Why should any of us contribute when Stack Exchange will throw away our work without consulting us?

Question

NOTICE:

Since this site is now in beta, it is time to have these conversations with the folks who are actually building this site. Please bring your comments and discussions to this site's 'meta' support forum so not to split these conversations. Thanks.

Proposal: Startup Business

On the old startups Stack Exchange I was a user with 3,000+ rep, 84 answers, and hundreds of edits. I proudly linked to my profile from LinkedIn, Quora, even my email signature. Answers.OnStartups got me involved in other StackExchange sites, where I've contributed with answers, edits, and questions on Stack Overflow, Webmasters, Wordpress, User Experience, and others.

Now, after providing Stack Exchange with who knows how many pageviews and associated revenue, all of my contributed content on the site I was most active on has been trashed into a zip file, and I don't even have an archived profile to show for my effort.

After the fact, I've learned that the issue was that not enough of the original community was still active. Rather than trying to re-engage that community, without even a single email sent to the broader community to discuss alternatives to closing, someone (I assume the StackExchange "Community Managers") decided to close the site, posted a notice to the rarely-visited meta section of Answers.OnStartups, and shut it down a month later.

How can the Community Managers not see this as blatantly disrespectful to the creators of the content the network is built on? Why should I or anyone else participate in re-creating a community they've already trashed once?

---

Edit: With thanks to Robert Cartaino for his reply, the core question is still unanswered. Why should the larger amount of content creators contribute when their work will be thrown away without consultation if the core community can't figure out how to get more people to moderate?

Is the expectation that Dharmesh Shah, Jason Cohen, Patrick McKenzie, and members in general shouldn't expect their participation in the community / content contributions to be valued unless they're also willing to edit answers, close questions, organize tags? Throwing away everyone's content sends the signal that these communities are not a place worth contributing to if you can't regularly participate in "core governance" too.

Answer 1

The "rarely-visited meta" — as you called it — was a big part of the problem. Meta hosts the core governance of the site. I wish I could point you to the myriad of efforts that went into getting this site going again. The Community Managers, Moderators, and top avid users tried valiantly through a multi-year effort to try to energize this community into doing something. Anything.

The site had a reasonable amount of fleeting traffic, but the problem was attrition — few people actually stuck around long enough to run and maintain the site. The questions became predominantly off base (with few people to fix them or even care) and the bulk of content was largely poorly maintained. That's too bad, because it once hosted some of the best content on our network. It just wasn't enough.

The Moderators and the (few) top users worked very hard to try and jump start and re-invigorate this site, but ultimately there was just too few people sticking around long enough to listen. The site was unmaintainable with an all-too-weak foundation to build on. It had to be shut down.

To answer your question about "why recreate the community?" —

For all it's faults, Area 51 does one thing very well — it determines of there is an organized and energetic community to rally around the subject of a site. The founder of Answers.OnStartups never had the time to put into building the site, losing one of the main rallying points behind launching the site in the first place. The base of avid users left a long time ago. We couldn't even draw enough of the community into a discussion to determine if the subject itself was suitable as-is… or if a new site scope was in order.

So that's what starting over would do: It would give us a fresh start to determine what the site was supposed to be about; to determine if there is a need for a site at all, and if there are a sufficient number of people around to make it work — because we couldn't make any of this work on the actual site.

Answer 2

Being frustrated with how the Answers.Onstartups knowledge was closed, we re-created the community over the last month: Bright Journey

More details on this answer here:

Site "On Startups" is closed - what to do now?

It took us a month working on this 'round the clock, but it was well worth it. There was tremendous knowledge on the site and knowledge is a terrible thing to waste.

UPDATE:

We have transitioned all accounts. In order to regain access to your old Answers.Onstartups account either:

• Use the forgot password feature: http://www.brightjourney.com/a/password/new

OR

• If you signed up using Facebook or Google+, just login as normal: http://www.brightjourney.com/a/login

Answer 3

I visited answers.onstartups.com nearly every day for almost two years. I even checked the meta site most days. My complaint with what happened is that we were never told, "If you don't fix this, we'll have to shut it down." It was, "This site is shutting down November 12th." At that point, there were actually quite a few people there trying to find a way to salvage the site, but in my opinion, we were never given a chance to try. By the time we were made aware that the site was facing impending death, it was apparently too late to try to salvage it.

But to Jay's larger point, I'm disappointed that the only thing I have to show for the time and effort I put into that site is a .zip file. (Though thank goodness there is at least that.) I don't have anything I could point out on a resume, in a job interview, or even to a friend about what I did there. I think Jay is right on the money that this is very demotivating. When a site is closed, it would make a world of difference if there was still something there that is readable and linkable, instead of just a data dump.

Answer 4

Like many others, I too spent numerous hours on the answers.onstartups.com site over a couple of years. I answered a lot of questions and did my best to help people, as well as report spam, up-vote questions and comments, edit typos, etc. In short, I spent a lot of time being "a good citizen" and this seems to have been reflected in the reputation points I received (many thousands).

However, from my personal point of view, I could never understand the moderation, which was often overzealous, arbitrary and lacked consistency. For example, some of my answers were up-voted several times, but I was told by a moderator not to provide "non-answers", whatever that means, and to only use comments. So, being a good guy, I started answering questions as comments (even though it was more difficult), only to be told some days later not to answer questions in comments, but to provide proper answers instead.

Whether you blame the moderation rules or the moderators is a distinction without a difference. In either case, the old site was extremely hostile to new users, so it is not a shock that a community never developed. This is a massive wasted opportunity, as it seems like there should be a startups Q&A site, especially after the demise of the Joel on Software forum (I was active there since 2001).