My primary issue with collectives is one of presentation.

I accept that SO needs to make profit to survive and fulfil it's purpose. However, that doesn't require creating a sponsorship product to sell to businesses and then not calling it a sponsored service. Not once does the word "sponsored" even come up anywhere in staff-related correspondence around collectives. It's clearly a paid for service, by a 3rd party, to have a more visible footprint here on SO. If that's not a sponsorship... I don't know what is. Instead we get this:

Collectives™ helps you find trusted answers faster, engage with product experts, and share knowledge around the technologies you use most.

They do none of these things unless you actively go to the collective page and do some filtering. Not even half of the questions first presented on the landing page have answers, much less answers from "trusted" users or "product experts". It's just a tag filter.

I accept that there is some community building aspect to this in that it creates an incentive for people to participate in a given set of tags, however it's purely cosmetic. It serves the same purpose as gold tag badges, but skips the whole... earning that respect part by letting the paying company decide who is recognized based on whatever criteria they see fit.

I do see the benefit of a "sub-community".. feature but tieing it to a commercial sponsorship effectively puts the sub-community at the mercy of said commercial sponsorship. This product kills the idea of having community-ran sub communities with any real support.

My primary issue with collectives is one of presentation.

I accept that SO needs to make profit to survive and fulfill its purpose. However, that doesn't require creating a sponsorship product to sell to businesses and then not calling it a sponsored service. Not once does the word "sponsored" even come up anywhere in staff-related correspondence around collectives. It's clearly a paid for service, by a 3rd party, to have a more visible footprint here on SO. If that's not a sponsorship... I don't know what is. Instead we get this:

Collectives™ helps you find trusted answers faster, engage with product experts, and share knowledge around the technologies you use most.

They do none of these things unless you actively go to the collective page and do some filtering. Not even half of the questions first presented on the landing page have answers, much less answers from "trusted" users or "product experts". It's just a tag filter.

I accept that there is some community building aspect to this in that it creates an incentive for people to participate in a given set of tags, however it's purely cosmetic. It serves the same purpose as gold tag badges, but skips the whole... earning that respect part by letting the paying company decide who is recognized based on whatever criteria they see fit.

I do see the benefit of a "sub-community".. feature but tying it to a commercial sponsorship effectively puts the sub-community at the mercy of said commercial sponsorship. This product kills the idea of having community-ran sub communities with any real support.