Since the announcement of Collectives™ on Stack Overflow, we’ve seen a number of potential narratives emerge for how and why Collectives exist. So in the spirit of continued transparency, I thought I’d take a few moments and talk about how and why Collectives came to be and our plans for them going forward as we are planning our priorities and roadmap for next year.
First let me start with a set of non-negotiable principles:
- We are a for-profit company. This has been true since the founders raised the first round of capital from outside investors. We have an obligation to our shareholders to create and increase value over time. This is both a reality and a position that cannot be changed.
- Our Public Platform’s paid product strategy approaches commercializing the public platform by focusing on relevance – specifically, using our unique position to bring interested people and organizations together to engage around the collective knowledge of a specific domain or topic. We have chosen this strategy because we want to deliver real value to both users and customers rather than just creating additional or new types of advertising.
- Stack Overflow, as a resource, is only viable if the quality of the objective content is extremely high, better than anywhere else. We cannot compromise on quality, and we expect all our products to build on this premise.
Additionally, these key insights were fundamental to the ideation of Collectives:
- Stack Overflow is too large to be truly considered a singular community. It spans too many diverse topics, and thus doesn’t have the focus that some of the other sites on the network do. If we are to continue to grow and to thrive, sub-communities are vital, but a single tag is too small of a unit to form a community around (in most cases).
- Almost since the creation of the site, there has been interest in enhancing the q&a format to include long form content. We believe this could also prove to be critical for community building and creating new opportunities for users to engage and contribute. We are concerned there is little value and high risk introducing these features across the whole site.
- We also know that tech organizations are seeking opportunities to connect with and understand the users and use cases of their products. They want the opportunity to engage more directly and support their users where they already are, in order to increase user retention and enable product adoption. Similarly, technologists value platforms that are well-supported by an active tech community, and have a strong desire to engage with the people building and supporting those platforms. They are interested in the opportunity to more easily provide feedback and learnings from their product use that could shape changes, improvements, and even new products.
From these principles and research grew the idea of Collectives. They are, at their core, sub-communities with a specific focus (to which we can add more features as we go). They are a space within the larger site for us to learn, grow, and experiment along with you all, our users, but in a controlled fashion. They are semi-isolated, although Q&A, for example, is shared with the public platform. Collectives give us the opportunity to experiment in ways that won’t leak features out. This enables new features and capabilities to be tested without endangering the underlying knowledge base, and - to meet our first priority - they fill an actual market need. They are the vehicle for us to offer an actual commercial product.
So we introduced Collectives, and there was an initial outcry against Articles.
Now, to be perfectly honest, while we took strides to ensure we didn't see a repeat of past projects (i.e. Documentation), there were a lot of questions we weren't able to properly answer without community involvement: would they be permanent or ephemeral, would they include announcements. And based on your feedback, we’ve landed on some answers to those questions (permanent, not ephemeral; no announcements, although we’ll need to find an alternative way to tackle this need) and have figured out how to position them as an enhancement to the knowledge repository.
There are, of course, other ways we could have gone to increase our revenue stream. The easy ways would have been to just incorporate more ads on our pages, or begin to relax our existing ad standards to allow more ad types (motion graphics, video, etc.), which the market has been pushing hard for. We continue to stand firm on our standards. Video or animated ads fill a customer need, but we believe they are too intrusive, distracting, and would drive higher usage of ad blockers. Your feedback across multiple Meta posts in the past have supported our ongoing stance on this issue.
We have explicitly decided against serving Real Time Bidding Ads to both Stack Overflow and all our Stack Exchange Sites that had previously been tested in the past. We were unable to ensure those ads were relevant and up to the quality levels we strive to uphold for users. We feel there continues to be a place for Display and Direct to Developer Ads on Stack Overflow, as they do generate awareness for our clients' products and services, but we didn’t feel like relaxing standards or hanging more ads on the site was the right thing to do. We wanted to do this in a way that was responsible and honors the values that built the site.
Advertising is a complicated business with an ever-changing set of privacy impacts, industry trends, and customer expectations. Between adoption of ad-blockers, upcoming changes to third party cookies, and the unpredictable nature of ad buying, we need to diversify the paid products on our public platform if we expect to continue to thrive and invest in our Public Platform capabilities.
For all these reasons, the existence of Collectives is not something we are able to debate. It’s the most viable option that we’ve found for long-term value creation on the Public Platform, which creates opportunities for both users and customer needs. We believe they also allow us to experiment and iterate more rapidly on features in a smaller, contained way. But the features that we launch, such as Articles, need community input to make them the best they can be. We are ideating and researching additional opportunities for next year and hope to move past the how and why of Collectives and work together on them, starting with Articles.
I hope this helps clear up our intentions, beliefs, and plans regarding Collectives. We ask those of you who are willing to work with us on developing the norms and guidelines regarding Articles. Let’s move forward together to create the first new, valuable way to participate and contribute there. Please check out Philippe's post to participate in the conversation.
