The number one problem with the site: less people are using it (something like a tenth of the traffic at peak).

Solution: let's make it harder to find useful content.

Do I really need to explain why that's a bad idea?

If you differentiate between human and (Artificial Intelligence) AI-generated content, you can sell that content (and meta data about the content) to AI model trainers. That seems a much better monetization plan than embedding ads in already noisy content. I.e. it is hard to find content now. You are making it harder.

Most people are already consuming the old content through AI. What's your plan if this drives away more traffic?

I am asking myself this question: who is using SO and SE and how are the new native ads affecting the experience.

The way I see it there are three uses of the site:

• seeking a solution to a specific problem you have
• phishing for interesting problems for fun and engaging your brain
• and contributing to the community by answering questions.

When you are searching for a specific problem you are not browsing the questions. You search (either internal search or external search) and/or ask a new question. You don't really interact with the main page and the questions page. So these native ads don't affect you, almost not at all. (until it's decide to put them between answers [sigh]).

But in the other two cases you actively browse for interesting questions. With the mindset and expectation of finding something interesting to either tease your brain, learn something new and or give back to the community by giving an answer.

This search of interesting questions already had two frictions:

• filtering questions not relevant to you - fair enough and expected, no algorithm can know what exactly in my particular languages and tags I am familiar with or I find relevant. No big deal.

• filtering bad questions. This is a big point of contention on this site for a while now. It's already generally a big deterrent to contributors the fact that we have to deal with a pretty big ratio of questions that waste everybody's time.

And now you introduce new friction:

• filtering ads. When I am looking for interesting Q&As or when I am looking to help another dev now, I also have to navigate the land mines of native ads. I do not what to go to a site where someone is trying to sell me something. I just want to find new interesting Q&As and to help other programmers.

This to me shows that the heads driving this ship do not understand the ship they are sailing, nor the community. Stack Overflow community is one of the most tech inclined audiences on the web. I bet this community has one of the highest percent usage of ad blockers. We are more ads adverse than the average internet user. We have a more hostile attitude towards intrusive ads.

So these native ads only add friction for users that are looking to contribute to the site.

I understand that the site needs to become profitable. I want this site to be profitable and self sustained for years to come. But I think this is not the answer and actually hurts the site in ways it wouldn't hurt other sites. I do not know what the solution is to becoming profitable, sadly I don't even know if it's possible at this point in time and in this world context. But native ads that look like questions ain't it.

This caught me by surprise, as usually I do not read along on Meta SO. What has not been mentioned is that ads even get displayed when I browse my own Stack Overflow profile page. This is even where I spotted them for the very first time just now. On the mobile page, it is a small overlay on the bottom of the page.

Due to my 66k reputation, I never had to see any ads before. I cannot say that I am pleased at all by this policy change. It is like an acknowledgement that SO indeed is as good as dead by now, if the new policy is to now scare away the most active members who spent many years here in order to support other users for free in their spare time. It feels like a slap in the face after so many years of community work to finally lose the ad-free privilege.

For the first time, I am seriously considering to stop contributing to SO for good.

This does not inspire confidence in the idea that staff really wants Stack Overflow to be a repository of human-generated content.

Honestly, this makes me feel more like a product than a participant.

Here are at least two questions:

Are these ads going to be treated as content and treated with the same standards, or will you allow AI-generated copy in native ads?

Since vendors presumably do not need 1500 reputation to create tags, will they be able to create their own tags by paying?

Also, allowing ads to use tags that work like real question tags is not transparent. In fact, it's a horribly manipulative trick: Tags create the impression that these ads are real questions, and linking these tags to the real tag index compounds this deception.

These ads shouldn't even have tags! If you have to let ads piggyback on top of user tags, you should at least have a reserved tag that prominently identifies the post as an ad. This ad has to be larger and more legible than the remaining tags as well.

Then again, maybe all this is deliberate. You know what doesn't have native ads yet? AI Assist. Guess we should ask our questions there instead...

Besides all the problems (to put it mildly) already mentioned - although it seems some of y'all at SE seem (looking at the comments) to be gathering some carefully selected part of feedback, it appears that the timeline is already set for the ads to run in January.

It may somehow not be the case, but it doesn't appear like there is enough time to actually get and reflect on the feedback and implement the changes (especially with the holiday season around the corner)? Is this post simply an announcement, and these ads will run in whatever state they will be in in said January?

...though I'm afraid we already know the answer to that one.

I don't believe the purpose of making the ads look like part of the page is to trick people into clicking on them. I think it is designed to stuff more ads on the page without making the amount of space that is non-content apparent at first glance. People will figure it out as they start to engage with the page though and for some of them it will leave the same bad taste that something like this does:

(If you want to experience the fully-animated horror for yourself, just pick any random article on www.dailymail.co.uk and turn off your ad-blocking)

Will the ads will also be embedded in site search results, custom filters and RSS feeds or is that something that will be coming in the future? How does the AI assistant fit in to this since it seems to bypass the question page ads entirely? Are you getting other sorts of revenue from our engagement with that feature that offsets the ad revenue?

I feel like y'all are boiling the toad here and the ads are just going to get worse and worse as each escalation doesn't return the amount of revenue you were hoping for. In my opinion, you should start investigating other sources of revenue that leverages the community's good will, like selling merch, instead of making us your product.

Native ads are a dark pattern: one of a set of deceptive techniques to trick the user into doing something they do not want to.

There is no place for such scams on Stack Exchange, supposedly the most reputed professional Q&A website of the Internet.

Spontaneous thoughts in no particular order:

• It seems to me that either a supporter tier (i.e. a small(ish) amount of money per month with not even any particular features attached; maybe a badge or a stylized highlight of the user name) or regularly happening donation runs (like Wikipedia does) could be successful without annoying anyone. Plenty of other websites or content creators do those and are just fine, financially. I think many people are aware these days that the internet is not free, and are willing to pay a bit for sites that they deem important.

• Generally, ad "partners" will always be in a tug-of-war against the rules, no matter how strict those are, and will always, by the nature of the business, try to go right to the edge of what's allowed; being as annoying as possible, while just skirting a ban. This sounds like so much obvious trouble to me; I don't feel SE is in a position to invite this right now?

• Once ad "partners" have big payments going towards SE, they will be able and willing to influence the content of the site. Maybe not in the first months of the feature, but possibly down the line. And not necessarily openly, but indirectly, by threatening to pull their business if certain things are not changed by SE.

• Heavy users will just come up with ad filtering solutions right away and nothing much will come from it? Casuals or really new people will quickly be turned away? I know for sure that when I see a new site that has frequent ads, especially intermingled with the regular content, there is little that turns me away quicker.

Couple of thoughts -

The front page is generally the part of the site you don't generally mess with. Folks already get annoyed with automatic bumps - having additional non-content is (as you've seen) controversial.

Practically speaking for people who are regular here, the site front pages are pretty much sacred, and any changes need to be a marked improvement. Ads generally are not, and reduce information density in unwelcome ways interspersed with content.

No user wants to accidentally click on an ad thinking its a post especially on say mobile devices.

Advertising revenue is a necessary component of our financial strategy to not only keep the lights on, but to continue improving the site.

We've heard "keeping the lights on, and improving the site" as a reason for many changes - but a lot of them haven't panned out to benefit us. We've pretty much had variations of this over the years, but that's more often than not resulted in lean periods for Q&A work rather than ongoing, steady improvements. We're not really reassured that the disruption native ads will cause will result in the company keeping their promises.

There's also always been a bit of a social contract - folks contribute content and we're generally seeing less ads. That this isn't really something affected by the see less ads, and that while the company has been cool with adblock usage over the years, that its explicitly designed to get around it also sort of goes against the social contract we've had over the years.

We've also had a fairly poor track record on the suitability of these are, and reporting being occasionally broken. Once again, this is an ongoing problem that makes the company look bad.

We'd probably be a lot more reassured if we saw (not heard) changes addressing these issues.

It also allows us to bring new ideas to fruition so we can continue to be a source of human-verified truth in an increasingly AI-influenced world. Implementing improvements and new projects takes revenue, and we’d be doing a disservice to ourselves and you by not trying to find responsible means of maximizing that revenue to accomplish those goals.

Quite a few of these ideas and projects seem... at odds with what the community prefers or are speculative projects. I'd ask - are these projects for the benefit of the network and public platform, and critically the Q&A network that built all these, or for something different from the platform we know and love.

1. Will the native ads be targeted based on our SO/SE profiles?

2. If a native ad uses a tag that matches one on my watch list, will it be highlighted just like other posts that match my watch list tags?

3. If a native ad uses a tag that matches one on my ignore list, will it be hidden/grayed-out (depending on my settings)?

4. If I click on a tag under a question, I get a new list of questions based on that tag. If I click on a tag in a native advertisement, will that still happen or will I be sent to the advertiser?

How will the advertisers and ads be screened before appearing on the site? That'd go a long way towards ensuring honesty and safety. Hopefully there will be some transparency about the advertiser that visitors can see if they click for more info.

If the number of ad variations are expected to be so voluminous that the company can't screen them all, perhaps consider letting trusted moderators and or users screen ads similar to how review and training ground posts are handled.

Mentioning these since nothing about screening or trustworthiness of the native ads and advertisers was mentioned in the original post. Given the native appearance and popularity of the site, they may be a target for abuse so care must be taken with what's allowed on the site; not to mention continuing to monitor ad landing pages for changes and malware.

To me, this ad feels openly hostile to Q&A. It feels like it is implying that you can't trust answers from Q&A, where the ad is displaying. Which is ironic, because you can't trust the answers AI assist provides when it does more than point you at existing content.

You are trying to hide behind "accessibility" for deceptive design.

The background color was removed from the early mockup image the moderators saw because it causes issues with readability/accessibility. For accessibility with color contrast and text we use APAC standards. Our minimum is Lc60 for text. NOTE - The image above is just a snippet screen grab, rather than the original file.

Comparing the mockup to the stack overflow question layout, the font used for "Sponsored" and "Ad" is smaller than 17px (the current size of the font for questions, which the text is smaller than).

I cannot tell the weight exactly from the mockup, but it seems to be light, or at best, normal. In either case, it must be 32px or 22px tall, repectively, to meet your own APCA guidelines.

You need to increase the contrast and/or increase the font weight, and should add a different background color to clearly differentiate that these are ads. In fact, it would be less deceptive to change the layout even more to delineate that "This is an ad, not a question".

I read this post and my first impression was

damn ... they almost got me with that April Fool's joke this time

Then I remembered it's December. Then I remembered the general trend of recent management decisions and I'm not even surprised.

Some points:

Advertising revenue is a necessary component of our financial strategy

OK, then maybe it is wrong financial strategy. All of the contributors, content creators, moderators are working as volunteers. For free. This should not be abused to create a revenue that benefits few individuals.

(...) to continue working on improvements to the site

Frankly, I don't see any improvement on the site since Staging Ground feature. Nor can I see any immediate field that needs to be improved (and no, increasing number of users just for the sake of having big number of users is not the reason why SE was created).

(...) we’d be doing a disservice to ourselves and you by not trying to find responsible means of maximizing that revenue to accomplish those goals

No, only to yourselves. I am not contributing to SE for profit.

Then, about overall design of this new adds feature: you basically follow Google's, Microsoft's, (could perhaps find more examples), transformation pattern, from the reliable and popular tool to a garbage dump composed of sponsored content and blatant misinformation.

I will continue contributing to SE, mostly SO, however sad true is that under this management strategy the site will inevitably stop delivering quality content and become inactive web archive.

I'll just block them.

If you want to make the internet even more unbearable for both people still using the web without an ad-blocker, be my guest, but it seems a bit mean-spirited.

The native ads load after the actual questions and move the content after they load. That is very annoying in question lists.

This particular change will not be much of hit to those that use Stackoverflow a lot. Most know that StackOverflow's search is far inferior to Google's (which also does this "native ad" thing). I have often needed to go back to google to search StackOverflow. Google then links me directly to the question I need (bypassing any StackOverflow native ads).

But I am guessing that AI is causing a crunch on StackOverflow's income. The standard process now is to check your AI of choice first, then go from there.

Under this model, a site like Stack Overflow is still useful, but not as lucrative as it was before. This means more aggressive monetization is needed. (Until it becomes other once-useful-site that was crushed under the weight of too many ads.) In the current setup, AI seems to not be sustainable because it destroys the very processes that feed it.

StackExchange is the new ExpertsExchange.

Will site ads be relevant to the site they’re posted on?

Yes, they will. (You shouldn't be seeing Java language course advertisements on Pets Stack Exchange, for example.)

Of course. No one will click on a Java course advertisement because it's clear it's not a real question. However, I don't think any user asked for the advertisement to be disguised as a real question.

"Advertising revenue is a necessary component of our financial strategy to not only keep the lights on" How did you live without them for such a long time? What has changed?

I will probably quit this SE when you do this!

When I was still a regular contributor to various SE sites (many years ago), the main page was one of the pages I often visited, to find questions to answer. Now I'm mostly just looking at questions when I search for answers to questions I have (or browsing the hot network posts list), so I'm never even visiting the home pages.

So now you are sending your contributors off-site by making them click ads by mistake, while the "pure consumers" (I'm including the current me here) are not even seeing these.

Sounds like a way to get less contributions. But I doubt that is the intention?

[UPDATE - Native ads are live, initially being tested for a few weeks with house ads (our blog, the Student Center, etc.).]

Why have I seen no ads?

Experiments on/off, security+adblock on/off, browser window private/not, logged in/out, US/EU proxy/not, Firefox/Chrome/Edge.