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As one of the primary participants in the current drama theatre that is MSE, will the Director of Public Q&A direct her efforts to the public Q&A (not Twitter)?

I hold hope that if / when she produces her side of events unfolded, that we won't receive the pivot.

There seems to be an abundance of processes and policies being churned out but very little to really address the events of the last month or so.

[Speculation]

  • Has The Company legal team advised Sara not to respond to the Monica situation?
  • Are SE Inc. in damage control mode?
  • Do the powers that be simply not want to engage in productive discourse?

Note: Pronouns used from public Twitter bio.

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    What's the chance of actually productive discourse occurring? It seems quite low at the moment.
    – ben is uǝq backwards
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 23:16
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    @benisuǝqbackwards I am a gambling man and even I wouldn't take those odds. I am also a hopeful man and still have faith in the individual, not the company, to do the right thing. I think we should appeal to the humility of the individual and not the stonewalls and NDAs of the company.
    – Drew
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 23:22
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    Director of Public Q/A seems very specialized yet self explanatory. How do you measure success in such a job? My guess is how well they handle questions in public settings. The only consensus I've seen in the millions of opinions on the topic at large is on that metric.
    – John
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 23:37
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    @John that brings to mind a quote from a favourite film of mine, "The only winning move is not to play." - Joshua (WOPR), WarGames. Perhaps Sara is a fan of this film as well.
    – Drew
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 23:40
  • That Director must be aware of what is happening. As we have not heard from them, they have chosen not to do so. They might choose to do do in the future, but only they can answer your question. So this seems primarily opinion based: all answers will be pure speculation.
    – Raedwald
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 6:33
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    Voted "Leave Open": This post concerns opinions that are relevant to the real world and the network, and it is concerned with a history of events that can be sourced back properly - while it invites opinions and discussions (as a Meta post should), it is not speculation-based.
    – Unihedron
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 8:51

1 Answer 1

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Going off of experience, it's not likely.

Shog9 posted a discussion between the CEO and Sara about company growth a few days ago. Based on what I saw, she has no reason to feel compelled to leave Twitter and engage with us. It was a comfortable discussion from up high about company growth. Going off of other companies and their behaviour, once a person or people have disengaged with the people and went into "Quarterly Profits" land, you don't hear from them again, and that's also when they become out of touch.

One company that comes to mind is Blizzard. Like Stack Exchange, it used to be vibrant with legendary back-and-forth between developers, management, and the community. They became too big for themselves, and that interaction stopped happening. They made bizarre decisions. Recently they decided to take away 3,000 dollars in winnings from a kid and banned him from competition because he supported Hong Kong on a Blizzard stream. They made no intention to give back the money until the Internet dropped fury on their head.

I like to be positive, but I've been alive for a while and whenever I see this distance from the community, it never comes back to the way it was, and bizarre or bad decisions are never held accountable unless a number of people lash out.

For Blizzard, that number came from the fact they're a gaming company. Gaming is notably more popular than software development or physics, to be fair, and so from Stack Exchange's perspective, there was no financial harm and so it has not convinced them to have a moral or emotional epiphany yet.

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    I have a narrow view of SE as I have primarily stuck to SO where this (drama) doesn't seem to occur. I have listened to a few pod casts that have been linked over the weeks and it seems to be the prelude to the old methodology of the "pump and dump". New CEO, sweeping changes, generate content regardless of accuracy to inflate numbers then disappear with the golden parachute to the next up-and-comer.
    – Drew
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 23:33
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    Not that I necessarily disagree with your main point, but I don’t think I would take that much from an interview in Business Insider. I would have been immensely surprised to hear them say anything that wasn’t positive and pro-growth on a site like that. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong, just that that article was decidedly not for us, and I’m not sure it means anything that they didn’t address our issues
    – divibisan
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 0:54
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    @JonathanReez Everyone's acting like this is something new for the company. It's really not; I remember there being a (SO) meta post on immigration. Some of this stuff even predates my time, such as the (SO) rainbow logo. The only thing that's new is that the audience is all of SE and not just SO.
    – Laurel
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 1:07
  • @Laurel SO seems to have backed out from trying to push the immigration-related agenda, but they refuse to back down from the new CoC. Having a rainbow logo is equivalent to having a rainbow in your Facebook profile picture, so I don't see anything wrong with that.
    – JonathanReez
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 1:19
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    @JonathanReez, as for "not seeing anything wrong with that"—it's more equivalent to the Facebook logo itself changing to a rainbow flag. This might interest you.
    – Wildcard
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 4:50
  • Blizzard apologied for that and returned prize.
    – Suvitruf - Andrei Apanasik
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 10:23
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    @Suvitruf yes, after the push to make Mei a symbol for the Hong Kong uprising, in an effort to get Blizzard banned from China entirely. Yeah, they backed down after that.
    – user316129
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 13:04
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    I like the comparison, I remember when Blizzard had a controversy about how they treated their employees and suddenly they announced that Soldier 76 was gay. Like many companies, they deflect outrage using the LGBT community. I think SE expected legal trouble with the relicensing issue when they decided to release the new CoC.
    – Luis Rico
    Commented Nov 13, 2019 at 9:22

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