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.

Yes, we understand that. Nobody has a problem with company making money here. We understand that you need to make money in order to run the platform.

What you need to keep in mind at all times, is that this public platform is not just a way for you to make money, it is a symbiosis between company providing the platform and community that provides and moderates content. If you take community out of the consideration when making changes to the public platform, you are killing the symbiosis and eventually killing the platform.

This has happened with Collectives. You have introduced the feature without thinking what kind of impact will it have on the community. You have community at your disposal for collecting the ideas and opinions on how some new features should look like, and what will work and what not, but you haven't done that. Instead you have developed half baked product that was tested only by few hand picked people without bringing broader community into the process during design stage.

As long as you keep developing features on public platform, without involving the community from the start, you will keep failing, as you will be blind to what community expects and tolerates.

With Collectives, you have created content that sits above other content and is out of the reach for the rest of the community, without ability to be moderated and improved by the community, that potentially competes with other content, and is eligible to earn reputation only for the selected few.

Earning reputation is a huge red flag for content that is out of the reach for the rest of the community, because it gives certain users more power on the rest of the site and without really earning that power and knowing how to use it.

If you take a look at the Collectives and their admins, meaning users that can add content on the site, they are all, but one, totally inexperienced on the platform. And how did that go? Well, so far, not so well.

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.

If that is your goal, then Collectives completely failed. There is zero incentive for the companies and their employees or other trusted members to provide high quality content here, and as we could see, basically zero new value was added. Those that want to provide value and content can and are doing so in the regular part of Q/A platform. Also there is no bringing people together as Articles are completely out of the reach for the rest of the community. The rest of Collectives is just the same old Q/A, only with sponsor ads.

If Collectives are just a way to put some targeted ads here, fine. If you want them to be more and provide additional content, then such content needs to be integral, functional part of the rest of the content, not some foreign body that will turn into a cancer.

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.

You keep repeating that, but very little has been done in that area. The last positive change was lowering the threshold for close votes two years ago. Stack Overflow is drowning in poor content and the company still refuses to explain rules to the new users, loud and clear, before they start posting here.