Stack Exchange - Tumblr Posts
big things that are also not good are happening at stack overflow soon :c
Week 2: Stack Exchange mod/curator strike
Negotiations begin
The company has asked for a small (3 person) delegation to discuss issues with and try to reach a mutually agreeable end to the strike. These three members have been selected by vote and are all highly respected and capable moderators. Talks are expected to begin today. Unsure where that'll go, since the demands were laid out pretty clearly in both the strike letter and on meta, but at least there will be some kind of communication.
Stack exchange refuses to interact directly with the community, which, while on the one hand would be challenging in this situation due to the size of the community vs the size of the staff, on the other hand the lack of communication with the community is exactly what got us into this mess so we'll see how it goes.
The case of the missing data dump
To throw fuel on the fire, Stack Exchange announced late last week that they also intend to do as twitter and now reddit have done -- close up access to their API. But rather than announce it, they implemented their first step without telling anyone, over a month ago. That first step was turning off the public data dumps that stack overflow has been publishing once every 3 months since 2014. The community noticed that the newest one hadn't gone up and asked about it, receiving a response from a former dev and then from the CTO explaining that not only was the dump gone, the API and data explorers were also going to be locked down.
Aaaaaand of course the moment I post this, a former community manager shares a new blog post they've written, containing leaked internal comms from Stack Exchange. Nothing terribly new or surprising, but it's an interesting insight:
Week 2: Stack Exchange mod/curator strike
Negotiations begin
The company has asked for a small (3 person) delegation to discuss issues with and try to reach a mutually agreeable end to the strike. These three members have been selected by vote and are all highly respected and capable moderators. Talks are expected to begin today. Unsure where that'll go, since the demands were laid out pretty clearly in both the strike letter and on meta, but at least there will be some kind of communication.
Stack exchange refuses to interact directly with the community, which, while on the one hand would be challenging in this situation due to the size of the community vs the size of the staff, on the other hand the lack of communication with the community is exactly what got us into this mess so we'll see how it goes.
The case of the missing data dump
To throw fuel on the fire, Stack Exchange announced late last week that they also intend to do as twitter and now reddit have done -- close up access to their API. But rather than announce it, they implemented their first step without telling anyone, over a month ago. That first step was turning off the public data dumps that stack overflow has been publishing once every 3 months since 2014. The community noticed that the newest one hadn't gone up and asked about it, receiving a response from a former dev and then from the CTO explaining that not only was the dump gone, the API and data explorers were also going to be locked down.
While I'm still watching the world crumble over at Stack Exchange, it's really cool to see the staff over here doing pretty much the exact opposite. Stack Exchange is actively in flames and will most likely burn down if the firefighters don't get to it right fucking now, tumblr is here doing the work to try and rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the verizon takeover and all of the ill will that created.
One of the hallmarks of the "good old days" on Stack Exchange was the way the company interacted with the community. You'd see devs talking about new features they were working on or responding to bug reports with a summary of the root cause was and how they resolved it. You'd see interesting new features suggested by community members get implemented and you'd see the company engaging with and revising their plans explicitly referencing pieces of community feedback as the cause.
Most importantly, you'd see the community team everywhere. I cannot give these people enough praise for the work they did (and still do, when the company lets them). All of them are excellent communicators, writers and to some degree engineers/data scientists. They acted as incredibly effective supports for the volunteer mod teams and liaisons between the community and the company. These folks earned heaps and heaps of respect for their ability to see through the noise and get to the core of issues -- being able to provide a key insight or intervention to get an out-of-control conversation back on the rails, or say that "enough was enough" and make a decision that needed to be made. They were able to both have their ears to the ground of community issues and engage casually with many different communities while also having the ability to be aware of what's happening internally and quickly pull an engineer aside to get context and information to help put out a fire if need be.
The reason why this worked so effectively is the high degree to which they were listened to and respected both internally and externally -- if the CM team saw an issue users were experiencing, they could effectively lobby for engineering effort to be put into resolving that issue and get it fixed. And, if an unpopular change needed to happen for some internal reason, they had the trust and respect of enough of the userbase that, once the rationale was explained, users would understand and respect that the change needed to happen for whatever reason was presented without diving into conspiracy theories and imagined motives.
So to bring this back to tumblr, seeing staff being active on the site and interacting with users, both discussing stuff on tumblr they care about/work on and also just... being real people with lives outside of tumblr, well, it reminds me of what we had on Stack Exchange before the company stopped valuing the work CMs did. And that's without any sort of dedicated community team doing this type of work! It seems like here it's engineers and management folks doing it in their free time (which is a little tenuous -- on the one hand having to hire a new team would be a significant cost for a site that's already in the red, but on the other hand without making it official it's very possible to lose the people you have doing that work).
On one hand, tumblr's starting from a much, much lower place that Stack Exchange started from. The original Stack Exchange Community Team hires there were actual community members who were key parts of launching the site and so came in with a lot of trust built up. On the other hand tumblr is starting from a place of deep, deep distrust and that's much harder to build from. But the way I see staff interacting with users and speaking on their personal blogs I think/hope will help people feel like staff is working with them rather than being disconnected strangers making decisions from on high. Culture change takes a long time and I don't expect attitudes to change in an instant, but I'm hopeful.
Anyways, tl;dr I miss stack exchange but I like tumblr. And I'm eagerly watching to see where this goes :)