackexchange.com. It's just the same old clique here talking to themselves with absolutely zero impact on anything. Delete this site from the network and nobody would notice a difference. Including the company upper management and 99.9% of the user base.
