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-- the Tour
I've heard from quite a few folks within the org that this goal of "a library" is problematic. Not because it's a bad goal, but because as the sole goal it doesn't allow for the creation of a path for new users - askers and answerers - that accommodates their needs.
What this means in practice... I don't know. I think the hope is that we can have two goals, and somehow resolve the inherent conflicts between them.
-- Shog9 in chat, a couple of weeks ago. (Part of a longer discussion about the future of the site and the library vs helpdesk dilemma.)
The community had long shared the company's goal of an 'encyclopedia of knowledge'; unfortunately, that goal also represents an understanding that not every problem a programmer has should be in that encyclopedia.
When it was Jeff and Joel directly driving the vision, the features oscillated between the two camps (Open to new users vs. Only good question that add to that encyclopedia stick around). Now that there's an entire product team devoted to Q&A and they see the downsides of the "only new good questions stick around" as gatekeeping, and the disadvantages to the life of the product that gatekeeping has, they're making changes to ensure that Stack Overflow will continue to be relevant to this and the next generation of programmers.
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I have come to realize that keeping people out because their question is "too simple" or "they could have googled it" is not how you would mentor a junior programmer, and we should model the behavior we want to see out of programers. We want junior programmers to reach out for help instead of keeping it in.
I believe that it is normal to be upset when the goals change; but I also believe that you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. The people who own this platform are deciding what the vision of this platform is. We can either agree with that vision and work towards it, or disagree and stop participating.
-- a recent answer by George Stocker.
Most of us here contribute to Stack Overflow because we want to help build a library of knowledge. That library, at present, is a powerful benevolent force in the world - it makes working programmers of all skills levels more efficient every day, reduces the barrier to entry into the profession for new programmers, and helps amateurs and dabblers get stuff done without needing to first build deep expertise.
(It is also, of course, the whole thing that brings eyeballs to the site, and hence ad revenue to Stack Exchange Inc., of course.)
Yet, for a long time, it's been unclear whether that vision is one that the staff still share. A recurring component of the "welcoming" drive was staff hostility to curation tasks that are currently necessary components of the "library" model (like closure, downvoting, and leaving critical comments). More recently, we've had a key tool for community coordination, Hot Meta Posts, removed on the basis that Meta, somehow, causes "psychological damage". And, per the quotes at the start of this post, it seems to be the sense of at least Shog and George that either significant factions of the company or perhaps the company as a whole are rejecting the idea of the "library" model being Stack Overflow's primary purpose, in favour of some sort of "helpdesk" or "mentoring" model.
But here's the thing: I don't want to work a helpdesk, or "mentor" anyone, and nor, I think, do most of the best answerers here. The library model is the force multiplier that allows me to do outsized amounts of good in the world for the amount of work I put in here; some of my top answers have been read by hundreds of thousands of people, and that's awesome. But by contrast, both for my personal satisfaction and from a utilitarian perspective, the helpdesk/mentoring model isn't worth participating in. There are a great many things I could do with my free time - like volunteer at a local homeless shelter, or work a second job and donate some of the money to charity - that would both do more good and be more personally rewarding than debugging random bits of code for random individual programmers.
And so I would like it if the staff could tell us, once and for all, what their vision is. Is the removal of Hot Meta Posts and the current war on comments on Meta just the beginning? Should we expect to see more curation tools taken from us, more changes made to the way the site functions, until it's no longer a place where someone arriving from Google can find knowledge? What, exactly, are you trying to build, and does your plan for building it involve tearing down this awesome library we've made so that you can build your new institution upon its foundations?
You've told us that ultimately you make the rules, and our only recourse is to leave. That much is true; you own the site and the brand name, and you may do with it as you wish. But everyone owns the content, not just you; it's CC-licensed, and we contributed it knowing that it did not become part of your library, but part of a library owned by all humanity. If you no longer want to be the people tasked with maintaining that library - if you want, instead, to build some kind of helpdesk or mentoring service - then all you need do is say so, and we will start doing the work of finding a way to migrate our content and our mission somewhere else.
Or, if we still have a shared mission, tell us that. We don't understand why you're making the changes you're making, and they seem to serve no purpose but to chip away at our ability to effectively build and curate the library. If we're on the same side, and this is not the gradual and deliberate usurpation of the old mission by a new one, then let us know that there's still a point in us contributing here, and tell us what you're really trying to achieve. Perhaps that will at least provide a starting point for some kind of useful discourse about how to move forward, rather than the resentment and confusion that have characterised the last several weeks.
