Edit - Meta Stack Exchange

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

20

The apparent time costs sound very high for the level of benefit delivered. I'm more than a bit skeptical that hat-time would come around and suddenly people in the community would see the company in a new positive light, especially for an event that has gotten a bit stale. If there were some way to make it more reasonable in scope of effort I wouldn't see much harm in it.
– Bryan Krause
Commented Sep 6, 2023 at 21:28
5

@BryanKrause: It was something fun to look forward to. Even if it was a bit stale it was known, and sprucing it up is one of those perennial challenges where getting buy-in or consensus on what to do next takes time. But to be more pointed, if the company was feeling like this was dragging on or not that exciting, why didn't they take any of our feedback on board?? I would imagine that we'd have some things to contribute to this discussion if it really was the case that they were running out of ways to keep it fresh. They're not in some echo chamber, after all.
– Makoto
Commented Sep 6, 2023 at 21:43
17

I'm sure just as many people feel like "Why are you spending developer time on hats instead of my favorite feature request"; hats-related features, fun as they might be, seem like they should be pretty low-priority to me. It would be one thing if these were little hobby projects by someone in their spare time, but instead it sounds like a pretty clunky system that took a lot of effort to run.
– Bryan Krause
Commented Sep 6, 2023 at 21:52
2

@BryanKrause: I'm not contending against the time/effort to run vs the apparent value, but I would adamantly reject any notion of this being something they deprioritize in favor of them prioritizing anything we want. This is going to be time and energy going straight into their corporate priorities, which is fine, but I don't want it conflated that their priorities and my priorities align all that well.
– Makoto
Commented Sep 6, 2023 at 22:06
6

They're looking at fixing long-standing website accessibility bugs, improving the API, and fixing the more irritating aspects of the left sidebar. That's not nothing.
– wizzwizz4
Commented Sep 6, 2023 at 22:50
4

@wizzwizz4: If that was a priority, then Winterbash would've been mothballed a long time ago with that as the explicit reason instead of a "it's honestly too expensive to do this" reason. So I see the work on all of those initiatives as serendipitous rather than where the attention will really go after this is done.
– Makoto
Commented Sep 7, 2023 at 7:06
13

@Makoto You're modelling Stack Exchange as an ideal perfectly-rational agent, whose efforts may be just as easily directed anywhere, who aligns its actions with a strategy that optimises with respect to a coherent utility function. I've never seen any group do that. (Heck, it's hard enough finding a single person who behaves that way.) Attention is not a fungible resource, person-hours are not necessarily transferable, and not everything is part of a grand strategy.
– wizzwizz4
Commented Sep 7, 2023 at 8:29
2

@wizzwizz4 "[N]ot everything is part of a grand strategy." Quoted for truth — this is very hard to keep in mind, but extremely important.
– Nathan Tuggy
Commented Sep 7, 2023 at 15:26
3

They said 1% wore a hat last time. I wonder how many explicitly "hated hats". I participated in winter bash for a year or two, but I quickly ended up being annoyed by a lot of harmful behaviours it would encourage (e.g. the swarms of entitled randos demanding their messages be starred in chat for a new year's hat, and similar disruptive incentives on the main site). If more people ended up hating winter bash than loving it then axing can even be a net benefit to the community... :P
– Andras Deak -- Слава Україні
Commented Sep 9, 2023 at 19:56
4

@AndrasDeak--СлаваУкраїні: I'm still taking that percentage with a grain of salt. Participation network-wide is at its lowest in December, since many of the normal site-goers are off of school or on vacation. Then factor in the even lower actual percentage of "community" that's just always around. 1% sounds low on paper, but I wonder if that's really how many daily users actually are in this so-called community. Y'know, those who care to do things here beyond finding an answer to their question.
– Makoto
Commented Sep 10, 2023 at 14:38

Add a comment |

Correct minor typos or mistakes
Clarify meaning without changing it
Add related resources or links
Always respect the author’s intent
Don’t use edits to reply to the author

create code fences with backticks ` or tildes ~
```
like so
```
add language identifier to highlight code
```python
def function(foo):
print(foo)
```
put returns between paragraphs
for linebreak add 2 spaces at end
_italic_ or **bold**
indent code by 4 spaces
backtick escapes `like _so_`
quote by placing > at start of line
to make links (use https whenever possible)
<https://example.com>
[example](https://example.com)
<a href="https://example.com">example</a>

formatting help »
answering help »