I love posts like this because it’s just a knife fight between community members whose identities are built around curation VS. a company whose user studies all sound the same alarm “new users leave because their shit gets curated”
Same thing happens to Wikipedia. The people building the platform pay good money for user study that show, pretty clearly, that trying to contribute to SO/WP is like hitting a brick wall. User study after user study will show the same thing but not give any way to break the logjam.
So then something like the above happens, with identical results each time. It’s glorious. Meanwhile new questions trend to 0.
The previous role of the current VP of Community for Stack Overflow was at Wikipedia. Did it work then? Will it work now? I found SO useful because I could find working answers in minutes from search results. Threaded replies are going to make that much harder. But hey, mods won’t close my crappy questions any more, that’s a win right? Right??!?
I feel stupid. Not only did I read all that, looking for and not finding the new philosophy. But then I did it again.
Yeah the philosophy part was completely absent. Many users are intuiting that a change in philosophy is strongly suggested here, yet whoever wrote this has been almost careful not to directly say what the new philosophy is and why it's so different from the old philosophy as to be worth rewriting all the code.
I have some sympathy for the author's total misjudgment of his/her audience given 95% of it just quit.
This will be the third death of SO, but likely way more permanent.
Did anyone click through?
That is a horrible website! Wow
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