[NobodyNada]

Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.

Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.

It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

[b112]

Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

This always cracks me up. I've seen it so many times, and so many books cover this...

Classic statement is "never take your eye off the ball".

Sure, you need to plan ahead. You need to move down a path. But take your eye off of today, and you won't get to tomorrow.

Maybe they'll SCO it, and spend the next 10 years suing everyone and their LLM dog.

You know, I wonder how the board and execs made out suing Linux related... things. End users were threatened too, compelled to pay...

SO could be spun off into a neat tiger, nipping at everyone's toes.

[brianwawok]

But was “today “ that profitable? Stack overflow always struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make money. If the current business makes very little money, it may not be worth the work.

[losradio]

His tone was extremely passive aggressive and rude. I don’t think he made the site better - he contributed to the downfall

[wizzwizz4]

Can you provide an example? The only rude Shog9 posts I can think of were aimed at people abusing the system: known, persistent troublemakers, or overzealous curators exhibiting the kinds of behaviours that people in this thread would criticise, probably far more rudely than Shog ever did.

[Shog9]

This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is."

Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.

That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.

With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.

But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.