I believe the data was just beginning to be understood differently around the time I left the company. (The timeline fits at least.) For many years the company used meta sites as a way of communicating with the most engaged users. Sometime in late 2015, I noticed a different model of meta users. Instead of seeing Meta as influencers, parts of the company began promoting a funnel model of users. In the funnel model, everyone who visits a Stack Exchange site is at the top and you winnow down to paying customers at the bottom. Since we only had products related to the Stack Overflow brand, this model suggested resources promoting the Stack Exchange brand were only helping if they converted people to Stack Overflow. For a variety of reasons this never happened, so the rest of the network was essentially excluded from the funnel altogether.

Meta is another strange situation. Again, there's no direct way to funnel meta users into paying customers. It's obvious that efforts to convert occasional readers into customers are far better spent on features on the main site. The latest incarnation of the podcast looks pretty successful in this light since a relatively small banner draws many users into that marketing vehicle. The annual survey (which is largely intended to assist marketing) also demonstrates the promise of reaching out directly to passive users. Meanwhile, meta sites tended to be distractions.

In December, there was a very real risk the company would move support, bug tracking, feature suggestions and announcements to other mechanisms besides meta sites. The only thing left would be discussions and I suspect those were allowed to stay because they could be easily ignored by employees. (It should be noted that replacing these functions would be incredibly expensive. This was, I believe, well understood. In times of belt-tightening, I don't really see how this was supposed to work.) I'd pretty much checked out of the internal discussion by then (new job offer and all), but the situation looked pretty dim from my perch as a community manager. Meta was the only real way I knew to influence the community without changing features on the main site.

Right around the time I left, there was a post to our internal Q&A Team that pointed out that while Meta was only a tiny subset of active users if you look at people posting here, when you look at active users by how often they visited, it was a much larger percentage. (I don't have the numbers at hand, but it should be possible to draw them out via SEDE if you join on AccountId across schemas.) Even after removing some of the paths to meta such as Hot Meta Posts (which come to think of it sounds vaguely NSFW), active users on main are often enthusiastic readers of meta.

Legend has it the CMs were once tasked with responding to every post on every meta. ("I'll take 'Things that Don't Scale' for 1000, Alex.) When I left the company there was a real chance meta would be all but ignored by employees according to policy. Actually including Meta as part of the company's communication strategy is hugely encouraging to me as a member of the Stack Exchange community. It doesn't make the hurt of the last four months go away, but it does indicate there is a path toward rebuilding fractured relationships. While the company is far worse positioned to meet the challenges it's currently faced with, I'm confident in the ability of many of the remaining employees to refocus on community (or rather communities) and avoid distractions that divide rather than unite.

I believe the data was just beginning to be understood differently around the time I left the company. (The timeline fits at least.) For many years the company used meta sites as a way of communicating with the most engaged users. Sometime in late 2015, I noticed a different model of meta users. Instead of seeing Meta as influencers, parts of the company began promoting a funnel model of users. In the funnel model, everyone who visits a Stack Exchange site is at the top and you winnow down to paying customers at the bottom. Since we only had products related to the Stack Overflow brand, this model suggested resources promoting the Stack Exchange brand were only helping if they converted people to Stack Overflow. For a variety of reasons this never happened, so the rest of the network was essentially excluded from the funnel altogether.

Meta is another strange situation. Again, there's no direct way to funnel meta users into paying customers. It's obvious that efforts to convert occasional readers into customers are far better spent on features on the main site. The latest incarnation of the podcast looks pretty successful in this light since a relatively small banner draws many users into that marketing vehicle. The annual survey (which is largely intended to assist marketing) also demonstrates the promise of reaching out directly to passive users. Meanwhile, meta sites tended to be distractions.

In December, there was a very real risk the company would move support, bug tracking, feature suggestions and announcements to other mechanisms besides meta sites. The only thing left would be discussions and I suspect those were allowed to stay because they could be easily ignored by employees. (It should be noted that replacing these functions would be incredibly expensive. This was, I believe, well understood. In times of belt-tightening, I don't really see how this was supposed to work.) I'd pretty much checked out of the internal discussion by then (new job offer and all), but the situation looked pretty dim from my perch as a community manager. Meta was the only real way I knew to influence the community without changing features on the main site.

Right around the time I left, there was a post to our internal Q&A Team that pointed out that while Meta was only a tiny subset of active users if you look at people posting here, when you look at active users by how often they visited, it was a much larger percentage. (I don't have the numbers at hand, but it should be possible to draw them out via SEDE if you join on AccountId across schemas.) Even after removing some of the paths to meta such as Hot Meta Posts (which come to think of it sounds vaguely NSFW), active users on main are often enthusiastic readers of meta.

Legend has it the CMs were once tasked with responding to every post on every meta. ("I'll take 'Things that Don't Scale' for 1000, Alex.") When I left the company there was a real chance meta would be all but ignored by employees according to policy. Actually including Meta as part of the company's communication strategy is hugely encouraging to me as a member of the Stack Exchange community. It doesn't make the hurt of the last four months go away, but it does indicate there is a path toward rebuilding fractured relationships. While the company is far worse positioned to meet the challenges it's currently faced with, I'm confident in the ability of many of the remaining employees to refocus on community (or rather communities) and avoid distractions that divide rather than unite.