How is the Community doing? [2024]

Question

Better than late than never, and before it completely escapes my mind.

We, the elected moderators, wanted to take a minute to check in and see how the community feels like things are going on the site.

This community check-in has been done for the last few years (skipping 2020), and it was very helpful. As such, we'd like to share our thoughts and also get your feedback on what is going well and what we could improve. The process is modelled very heavily on last year’s, but for everyone’s benefit:

How this specific Q&A is run so that we get good value out of it

One clear premise per answer

1. Please share your thoughts on/observations about something you/we have seen or think needs improvement. Make sure to note whether you think the thing you’re writing about is an improvement, a problem, or some mix of the two (one person might see the same change as bad that you see as good, or vice versa)...

2. Post only one kind of thing per answer, so that when people upvote/downvote based on whether they agree or not, it's more clearly actionable. If you write an essay about 4 different things, it's not going to be clear what part(s) people agree or disagree with and thus it becomes difficult to act on that feedback. You can, of course, contribute multiple answers.

3. Upvote or downvote the answers based on your agreement with whether you see that thing happening and whether you concur with the answer's premise (that it's good or it's a problem). (In other words, if someone says "We get too many questions about unicorns and I hate them," you would upvote if you agree, and downvote if either you don't think we get too many questions about unicorns or if you don't hate them.)

No long comment threads

1. This post isn't the place to workshop solutions - if a particular problem gets a lot of votes, we should open a new meta question to do justice to that issue. Solutions hidden in a comment thread on one of these answers can not be clearly vetted and voted on, so they will tend to remain undone.

2. If you disagree with an answer, use your vote, but limit comment usage. Consider that it’s possible to disagree with an answer’s take, but that it’s possible the issue should still be discussed in full.

3. If appropriate, give your own answer, though having multiple answers on the same issue here is mostly gonna be hard to follow. If the answer would just be disagreeing with another answer, the effort would probably be better placed towards a dedicated meta.

As usual, the Code of Conduct, which we’d still like to summarise as Be Nice, applies to meta as well as the main site.

You may strongly disagree with other users or with the mods or whoever, but we trust that you can find ways to express what you like or don't like without being hostile or insulting to others. Focus on actions, rather than characterising people, and that extends how how those actions are characterised.

Answer 1

It feels demoralising to do anything under today's Stack Exchange Inc.

Just within recent memory, Stack Exchange Inc has this on its corkboard:

• Vagueposted about “socially responsible AI” and partnered with OpenAI. Besides that socially responsible AI doesn't exist, this is commercially exploitative. ChatGPT is something I'm ethically very against (it's disruptive and harmful to every single creative field while simultaneously built on the exploitation of the people therein, not to mention its obscene carbon and water footprint) and the content I produced for other humans is now being fed into it by commission of Stack Exchange Inc with no say or consent from me.
• The company has fired or driven out nearly every single staff member I'd ever worked closely with: Jon Ericson, Shog9, Catija, our own V2Blast, to name a few. To put things in a timeline, Stack Exchange let the Community Management team languish without sufficient resources for years, then finally appeared to give it renewed commitment... then that and multiple rounds of layoffs happened.
• Just one year ago there was a general moderation strike that lasted two months and involved the Stack Exchange CEO publicly disparaging striking volunteer moderators in the press.
• Turned data dumps private on terms that are incompatible with CC BY-SA. Previously they were publicly available on a monthly basis on the internet archive so that if Stack Exchange turned evil (like, what's happening now) they wouldn't be able to hold any data hostage, anyone could just take the public good it had produced and spin off new content with it. This change is of course to ensure AI people go through them and pay for our content (not that you and I will see any money from sale of content we've produced). Now Stack Exchange will withhold that content from the public. Keeping database dumps available was part of what the general moderation strike was about; it hasn't even been a year since it concluded.
• It recently did a sprint addressing community requests. This is good! The less good part is that Stack Exchange so rarely does actual work on community tickets anymore that them actually spending a (one) week on community requests is newsworthy. The last time I remember this was a “ticket smash” that started in 2021 (which as far as visible change went mostly seemed to consist of declining things) and had “part two” in 2023.
• Years after retiring Stack Overflow Jobs, which was a refreshing countercultural competitor to awful sites like Indeed, brought back a new version of Stack Exchange Jobs... which is just a reskin of Indeed, the thing many of us had signed up to Stack Overflow Jobs to get away from.

... and this is just the things I can remember off the top of my head right now that are recent and I can provide links for. The CEO and executives who own this company and call the shots are awful to us.

When I joined Stack Exchange, I was participating in a network that was lead and developed by executives who actually passionately shared our mission and cared for, participated in, and were knowledgeable about the communities here on this network.

Stack Exchange has long since passed into new hands of an executive leadership that does not care about our mission, does not willingly participate in anything we do, does not understand us or what we need. Over the past couple of years, leadership has gone from not merely being indifferent to us but being actively malevolent toward us: the impression I get is of us being a rabble who they begrudgingly accept when they can't merely entirely ignore us, while they find a way to somehow crush enough profit from this stone to make it worthwhile, damned who and what gets tossed out in the process.

These aren't the people whose platform I signed up to contribute toward, or the supportive environment I signed up to do it in.

The few contributions I still make here I do out of love for this community and in spite of the people who own the network, but I am so repulsed by the exploitative leadership of today that I cannot help but think about how every single thing I do is ultimately pinning up a leadership who couldn't care less about me and would feed me into a grinder if it'd make them a dime, and so I cannot in good conscience participate here more than a little nowadays. I mostly participate in other smaller communities nowadays, and I lament that the odious nature of today's Stack Exchange has moved in beneath this site whose community I still love.

Answer 2

Feels quieter

I'm not exactly a site power user but even with the general down-trend in site activity over the past few years, it feels quieter around here lately.

I kinda expect an uptick in questions as "5.5"/5e 2024 comes out and we start getting rules text, but I don't know if that will pull numbers back up significantly.

Answer 3

New RPGs don't seem to find their way here

This might be adding a bit onto Trish's answer, but I feel it deserves a seperate mention.

In the last couple of years many new TTRPGs have hit the market. Part of this is because people were disappointed with WotC, while others are just burned out from having played 5E for 10 years. Some people are calling this the Old/New School Renaissance of RPGs. Regardless of the reasons, those new RPGs don't seem to find their way to us.

Here are some examples:

• Critical Role's Daggerheart, which is currently in open beta and benefits from having a fanbase of millions of "critters" behind them. Currently has no question and no tag.
• Critical Role's Candela Obscura released in 2023, again has in theory a large fan base behind it. Currently has a single question, with no answers.
• Dungeon Craft's Deathbringer, released in 2022. No questions.
• The Dungeon Coach's DC20 which is also still in beta, but like half or more of the D&D youtube channels I know of, are constantly gushing on about it. No questions.
• Renegade Gamestudio's Essence20 System, released in 2022, which comprises a total of 4 games. It has a single question, which is just a self-answered question by me, basically learning about this system through a reddit post.

And I am sure there are many more examples.

Answer 4

It took a while for me to be able to actually pinpoint why I feel better about the site:

Sometimes I post answers that are not rulebook answer. Just my experience. I think those are the most important answers on this site, because tthey cannot be looked up in a book. I don't claim that it has to be the same experience for the asker, just explain what happened for me, that it solved the problem for me, and advise them to maybe try it too, to figure out whether it works for them.

In the past, people who had different experiences downvoted those answers. Which I always found very unhelpful. It didn't offer any constructive way forward, neither for me, who could not really change anything about my personal experience, nor for the asker, who is not helped either by downvoting it without giving an alternative.

It seems that the downvote crew has moved on. I now see more of a "that might be your experience, mine is different" attitude, that lets all experiences stand and instead offers more constructive competing answers. I think that helps everyone.

My personal approach to questions has changed from "it's not worth it posting here" to "I will post my experience and solution to this, maybe it helps someone, maybe it just inspires someone reading it to go write their own answer because they think mine won't work".

So all in all, while I post way less, I have a way better feeling about it.

Answer 5

Many members WERE careful about DnD-5e-2024

Many members of the community try their best to hold their horses about the 2024 revision of DnD 5e before the official release and until more than a few advance copies can be in the hands of the people for proper citation and clarification.

But not all were

However, a couple of people did alread ask questions with the same problems we identified with the last playtests - and the scores of those questions have been quite negative in the last few days. The same problem also became a pitfall for some otherwise quite high-voted users when they answered with 2014 books and what they gathered from reviews of the changes, when they rushed to answer - which is quite incomplete and possibly a false basis.

Call to the Community: Thank you for being patient till September

Please, even if you want to see the new edition to show up already and have questions because you have an advance copy, please wait for the rest to get a chance to buy the book and give as much information as with other, normal questions. Many have the itch burning for the new book, but please, be patient.

This call to stall seems to have had enough traction to delay most questions. An influx happened when the free rules broke, and I expect even more questions in a few days when the book hits the shelves.

Answer 6

Non D&Desque feels as neglected as ever

While I answered a lot of old stuff on WoD in the last months and committed necromancy on the way, new questions on non D&D-esque systems (e.g. D&D, Pathfinder) seem to be either as low or lower than before, continuing the trend that those "niche" systems are feeling neglected.

The Numbers

2023 had 1515 questions from the bigger D&D Family (including Pathfinder and Mutants-and-Masterminds 3e, which is a D&D conversion), compared to 230 that were not so. That is 13.2% non-D&D Questions, which actually is a high compared to about 12% in 2022 and 10% in 2021. Still, that's just one new non-D&D question every one and a half days, while there are about 4.1 D&D-like Questions every day.

Answer 7

I remain extremely salty that the RAW tag was burninated.

There was exactly one tag that I used as tags are intended to be used. It was helpful and reliable. And then someone took actions that from the outside are indistinguishable from a series of abuses of moderator privileges to burn it.

I haven't been able to assume goodwill since.

Answer 8

I feel like this stack is unwelcoming not because there is constructive criticism (which is always welcome, and I encourage) but because there is often condescending and unnecessarily contemptuous attitude mixed in with a lot of the close reasons and comments.

I will continue to use the site because it’s a hobby but sheesh it’s quite offensive to try to get an honest question on here without the same small cast of 1% ers having at it with their hot takes.

There’s a huge number of people who come here to get clarity on issues they are facing and now more than ever likely feel a lot better asking on one of many discord servers than here.