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One small bit of parting advice... You need to ignore the people who think that getting and responding to feedback from a million junior programmers on SO is more important than feedback from hundreds of highly engaged users across the network.

Turning one “promoter” into a “passive user” or “detractor” will affect SE from a business perspective far more than making a large number of only-here-for-the-answers users happy for a little while. Anyone who thinks otherwise is focused on the wrong metrics.

I think that y’all are undervaluing the communities on the smaller non-technical sites. Those communities are something that can’t be bought, and yet they’re treated like second-class users and have to make do with whatever you develop for Stack Overflow because their feedback is buried in surveys designed specifically for the trilogy. If you’re thinking that web traffic/ads is the way to make money and the smaller public Q&A sites are some sort of side effect instead of something intrinsically valuable, y’all need to stop listening to the bean counters.

SE doesn’t have to focus just on programmers to be successful. SE’s core audience should be the life-long learners, the curious, the teachers and collaborators (in the best sense of the word) regardless of the topic. Others will benefit, but those are the people you should be focused on understanding and serving. Those people, when they band together in a healthy community, solve all the problems y’all are trying to solve with policies and micromanaging how long a post can be featured for and such. The public Q&A part of SO needs to get smaller, not larger. It needs to go from a firehose to hundreds of fountains with benches under shade trees that encourage lingering. SE’s interface is inhumane when it attempts to scale up to millions of visitors a day, and no amount of chastising your users to be nicer, rewording the close reasons, or moderator diversity training will fix that.

I suspect though that SE as a company has moved into that phase where the innovation stops because investors are getting tired of waiting for their ROI. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just sad to see something special paved over.

Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
til it’s gone?

One small bit of parting advice... You need to ignore the people who think that getting and responding to feedback from a million junior programmers on SO is more important than feedback from hundreds of highly engaged users across the network.

Turning one “promoter” into a “passive user” or “detractor” will affect SE from a business perspective far more than making a large number of only-here-for-the-answers users happy for a little while. Anyone who thinks otherwise is focused on the wrong metrics.

I think that y’all are undervaluing the communities on the smaller non-technical sites. Those communities are something that can’t be bought, and yet they’re treated like second-class users and have to make do with whatever you develop for Stack Overflow because their feedback is buried in surveys designed specifically for the trilogy. If you’re thinking that web traffic/ads is the way to make money and the smaller public Q&A sites are some sort of side effect instead of something intrinsically valuable, y’all need to stop listening to the bean counters.

SE doesn’t have to focus just on programmers to be successful. SE’s core audience should be the life-long learners, the curious, the teachers and collaborators (in the best sense of the word) regardless of the topic. Others will benefit, but those are the people you should be focused on understanding and serving. Those people, when they band together in a healthy community, solve all the problems y’all are trying to solve with policies and micromanaging how long a post can be featured for and such. The public Q&A part of SO needs to get smaller, not larger. It needs to go from a firehose to hundreds of fountains with benches under shade trees that encourage lingering. SE’s interface is inhumane when it attempts to scale up to millions of visitors a day, and no amount of chastising your users to be nicer, rewording the close reasons, or moderator diversity training will fix that.

I suspect though that SE as a company has moved into that phase where the innovation stops because investors are getting tired of waiting for their ROI. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just sad to see something special paved over.

Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
til it’s gone?

One small bit of parting advice... You need to ignore the people who think that getting and responding to feedback from a million junior programmers on SO is more important than feedback from hundreds of highly engaged users across the network.

Turning one “promoter” into a “passive user” or “detractor” will affect SE from a business perspective far more than making a large number of only-here-for-the-answers users happy for a little while. Anyone who thinks otherwise is focused on the wrong metrics.

I think that y’all are undervaluing the communities on the smaller non-technical sites. Those communities are something that can’t be bought, and yet they’re treated like second-class users and have to make due with whatever you develop for Stack Overflow because their feedback is buried in surveys designed specifically for the trilogy. If you’re thinking that web traffic/ads is the way to make money and the smaller public Q&A sites are some sort of side effect instead of something intrinsically valuable, y’all need to stop listening to the bean counters.

SE doesn’t have to focus just on programmers to be successful. SE’s core audience should be the life-long learners, the curious, the teachers and collaborators (in the best sense of the word) regardless of the topic. Others will benefit, but those are the people you should be focused on understanding and serving. Those people, when they band together in a healthy community, solve all the problems y’all are trying to solve with policies and micromanaging how long a post can be featured for and such. The public Q&A part of SO needs to get smaller, not larger. It needs to go from a firehose to hundreds of fountains with benches under shade trees that encourage lingering. SE’s interface is inhumane when it attempts to scale up to millions of visitors a day, and no amount of chastising your users to be nicer, rewording the close reasons, or moderator diversity training will fix that.

I suspect though that SE as a company has moved into that phase where the innovation stops because investors are getting tired of waiting for their ROI. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just sad to see something special paved over.

Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
til it’s gone?

One small bit of parting advice... You need to ignore the people who think that getting and responding to feedback from a million junior programmers on SO is more important than feedback from hundreds of highly engaged users across the network.

Turning one “promoter” into a “passive user” or “detractor” will affect SE from a business perspective far more than making a large number of only-here-for-the-answers users happy for a little while. Anyone who thinks otherwise is focused on the wrong metrics.

I think that y’all are undervaluing the communities on the smaller non-technical sites. Those communities are something that can’t be bought, and yet they’re treated like second-class users and have to make do with whatever you develop for Stack Overflow because their feedback is buried in surveys designed specifically for the trilogy. If you’re thinking that web traffic/ads is the way to make money and the smaller public Q&A sites are some sort of side effect instead of something intrinsically valuable, y’all need to stop listening to the bean counters.

SE doesn’t have to focus just on programmers to be successful. SE’s core audience should be the life-long learners, the curious, the teachers and collaborators (in the best sense of the word) regardless of the topic. Others will benefit, but those are the people you should be focused on understanding and serving. Those people, when they band together in a healthy community, solve all the problems y’all are trying to solve with policies and micromanaging how long a post can be featured for and such. The public Q&A part of SO needs to get smaller, not larger. It needs to go from a firehose to hundreds of fountains with benches under shade trees that encourage lingering. SE’s interface is inhumane when it attempts to scale up to millions of visitors a day, and no amount of chastising your users to be nicer, rewording the close reasons, or moderator diversity training will fix that.

I suspect though that SE as a company has moved into that phase where the innovation stops because investors are getting tired of waiting for their ROI. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just sad to see something special paved over.

Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
til it’s gone?

One small bit of parting advice... You need to ignore the people that think that getting and responding to feedback from a million junior programmers on SO is more important than feedback from hundreds of highly engaged users across the network.

Turning one “promoter” into a “passive user” or “detractor” will affect SE from a business perspective far more than making a large number of only-here-for-the-answers users happy for a little while. Anyone who thinks otherwise is focused on the wrong metrics.

I think that y’all are undervaluing the communities on the smaller non-technical sites. Those communities are something that can’t be bought, and yet they’re treated like second-class users and have to make due with whatever you develop for Stack Overflow because their feedback is buried in surveys designed specifically for the trilogy. If you’re thinking that web traffic/ads is the way to make money and the smaller public Q&A sites are some sort of side effect instead of something intrinsically valuable, y’all need to stop listening to the bean counters.

SE doesn’t have to focus just on programmers to be successful. SE’s core audience should be the life-long learners, the curious, the teachers and collaborators (in the best sense of the word) regardless of the topic. Others will benefit, but those are the people you should be focused on understanding and serving. Those people, when they band together in a healthy community, solve all the problems y’all are trying to solve with policies and micromanaging how long a post can be featured for and such. The public Q&A part of SO needs to get smaller, not larger. It needs to go from a firehose to hundreds of fountains with benches under shade trees that encourage lingering. SE’s interface is inhumane when it attempts to scale up to millions of visitors a day, and no amount of chastising your users to be nicer, rewording the close reasons, or moderator diversity training will fix that.

I suspect though that SE as a company has moved into that phase where the innovation stops because the investors who are getting tired of waiting for their ROI. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just sad to see something special paved over.

Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
til it’s gone?

One small bit of parting advice... You need to ignore the people who think that getting and responding to feedback from a million junior programmers on SO is more important than feedback from hundreds of highly engaged users across the network.

Turning one “promoter” into a “passive user” or “detractor” will affect SE from a business perspective far more than making a large number of only-here-for-the-answers users happy for a little while. Anyone who thinks otherwise is focused on the wrong metrics.

I think that y’all are undervaluing the communities on the smaller non-technical sites. Those communities are something that can’t be bought, and yet they’re treated like second-class users and have to make due with whatever you develop for Stack Overflow because their feedback is buried in surveys designed specifically for the trilogy. If you’re thinking that web traffic/ads is the way to make money and the smaller public Q&A sites are some sort of side effect instead of something intrinsically valuable, y’all need to stop listening to the bean counters.

SE doesn’t have to focus just on programmers to be successful. SE’s core audience should be the life-long learners, the curious, the teachers and collaborators (in the best sense of the word) regardless of the topic. Others will benefit, but those are the people you should be focused on understanding and serving. Those people, when they band together in a healthy community, solve all the problems y’all are trying to solve with policies and micromanaging how long a post can be featured for and such. The public Q&A part of SO needs to get smaller, not larger. It needs to go from a firehose to hundreds of fountains with benches under shade trees that encourage lingering. SE’s interface is inhumane when it attempts to scale up to millions of visitors a day, and no amount of chastising your users to be nicer, rewording the close reasons, or moderator diversity training will fix that.

I suspect though that SE as a company has moved into that phase where the innovation stops because investors are getting tired of waiting for their ROI. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just sad to see something special paved over.

Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
til it’s gone?