I'm going to start somewhere in the middle

> With that said, our attempts to communicate about the necessary change were imprecise and confused the situation. When we said “no more closing questions,” we failed to take into account that that phrase would mean something very different to you than to us. For instance, we effectively draw a line between closing questions and deleting questions. Deleting questions is definitely still in scope for us.

Well, that's a clear example of why the company fails us. We try our best to communicate our needs. We don't have enough people who speak our language, and can translate it to what you speak. Where people have the skills to communicate with the community, they are undervalued and we've lost too many.

If you can't understand the community's needs, and understand why we need closures of questions (to give an opportunity to *fix* those questions) - you shouldn't be changing those things. 

You've already gotten a lot of feedback. Some of it from the most gifted folks on the network. Jon Skeet weighed in - how much of it do you actually understand, and if you don't, how're you going to figure out what you're missing?

If you have no one who can communicate effectively between the community and company - you should be building on and growing those competencies. As a community member, that's lacking *across* the company. 

Hiring for those abilities - *across* the company would be good, but y'all aren't seen as a good choice by many, or the people who'd give you a shot just can't get hired. And the folks we've had over the years who could communicate invariably end up downsized. 

You arn't just dealing with corporate customers. You're dealing with a deeply passionate community of folks who're dealing with the trauma of the company's past actions and are mistrustful. Reactiveness isn't a sign the community is against you, its that the company's actions did and continue to hurt us and the relationship we've had. 

In some cases that's personal, in other cases, its common to many of us. We don't have good reasons to think the company will listen to us, or even keep its word. 

If we were clients, chances are we'd be dropping you or asking for compensation. As a community, we only really can try to reach out, fight or walk. 

You're never going to succeed if you can't get people who can bridge the gap. 

> Many of the tools we have today were designed to address scaling challenges from over a decade ago. These challenges may no longer exist in the same way. With that in mind, our intent is to focus on tools that meet today’s needs while taking a hard, analytical look at existing tools to see if they’re still the right fit. While we may not have gotten it exactly right, I can assure you a lot of thought went into this redesign and direction.

These challenges partially don't exist because the folks who were active on the network often got alienated by decisions made by the company. This path *reinforces* the negative feedback loop that causes people to leave. "Not gotten it exactly right" is a very strange way of saying "We know what people on the network need better than folks who are actively doing curation and content creation every day" 

In a perfect world - we'd want to scale up again and have the tools to deal with those problem. 

>  experienced contributors, who feel they lack the tools to effectively curate and maintain the site. 

Thing is on the short run, we created these tools. Review queues evolved from chatrooms used to review posts. More recently, we got better spam tools - after 2 years of ad-hoc dealing with *thousands* of spam posts with the help of the community. We don't need perfect, but we're more likely to be able to handle things *if* we know you understand our needs and are working on it. 

We've been complaining about these over a decade, we've lost a LOT of contributors, and as things go, folks who can operate on the site at the level are rare. 

This is also, incidentally the group the company seems to alienate the most often. 

> I also need to level set a bit: we’re not trying to do away with the concept of removing unhelpful posts. We care deeply about curation and have dedicated substantial time and money to building tools for it, and we will continue to invest in this area. But we do have to move away from a world where closing questions is essentially the catchall and default option for curation. We believe we can create better, more precise, more surgical tools that can be used. And we intend to work with all of you to make sure that curators here can take advantage of those tools.

If there's better options for dealing with duplicates and such, people would use them. Taking away tools without better options is a bad idea though. And If you're not listening to the people using the tools - we're less inclined to suggest better tools. I've been floating a idea on better duplicate handling for a while - but in the current environment, I don't see the point of spending the time laying out even an early draft on meta cause it'll likely to be ignored. 

> Regarding feedback on quality, you are right – there is still significant work to be done. We intentionally chose to launch this in an early state. We are, as Stack Overflow did in the distant past, intentionally relying on you to help us identify issues so we can more quickly address as many as necessary to reach an acceptable level of quality before moving the site to the new design. I’m here to listen and gather actionable feedback. I want to understand what’s most important to you, what you feel makes the site unusable, and how we can improve the tools you rely on. Specifically, I’d love your thoughts (as answers here) on:

An early draft that a little janky, designed to find requirements has value. Something that's clearly designed to be a completely different model is going to get pushback. Thing is there was a lot of early feedback on the redesign that's been ignored. In many cases, *other* initiatives - such as the new data dump, still have promised features (like access to a complete copy) either on hold for years, or quietly killed off. 

We've consistently given actional feedback, even tried to explain where its less than obvious and its been ignored. At some point we burn out. The mood amongst many mods is 'why bother' cause our feedback hasn't had any impact at all. 

I'm going to quote from a moderator internal post I wrote earlier 

> A lot of the time, the company lacks direction and communication. There's multiple situations where the company has failed to take community feedback, or pushes through 'features' or bigger projects without taking neither their own employees feedback or the community's (see the rebrand). We've had extended periods over the years with insufficient support. While the company is very focused on changing the platform to attract people from outside, we lose people who have impact within the communities. The public platform, especially smaller sites often end up in a poor state as a result cause they don't have the critical mass to handle a problem.

We need to know our feedback has value. If the feedback is that the new design is currently unserviceable for our needs - and we're rather you iterate and improve our current model, we need you to *take that feedback* , and show good faith, even if It means killing off a project you've sunk a lot of man hours into . 

You'd note most of the feedback has been negative. Its been actionable. We have a return of the new comment design - where we clearly pointed out comments were a 'second class' thing and they distracted from answers for example. You have everything you need already. Its just ignored from our perspective. 

And while early action's nice, much like with your AI initiatives, hubris has poisoned the well. This is seen as the first step towards killing off the Q&A platform (and the rest of the redesign kills off the stack exchange network's identity). We see this as a threat to the network, and are reacting accordingly. 

So very much my actionable suggestion would be - without the Q&A platform we've built over the last 16 years, this place wouldn't exist. These changes are affecting folks who are the most active the most.  If you want to try something new - let it be on its own merits. Build a different model. See if people prefer it - but if you' want to replace what we have now, you're going to lose the community we have. 

I sometimes feel the community SO inc wants is different from the one we have. Its also... kinda vaporware. So take the opportunity - look at what we've said, and please do right by us.