[This post is not directed to Bella personally - any presence of 'you' in the post is addressed to Stack Overflow - the company.]

I tired of these kinds of posts long ago - I don't want any posts from CMs or middle management trying to sugar coat how bad everything is - this is a just huge waste of everyone's time and won't change anything. Everything I have to say about that can be found here.

Instead why can't the CEO wake up and post these meta threads themselves? Then it might even be meaningful to give feedback. The CEO is ultimately responsible for the fiasco, even though the negative trend started even before Chandrasekar took over. There was a sudden outburst of activity from him one year ago here, which is the reason behind the chat overhaul, opinion-based questions experiment etc etc. Then he turned silent again.

What I really would like to hear from him is him thoughts of why all of these often quite good ideas - I support several of them - end up implemented so poorly. The opinion-based questions, new editor, new graphic design (hot dog theme) and comment overhaul in particular stand out as good ideas implemented in outright horrible ways. And that's without even mentioning AI-something-something, which was not even a good idea to begin with.

It is not isolated occurrences, every good (and bad) idea during the past 2-3 years turns into complete s*** when implemented. As if the implementation was handed over to complete laymen.

You shouldn't need to do a beta launch and get community feedback in order to tell that Stackoverflow AI crashing when started needs to be fixed before launch, or that a new editor shouldn't wildly bounce up and down when typing, or that we can't have a question category named 'advice' together with no moderation instructions, or that opening up chat to 1 rep users means there will be a flood of trash & spam that needs to be moderated somehow. A child could have told you as much. It's plain embarrassing incompetence, over and over.

This wasn't the case some five years back. Is it because the last competent staff left the company with the 2023 layoffs or is it because they started leaving/were fired even before that?

We can't rebuild if there is nobody who has the skills to rebuild. Yes, I do believe this is the end.

[This post is not directed to Bella personally - any presence of 'you' in the post is addressed to Stack Overflow - the company.]

I tired of these kinds of posts long ago - I don't want any posts from CMs or middle management trying to sugar coat how bad everything is - this is a just huge waste of everyone's time and won't change anything. Everything I have to say about that can be found here.

Instead why can't the CEO wake up and post these meta threads themselves? Then it might even be meaningful to give feedback. The CEO is ultimately responsible for the fiasco, even though the negative trend started even before Chandrasekar took over. There was a sudden outburst of activity from him one year ago here, which is the reason behind the chat overhaul, opinion-based questions experiment etc etc. Then he turned silent again.

What I really would like to hear from him is him thoughts of why all of these often quite good ideas - I support several of them - end up implemented so poorly. The opinion-based questions, new editor, new graphic design (hot dog theme) and comment overhaul in particular stand out as good ideas implemented in outright horrible ways. And that's without even mentioning AI-something-something, which was not even a good idea to begin with.

It is not isolated occurrences, every good (and bad) idea during the past 2-3 years does not live up to expectations when implemented. As if the implementation was handed over to complete laymen.

You shouldn't need to do a beta launch and get community feedback in order to tell that Stackoverflow AI crashing when started needs to be fixed before launch, or that a new editor shouldn't wildly bounce up and down when typing, or that we can't have a question category named 'advice' together with no moderation instructions, or that opening up chat to 1 rep users means there will be a flood of trash & spam that needs to be moderated somehow.

This wasn't the case some five years back. Is it because the last competent staff left the company with the 2023 layoffs or is it because they started leaving/were fired even before that?

We can't rebuild if there is nobody who has the skills to rebuild. Yes, I do believe this is the end.