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.

I suspect it would be useful to consider the "non negotiable principles" not as an ultimatium but as an opportunity to understand where these things have to be mutually beneficial. I feel it's useful to consider 2 of the points made in context.

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.

SE is a platform and a set of communities, and many attempts to "create value" have fallen flat because they completely forgot the communities. Value and engagement comes from healthy, vital communities, and if, as often in the past, things are focused on "creating value" while losing sight of what creates the value - things are doomed to fail.

While I know part of the SE community feels we should go all-in on a different, less commercial path, I feel that if things work folks would have no exceptions to the company creating initiatives to improve profit and value in partnership with the community.

I suspect that if you don't want to be irrelevant - finding that balance is important.

Fundamentally, a content, happy, community you're working with is the best way to add value over time.

Our Public Platform’s paid product strategy approaches commercializing the public platform by focusing on relevance ....

In plainer English - if folks are finding stuff they need more easily, even if it's written by employees of an org that happens to be paying y'all, then that's good. While I'm not an SO denizen, and mostly follow events here second hand - I'd argue 'good' support for paid products on the public platform might include helping ensure relevance not just of content, but of tone and style as well.

I do believe that that's the core of some of the critiques made. SO's very much built many solutions in need of problems in the past. For something to succeed it needs to balance the needs of the company, of potential clients, and the community as-is (not as you want it).

In context - your products are only going to be relevant to your clients if they're relevant to the community, since your clients are and always have been selling to the community (or to put it another way - we're the product).

I suspect this is relevant across SE's product and communication lines, and often forgotten.

So we introduced Collectives, and there was an initial outcry against Articles

Video or animated ads fill a customer need, but we believe they are too intrusive, distracting, and would drive higher usage of ad blockers.

Both of these have something in common - that they kinda caused an outcry (and SE did try video ads, and some of the ads that were shown were poor fits for us) - Y'all have a technically sophisticated userbase, especially but not limited to the tech sites, who probably are going to more vocal about things than the average user.

As much as anything else - you're selling eyeballs and attention first - everything else relies on that. As such, any product is adding value to user experience. It's been years since I studied marketing - but to borrow a phrase - your product needs to bring delight to the customer - and in this case, for Collectives or other products to 'work', they need to be something folks would recognize as bringing additional value (and delight!) to their SO experience.

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 the community at your disposal for collecting ideas and opinions on what 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.

I don't think anyone (deep down) begrudges SO from trying to make a profit. You have to pay the bills somehow. But there were numerous errors that could have been avoided. Some of these should be embarrassing to the company.

Profitability should have been a stated goal

This paragraph was needed 5 months ago

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.

The community figured that out on day one

I've only ever seen one devil - profitability. The whole network needs revenue to keep the lights on, and given the way that venture capital was raised, I don't think making this service a non-profit was ever a tenable option. So, revenue is needed. In the void of decisions clearly made for the good of the overall community, decisions or actions are taken that are presumed to be for the good of the company's long-term vitality. It's not a problem that lights need to stay on; what is the problem is that this comes at the effective loss of what made this place worth staying for.

I mean it wasn't that long ago that the company was up-front when a new feature was trying to earn money

As we continue our endeavor to find things that improve our core Q&A experience and contribute to our bottom profit line, we look for intersections where we can make us more valuable to everyone, which often comes in the form of identifying opportunities that we've been wasting because we haven't yet discovered them.

I don't expect people to be happy about it, but being open about goals of making money needs to be a policy. Yet the announcement said nothing about it directly (although it does call the initial Collectives "customers"). Which leads me to my next point

Pretending this wasn't about revenue confused everyone

The gist of the announcement was that this was a value proposition. The community wasn't seeing new ads, they were gaining quality content. The community never really bought it, seeing it as just another ad system. I mean, it is hard to see this as anything but a paid advertisement and a commenter noted

I downvoted this because it felt like a product blog post. I'm not very familiar with the new articles feature. Maybe that's an acceptable post style and I'm wrong. But that's why I downvoted.

Worse is that for the people paying for this shiny new feature seemed to be equally confused. Many of them seemed to be tasked to spread information through what ostensibly was a paid channel, only to have their articles deleted for content quality issues that would not pass muster anywhere else on SO.

Yes, it was a Beta, but not setting expectations first was a mistake, and announcing it like it's a new feature instead was a recipe for disaster. Hence where we are today, with a fuller explanation that should have been offered from the start.

What universally broken thing are we trying to fix - both for us as users and your corporate partners? Right now, I feel like you have two parties talking at each other - partners trying to understand what the best way of using articles is, and users trying to nudge them in various ways.

And there still aren't any tools for community moderators. Only CMs can manage articles like other posts. That's partially due to the fact that Collectives was cobbled onto Teams, which was cobbled onto Q&A. We have no idea what became of this post

Some key topics we covered with participating Stack Overflow moderators were how moderation of new features should be handled, and whether there should be any new rules. One big takeaway from these interviews was that the mod team should moderate the majority of new features, with the option to pull in a Community Manager from our staff where they feel appropriate. We were concerned about the potential added workload, but most of the Stack Overflow moderators we spoke to felt that this wouldn’t meaningfully impact their workload.

It was good you interviewed some mods about it and the summary they posted indicated they gave feedback I (and probably most of the mods) would have given if we were asked. But since then... nothing.

At this point, I consider Collectives to be like Teams: a paid product we just don't deal with. It makes money, SO has its own internal rules and tools, and SO manages it from the top down (with some feedback from the community here and there about how it should look and feel). I don't know if that's how you want it to be perceived, but that's the impression I get from fellow users I interact with. Philippe has been fighting an uphill battle on that front, and I do not envy him in this task.

TL;DR Takeaways

You're a busy lady so here's just the basics

1. If a project is about revenue, be open about that. Selling revenue-producing projects as solely beneficial to the community will not go well.
2. Don't rush the tooling. Collectives launched half-baked and have not significantly improved since
3. Make sure you set expectations in the launch notice(s), especially for customers, CMs and moderators. It's bad when your employees are having to improvise answers on the fly.

I don't see any issue with SE earning money, and I don't think the interests of the company and the community are really at odds here. I also appreciate that SE has listened to the feedback on the ad experiments, I was one of the people yelling very loudly about that.

But I do think that the Collectives feature has fundamental issues, and that SE isn't looking deep enough into why it's so poorly received by the community. To me the whole thing really feels like SE is desperately trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. I think there is an interesting idea somewhere there, but the feature as released feels completely incoherent to me.

Articles are not a bad idea in themselves, I think there is a place for different kind of content on SO/SE even though it's probably really hard to pull this off in a way that works well and doesn't produce too many issues with quality. But coupling articles to collectives is probably the worst way to start, and this amplifies the potential problems with articles because you put the tool only into the hands of people with somewhat conflicting interests in promoting their product and with likely not that much SO experience.

What the paying customers are probably interested in are essentially native ads/sponsored content. That's not a bad thing inherently, as long as it is properly marked. But it is the antithesis of what SO content should be, it needs to be clearly differentiated from the actual content of the site. Mixing these promotional interests with a new core content type creates a lot of conflict as you've noticed.

It would be a shame if we are all so used to the corporate mindset that we accept it as a justification for actions that the community finds undesirable.

The site and technology exist to provide a platform for the content provided (for free) by the community. The company exists to maintain and support the site and technology (and the community). To do this it needs to make enough money to continue existing. It doesn't need to make more profit. If it is trying to increase its profit by changing things that the community would prefer not be changed, then it is acting parasitically.

The company telling us "we do this because we want to increase the money for our shareholders" is like a politician saying "I did what my campaign contributors wanted because it's in my own interests". It might be true, but it is not an argument in your favour.

I want to respond to one paragraph because I worry that it represents a misunderstanding about how community feedback works and why it's valuable.

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.

I was the community liaison for the Documentation project. I wrote the announcement that the project was ending and a postmortem. So I believe I have a pretty good idea of what went wrong. In short, people didn't have a reason to participate:

Early on, I made some small change to some small part of PHP Documentation and occasionally see a single rep point pop up, but I NEVER find myself visiting it for ANY reason now.

This is from the highest scoring question about Documentation not written by staff. It's red flag when users are asking if your project is a "failed experiment" and unfortunately the community was right in this case. I'm afraid I'm getting an uncomfortable sense of deja vu when it comes to Collectives.

One thing that is absolutely true about Documentation is that it never had a revenue model attached. (Insert "Phase 3: Profit" joke here.) As it became clear Documentation was a lot harder than anticipated, leadership counted the cost and pulled the plug. So one huge advantage of Collectives is that it seems to be generating revenue. As it happens, I'm currently a developer advocate and I've looked at Collectives as a potential tool to interact with our current and potential customers. Unfortunately, Collectives just isn't an attractive platform for us in its current state. (Ironically, perhaps, most of my work has been on our own documentation site.)

It sounds like you asked two questions about the Articles feature:

1. "Would they be permanent or ephemeral?"
2. "Would they include announcements?"

These are important questions to answer if you want to build the appropriate feature. I also suspect they represent a schism between the needs of Collective customers and Collective consumers. If so, these are not the questions that are most pressing. It seems to me that the community's answer to these questions are self-evident—Stack Overflow users aren't interested in fluff.

My absolute favorite article about user feedback remains "Listening to users considered harmful?" It's a short piece with a pithy conclusion:

So maybe the key is to listen not only to what users say, but more importantly to what is motivating what they say. The rest is up to us. If we really care about our users, they'll just have to trust us... but more crucially—we have to trust ourselves.

In truth the problem with Documentation may well have been the name itself. Documentation instantly meant something to everyone who heard it. Unfortunately, it's a malleable word that could mean dramatically different things to different audiences. The result was we muddied the waters and added features that strayed too far from the real vision (Examples). It set an expectation for canonicity that wasn't supported by the product we delivered. Listening to users, without understanding their motivations, led us to work on problems that pulled the product away from the original vision. Therefore we failed to accomplish what we set out to do and failed to meet user expectations.

If Collectives needs an announcement feature, then it doesn't much matter what the community says about that feature. Or rather, it's critical to understand what motivates their reaction to announcements. Every once in a while, I open Stack Overflow in a private window:

And every time I wonder why Stack Overflow is so eager to hide the value of its content. Why so eager to push announcements? How can we trust the company to provide useful announcements rather than just let their customers spam users? With all the other people vying for our attention, who would voluntarily ask for more announcements?

There ways to make this sort of feature work and even provide value. For instance I'm subscribed to mailing lists because they promised me a discount years ago and I haven't gotten around to unsubscribing. That's maybe not the right model for Collectives. But that's for you all, the designers of the product, to figure out. Once you know what to build, trust yourselves to know how to make it work.

An anecdote: when Stack Overflow introduced the question closing feature, I thought it was a very bad idea. Obviously I was wrong. Who can argue with the success of Stack Overflow, to say nothing of nearly two hundred Stack Exchange sites, in maintaining high-quality Q&A content? And yet, I was also very clearly right since the question closing feature has been under nearly constant revision. Surely there's a better way to accomplish the goal?

What I've come to discover is that the problem the close feature is solving happens to be a very difficult one. "Just close the bad questions" turns out to be hopelessly naive. So adjusting the feature to get better results is the only solution. Another solution (I preferred making downvoted questions harder to discover) will converge on similar failures down the line too. It's less a matter of how the system works and more a matter of relentlessly fixating on the problem that needs solving.

While I admit my first tongue-in-cheek answer felt like it was complete, I decided to take a bit of time to formulate a different response.

First of all, thanks for communicating this. You have the unenviable position of needing to communicate all of this out to all interested parties as well as guard and defend the company's position on this.

Ultimately though, this whole sentiment regards someone like me, who is a veteran of the network, as nothing more than a resource as opposed to someone who also has something to gain from these efforts.

I do not like that.

No one begrudges you for needing to make your dime. Servers aren't cheap and it isn't like we're donating any cash to keep this place afloat, either. You're a business, and you have to sell a product to keep the lights on. I get it. I'm not naive to the ways of the world here.

However, your choice to then roll out a feature that the community at large simply did not know how to handle and then suggest that somehow that this is bringing us "value" is insulting.

The company has decided to shape this into a specific conversation - one in which they are going to decide the direction and we're going to be dragged along with it, whether or not we like it.

I do not like that. I even cautioned against it when Philippe made his debut.

The company has made so. many. decisions. that have made this "benevolent dictatorship" relationship that we've had with you for quite some time a whole lot less benevolent. But you're not really keen on stopping it.

I suppose you put it aptly here best:

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.

Our only recourse as a form of civil disobedience or disagreement to your policies or your plans is not to talk to you about them, not to engage you on them, not to reach out, not to foster a relationship, not to plead, not to whine, not to bleed, not to suffer...but to simply stop moderating.

But a silver lining to all of this - at least now I know how you're going to engage with us going forward!

If I could hit the pause button on this whole project and make any changes I wanted to it and its presentation, I would do this:

The TLDR before we get into the weeds of this is make the whole process more transparent, remove the Articles/Q&A Overlap, and create rewards/benefits for users who participate. This clears up what articles are for and gives a reason for Collectives to exist that isn't just another form of sponsored tags.

Collectives™ are spaces on where the community and the sponsoring company can collaborate to ask and answer questions on the tags tied to the collective.

1. Get rid of the "recognized member" designation, but leave "employee". "Employee" is mostly just flair, it doesn't give the user any additional ability in the Q&A portion of the site but it may give them more abilities within the collective itself such as suggesting/editing Articles or controlling/moderating other parts of the collective.
2. Leave the leaderboard, but make gold/silver/bronze rankings slightly broader and give users who attain those rankings curation privileges similar to gold badges.
3. Articles can't be voted on or earn rep; maybe implement the reactions feature here.
4. Revise the comments/feedback mechanism for Articles to be a three entry-point process: "This article was helpful 👍"/"This article wasn't helpful 👎"/(redflag)
5. Articles are for Announcements, Events, and Advertorials/Tutorials. No copy-pasting from elsewhere, everything must be tailored to this network.
6. Articles don't show up in the general Q&A search. Instead, they show up in the right panel when you are viewing collective pages and collective questions. Add the ability to subscribe to articles.
7. A roadmap that includes future features that add more ways for the sponsoring company and the community to interact. For example: a job board, chat integration, teams integration, outside RSS Feeds, and all of these things could be separate information blocks that appear any time someone visits a collective question/answer or page.
8. Remove "Recognized Answer". If it's a good answer people will upvote it; we shouldn't be using collectives as an alternative to the outdated answers project.

The goals would be to have a space where people can earn prestige (the leaderboard) while attaching real benefits to participation (additional moderation ability on those tags.) The sponsoring company will still get their space on SO, still be able to designate employees, and be able to directly communicate to the community through articles (and future features such as chat integration) without needing to make articles compete with Q&A for relevance.

I think this post addresses the finance angle a little too heavily, while also kind of coming across as naive since it doesn't address costing. It leads to a very tangential discussion point...

The main point here though, seems to be, that we just accept there is a project being overengineered which is trying to attract experts that haven't been onboarded. Fine with me, but it doesn't look like profit. Why wouldn't they just convert these into self answered question and answer posts instead of paying?

Long term, this makes a lot of sense though, considering that Google really does need something like this in place prior to purchasing Stack Overflow in a few years. It will be like their version of the Microsoft Developers Network. Value added indeed!

Money aside, it looks like it could be a little bit of fun while its running, but it is going to require a whole heck of a lot of people to buy into not just the financial aspect but the outlook. For example, free tools. There are some amazing tools out there from fantastic people. They try to help out, post how to guides, create documentation... but it is hard on them and a lot of work which doesn't always get rewarded. Why should they have to pay to move content into the "Collectives" feature here? Why would they? That is a large part of the market space you are looking at.

Thank you for the clarification of the motivation behind the Collectives feature. Just to summarize: the company and the community are co-dependent but not co-aligned. We simply have different goals with an emphasis on making money on your side and less so on our side. I think that is both perfectly understandable. Ideally, we would achieve both, so in a way your concerns are also our concerns and vice versa. I definitely wouldn't use Collectives only to increase the profit of the company, if it weren't otherwise useful to me in some way. And even if it persists, I guess that if it can't show its usefulness better, it might not become a high impact feature.

The initial feedback, even more than the initial score, wasn't all pure opposition but well meant in the sense that it also wanted to improve the feature. My impression was that official responses to issues regarding the usefulness of the feature could have been more comprehensive and I would really like to discuss this more. I'm simply not sold on the concept yet, but I'm only one person, in the end we all decide by the sum of all our actions.

I suggested the removal of the x86 and x86-64 tags from Intel Collective here: Intel collective owns [x86] and [x86-64].
Peter's answer explains the issue with the current scope of the Intel collective.

As I see your point, it is non-negotiable to significantly reduce the traffic of the Intel Collective.

Can you consider splitting the Intel Collective into two collectives instead?

I understand that it could be non-negotiable as well. But with its current scope, it doesn't meet fundamental to the ideation of Collectives.