Upcoming initiatives on Stack Overflow and across the Stack Exchange network (July 2024)

One of the key focuses is User Activation, which you define as "Improving new user success".

Among the areas that you're looking to improve with this in mind, is (from the blog post):

creating easier ways for users to interact with content that’s relevant to them

Would you care to elaborate a bit here? I recognize that the home page initiative may play into this, but I'm curious what sorts of improvements you're looking to make to prompt new users to jump into the scene.

To touch on this a bit more... Stack Overflow (and the broader network) has a really big reputation for being a place where folks come here via a search engine query, read what it is they want to read, and then leave. It seems to me that, in that brief moment between reading and leaving, you want to insert some sort of nag/beg to "activate" that user and get them active on the site they're visiting.

I... Dunno if that's really needed. Sure, there's likely to be some correlation between getting a user signed up for an account who would've otherwise never signed up and them maybe taking the plunge into asking/answering questions, but passive readers across the SE network are, and always have been, the bulk of its traffic. Everything curators do is in service to the future, likely account-less, reader.

What're some goals you're looking for with this initiative? What value do you hope to extract from exploration here? I'm genuinely asking not because I think it's a bad idea by any means, more so that I'd like to understand why there's a sudden interest in this area.

Those first two initiatives (long-standing feature requests, Staging Ground) are great! But I think most of the current initiatives fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of the Stack Exchange network. Des's answer seems to explain why that's happening, so I'll quote it liberally.

from the moment a user signs up to when they start using the product in a way that produces value for them

This period is negative for every site except GenAI, and especially for Stack Overflow. Most people who benefit from the library have never been, and will never be, users.

It’s about helping users get the most from their experience with the product after they’ve raised their hand to sign up.

If users sign up and find it valuable enough to stick around,

Stack Exchange is not something that users get anything out of. It's an elaborate con to get members of a highly-individualistic culture to perform expensive, pro-social behaviour, via the magical power of numbers-go-up. (There are, of course, exceptions.)

features that can help users find what they need faster.

Until Google's recent deprecation of Google Search, this feature was Google Search (or, if you're weird like me, a Bing proxy of your choice). Stack Exchange's internal search tooling is to better find questions to answer (and well-remembered duplicate targets). Not to help people get answers to their questions.

Those first few touchpoints with a product are critical to developing a lasting relationship and a healthy ecosystem of active users.

We had that. We still do, in a sense, but company actions continue to chip away at it.

Sure, there are some pretty major social problems, but most are reflections of major problems with society, and are gradually improving as activists work on them in areas of society where they can make a difference. Stack Exchange is not really a place where that can happen. The company can make symbolic gestures, or do activism effectively in other areas; but e.g. employees attempting to use their positions of power to subordinate users and micromanage interpersonal interactions on the site is just… ineffective. (And, imo, unfeminist.) Those (seemingly) responsible for that particular farce are no longer in charge, but it's still an important lesson: what seems like an appropriate intervention to employees, isn't necessarily.

The Stack Exchange userbase, culturally, has a lot of overlap with the software development industry. There are some pretty major problems with the culture there… but there are also people who've investigated those problems. If you want to cultivate a healthy ecosystem of active users, listen to what those people have to say (e.g. Tanya Reilly's Being Glue talk). Don't just do random stuff because something measurable is affected and you Have to Do Something.

Designing a better website, while appreciated, will not fix our community problems. Modifying the website to fix perceived community problems will not improve the website.

The goal with improving user activation is to see better user retention – more users sticking around.

Why do you want this? A healthy ecosystem of active users is at odds with a user-maximalist approach. If people see that Stack Exchange is not for them, we want them to leave. (We also want people to feel welcome if their interests align with our mission, which afaik isn't happening as much as it should, but that's a social problem.)

Every Stack Exchange user is a liability to the company. Being a Stack Exchange user is a personal liability. The library is where the value is, and that doesn't belong to the company (though you do get a little ad money from hosting it).

Some will continue to be passive content consumers, of course, but some will progress and contribute back

I think your model of how community onboarding works is very flawed, and that – because you had that "sales funnel" model ready to go in your heads – nobody in the company has tried to find out how it actually works. Why do you believe this?

content […] the corpus

Thank you for the transparency. However, this is perhaps the most offensive thing I have read from the company in the past year. I knew that the company thinks this way about our library, but it feels different to read it. I am overreacting.

There's some comments and questions around activation that I wanted to speak to so I’m posting this as an answer.

An updated homepage and signup optimizations are part of user activation but not the whole picture. Onboarding improvements are also a part of this. Activation is about introducing users to the platform and helping them accomplish their goals. It represents those early touch points from the moment a user signs up to when they start using the product in a way that produces value for them. You can think about the steps to product usage in these phases:

1. Acquisition - the ability get users to sign up
2. Activation - the ability to help users realize the value of a product (so that they stick around and use it)
3. Engagement - effectively engaging with the core product experience

In this funnel, Activation is the gap between sign up and engagement. It’s where we (and most products) see the biggest drop off. Or put another way, the biggest opportunity for improving user retention.

Activation is not about nagging more users to sign up. It’s about helping users get the most from their experience with the product after they’ve raised their hand to sign up. There is so much room on the public platform for better content discovery, personalization, and raising awareness around features that can help users find what they need faster. The goal with improving user activation is to see better user retention – more users sticking around. If users sign up and find it valuable enough to stick around, we have the opportunity to deliver more value over time and encourage deeper engagement. Those first few touchpoints with a product are critical to developing a lasting relationship and a healthy ecosystem of active users. Some will continue to be passive content consumers, of course, but some will progress and contribute back to the corpus.

All that to say, we see this as a long-tail project that we’ll be spending more than just a couple of months focusing on and are excited to share more as we go.