What does the public really need from us?

I don't have a full answer for you. Instead, I'll look back to the time when I was just another member of "the public", before I became Puzzling's primary curator, before I made an account, before I knew what Stack Exchange's deal was.

Note that, given the time period I'm talking about here (pre-2020, when I made my account), genAI wasn't an issue on the internet, so this answer doesn't address that.

If I saw an SE link in one of the top search results, I'd click on it. It didn't matter which SE site. I overwhelmingly preferred SE to blogs, other Q&A sites, or even documentation. Why?

What value did I find in Stack Exchange?

• SE sites didn't have intrusive pop-ups or ads. (Honestly, the giant Google sign-up box and the cookie dialog, if they'd been around at that time, might've driven me off.) I didn't want to sign up for newsletters or learn about how one neat trick would fix my sleep schedule. I was searching for answers to specific issues, and the more random boxes I had to close, the more likely I was to click back and choose a different search result.
• SE sites had a consistent layout. Again, I was searching for answers. I didn't want to have to figure out where on the page to look. The unified design helped with this. The question was up there, the answers were down there, comments were in those little boxes, everything I need is in this column. Great, now I can focus on understanding the answer. This is a benefit of having a network of sites: all the sites have different content, but once I figured out how to navigate one, I'd figured out them all.
• SE sites had quality answers. I could trust an answer on SE, especially the higher-voted ones, to be largely accurate. If there were issues, they'd usually be pointed out in comments. In addition, grammar and spelling were generally at least fine. These baseline standards are not always present on e.g. random blogs.
• SE sites didn't require me to sign-up for normal browsing. Some Q&A sites (cough Quora cough) threw a sign-up dialog at my face if I tried to click a link to a related question. Often, when I was searching for answers, I'd realize one of those related questions actually might be useful. It was quite nice to know that on SE I could look around without having to fork over my information. I'm generally averse to creating accounts. I appreciate being given the choice to do so on my own terms.

How can we continue providing this value?

• Getting rid of those pop-ups would be great. Or at least shrinking them so they don't cover so much of the page. Remember that the public wants answers, not dialog boxes. I have a strong empirical association between an overabundance of dialog boxes and low-quality content.
• When you're messing with design elements, remember that it's not just the long-time users who will be affected. They'll complain the loudest, sure. They have accounts to complain with. But most people who come to SE looking for answers don't have an account. They don't have userscripts to revert unpopular design changes. A consistent, clean layout/design helps build their opinion of your brand, and means that the next time they come looking, they'll have an easier time using the site.
• Keep up the answer quality, I guess. Promote a culture of editing so that every post is the best it can be. I do my part on Puzzling, and I sort of follow the general network news. But, since Puzzling is so different than a regular SE site, I don't have more specifics to offer for this point.
• Keep up allowing anonymous browsing :)

I'm aware that this answer is quite backwards-looking. I don't know what the public "really needs" from us. All I can tell you is what I used SE for, and what I needed from you then.

What need does the public have that this group is best suited to serve?

Knowledge.

The purpose of the SE network has always been to provide knowledge and that's what people are here for. Some people want to provide knowledge (e.g. with the current system: by answering), some people want to obtain knowledge (e.g. with the current system: by asking and visiting the site) and some people are interested in preserving or curating knowledge (e.g. with the current system: all of the moderative activities including voting).

This worked with the Q&A style, tag wikis, the Community Wiki that no longer exists and that's also what the company attempted to do with articles and maybe also discussions.

Taken as a group, who are we? What are our best (unique) assets, right here, right now?

People interested in certain topics (which topics these are differ by the concrete SE sites and tags). Some people are experts, some people want to become experts, some people are curios.

Currently, we (the entirety of the SE network) are a knowledge base containing a lot of information on a wide range of topics with people contributing to it in various ways.

Who are we capable of becoming?

Honestly, I have no idea. We can become whatever we want to become - as long as the Community and the Company work together and not against each other.
We could become one of the last reliable sources of knowledge in the internet that is not dominated by AI crap (if we aren't already).
We (the Community and the Company) could get the trust back that was lost over the last few years but that would require a lot of work.
Maybe Collectives on Stack Overflow (and other (relatively big?) sites if they are interested) can be expanded such that there are more Community-run collectives on different bigger topics that are related/have significant overlap (e.g. JVM (including different JVM languages), .NET, relational databases, etc).
Maybe we could become a Community (or build smaller Communities) that does things with each others (like events or whatever is interesting for many people) - literally anything is possible.

Or we could become like many other places in the internet: Overrun by a combination of useless, AI-generated and low-quality content that's just there to get people to click on it.

So, at my last job - I was kind of generally the weird person in between. I went from being the interface between our end users and our devs/demi-devs to essentially the interface between our monitoring systems and every one else. You see things.

I've often talked about SE as a whole as a 'commons' - we've built a resource that's supposed to be explicitly about the public good. I sometimes complain about SE being obsessed with the top of the funnel, but I'm probably wrong. The top of the funnel is people who are passive users and find this site useful. Our body of old posts and our ability to answer new ones is in its entirety the value we have to the public, and everything else is in the service of that.

Taken as a group, who are we? What are our best (unique) assets, right here, right now?

To an extent, the last survivors of a once thriving set of communities. The hopeful, the naive, the stubborn. The optimists who believe there's something left that can be saved and worth saving. The ones too stubborn to go. The ones who hang on due to spite and rage.

I'm a bit of the first, a little of the second. I hope I don't end up the last ;).

The rare few who manage to stay above the politics, and the drama, in a sense, folks who maintain a strange innocence, and consistently post great answers across a set of fields.

While this seems negative - I believe the network has strong bones. We still have experts and petty dabblers who do post quality answers. We have a community that deeply cares about the future of the network, and a diaspora that still holds a great deal of love for the places they used to frequent.

We've been at this for ages, but unlike many spaces, I still believe that the folks who left over time could come back with the right incentives.

Who are we capable of becoming? (Try to avoid needlessly bleak or cynical outlooks here. It’s a positive question. If you say “doomed,” I’ll whack you with a wet trout.)

People focus much too much on the mechanics. I'm fond of saying SE built communities in spite of itself. Right now, considering many sites have the same sort of traffic they did in the early days (and that's a problem), I find myself (still) with not enough energy to hand write comments, relying more on autocomments.

I'd like to think our goal should be communities motivated by the desire to help as much as the desire to organise. The hard part is - I'm convinced the things that hold us back are attitudes. What I jokingly term as "the developer's motivation for order", the network run by an organisation that's seen as deeply out of touch with the community, and a decade where everyone's been flip flopping between hope for better things peeking out of the horizon.

To me there's still just a sliver of hope that we can be what we should be - close-knit core communities of experts and enthusiasts, folks hanging around 'cause they enjoy this sort of thing, and the community finding useful artifacts of information and sometimes engaging where they can't.

What need does the public have that this group is best suited to serve?

Very simply the ideal SE user knows just enough to either solve a simple problem, know enough to work through a slightly more complicated one, or get nerd sniped into a very complicated problem. We have subject matter experts in some fields on the network - which helps folks who are a little more advanced in their fields. Where we can fail isn't competency - it's in attracting, and keeping these folks, and that over time those people end up drifting away, due to real life or disagreements in/with the network.

The public probably wouldn't care about network politics, or how happy the folks who frequent the network are. But these things have an indirect effect in terms of what they get, and a direct effect in terms of interactions with people.

Warning: This is entirely a stream of consciousness, so read at your own risk. The author is not liable for a lack of any specific point, rambling, unclear jumps between thoughts, or waste of time by consuming this post. By reading this post you agree that you have been adequately and sufficiently warned.

SE as a model is rather unique.

SE's closest digital counterparts are probably Wikipedia and Reddit, leaving aside smaller alternatives for the moment. SE is not designed for social connection, unlike social media sites; it's not designed for media consumption; it's not a personal online diary, unlike a blog (or microblog); and it's not where you do your shopping, unlike practically the entire rest of the internet. Like Wikipedia, it's an information repository, and like Reddit, it's where people respond to specific posts under a username.

Posts on SE are encouraged to not have any fluff, use references to back up claims, and be specific. To contrast to Wikipedia, we're not interested in writing the entire article - we want to explore a single point.

That leaves us with a model where semi-academic, specific nuggets of information are shared by and attributed to individuals.
That attribution is important - Wikipedia recently had an incident, for instance, where a small group of people coordinated among themselves to promote a specific viewpoint, making hundreds of edits across Wikipedia to align with the views they wanted to promote. (Wikipedia banned them a couple days ago. I don't know if the edits have been reverted or not.) This was only a problem because by default, you don't see who wrote the content you're consuming on Wikipedia - it's presented as one cohesive article, and you have to look at the history to find out who wrote a specific line or section. On SE, if someone wants to spread a certain viewpoint, it's immediately obvious that all of these posts are written by the same person (and using multiple accounts to obfuscate it is unlikely to succeed, thanks to the tireless efforts of our moderators). That transparency builds trust.

Similarly, AI is also capable of spitting out information - but you don't know where that information is coming from or if it's in any way accurate. This means that ultimately you cannot trust that information, without independently verifying it first, which you then have to do for every single thing that you ask the AI, since it can give you a different answer any time.

Where does that leave us? SE is in the unique position of being an information respository, with semi-academic content, appropriate for all levels of many different subjects, where each nugget of information is tied to an individual whose accuracy can be verified - loosely represented by reputation, in theory.

Now... is that model sustainable? The academic world has been suffering a bit lately; students' attention spans have dramatically reduced within the last five years - and certainly ten - if my professors are to be believed. Academic or time-consuming content is being abandoned; movies and TV shows are being designed to be just there in the background while you scroll on your phone; and people use ChatGPT to summarize articles instead of actually reading them. The type of complex, high-quality content that we optimize for here on SE is rapidly becoming extremely niche.

So we have a situation where for the past sixteen years or so, we've been optimizing for one specific type of content. That specialization has left us in a position where SE fills a highly specific need - but a need that people are more and more never realizing that they have. That means we need to address the current needs that people have - but how can we do that without sacrificing everything we've built already, and everything that makes us unique? How do we address the changing reality without losing ourselves?

While "do what everyone else is doing" is a tempting answer, I don't think that's the solution. Pivoting to short-form video or to AI means sacrificing our unique identity, and that's just as bad as being left behind by a changing world, from every perspective except economic. Instead, I think that one thing that the public needs from SE may be for discovering that SE provides for that specific need to be easier.

People need the content we provide. They need content that's verifiable, trustworthy, specific, and everything else. But the people who need that academic-style information often have no idea that SE exists. We don't necessarily need to adapt the model to fit people who have no interest in it; we need to better attract the people who would have an interest in the model.
Part of this comes back to onboarding. If we can better introduce people to the rules and concepts and models and expectations and standards and tools and guidelines and norms that they need to know before starting to contribute, then those people are more likely to become involved.
Part of it is also marketing, and maybe thinking about who the target audience is. Maybe Twitter isn't the right platform to be focusing on, and people should be linking SE questions from PubPeer comments. Maybe there should be APA and MLA citation generators for posts. Our model is rather niche in today's day and age, despite its unique advantages that we shouldn't just throw away; we need to be focusing on the people who would still benefit from that model and would thrive in our environment.

Now, I did recently start a degree at university. My experience on SE has directly helped me so far; those years of practice asking specific, topical questions has paid off, as has formulating arguments here on Meta, and, of course, the academic-style expectations here on SE for vocabulary, grammar, citations, and ethics. That experience is probably influencing my thoughts here, especially since it's so novel and fresh for me. But I do see significant potential for people who would still benefit from the model we've built here - if we don't throw away what we've developed and work on getting those people here.

Who are we capable of becoming?

We are capable of becoming 'anything'. What will we become? Well, you requested no bleak outlooks…

Please let me elaborate.

Stack Exchange consists of two conflicting parties: the company, and the community. Both parties have very different ideas of what SE’s future looks like, but, unfortunately, rely on each other.

Without the company, the community 'dies', without the community (e.g., the 1%), the company loses its business model. As I’ve talked about in Slate’s previous question.

The bottom line: For Stack Exchange to reach its full potential - whatever that may be - the company and community must first work together. Which is easier said than done.

I don’t know what our 'full potential' looks like, but what I do know is that getting there won’t be a walk in the park.

How about skipping these fuzzy psychological experiments and focusing on features? As in not just empty words but things that actually happened.

As I've repeatedly pointed out before, communicating with private companies is a huge waste of time as they'll have their own private agenda carried out regardless of anything said in public. Therefore listening to what's said, trusting things promised or attempting any form of two-way communication is one huge waste of everyone's time. There are already endless discussions and feature requests all over the place, yet another won't make a difference.

Instead do not look at what the company says, look at what the company does. Specifically at which features it actually implements. The most recent such major features:

• Voting experiment to encourage people who rarely vote to upvote
• Upcoming Experiment for Commenting
• Question assistant and staging ground changes
• What does a new user need in a homepage experience on Stack Overflow?
• Misc strange UI changes and AI experiments during 2023.

Apart from the staging ground which is something originating from the community through all the various "wizard" and "on-boarding" experiments over the years...:

• None of these things were requested by the community.
• None of them seem particularly urgent or obvious to prioritize.
• All of them just popped up out of the blue.

Conclusion 1: it doesn't matter what anyone says to the company because it will just carry on it's private (lack of) agenda, which is all about rolling out completely arbitrary and often pointless site changes, with no longterm plan or goal.

Conclusion 2: whoever interacts with the so-called "community" on the various metas either don't have a high enough position to influence anything or the company simply couldn't care less about what the community says. My impression is rather that random teams/random middle managers go about and do whatever they like at a whim, completely detached from the rest of the world, except perhaps with a bias to encourage AI-something-something. And so random features and experiments appear, randomly.

Conclusion 3: Notable from the above links, all new features and experiments arrive on Stack Overflow, which is a site that has apparently gone from network flagship to network guinea pig. Since all new features are rolled out and discussed there, we should seriously close down meta.stackexchange.com. It's just the same old clique here talking to themselves with absolutely zero impact on anything. Delete this site from the network and nobody would notice a difference. Including the company upper management and 99.9% of the user base.

Disclaimer: I'm not active on Stack Overflow or any of the tech sites, so this answer is mostly from the viewpoint of the less scientific sites. A lot of it is probably transferrable to the tech context too, but I can't personally comment on that.

Taken as a group, who are we? What are our best (unique) assets, right here, right now?

Who are we? People with interest in some particular topic(s).

What are our best (unique) assets? Knowledge and the ability to present it well.

"Knowledge" is an obvious answer, but I think the way Stack Exchange has trained us to present our knowledge is also worth mentioning. What these sites do best is not only to provide knowledge, but to provide it in a coherent, eloquent, and well-organised way. Partly this is helped by the format of the site ("ask questions, get answers, no distractions" - much better than other sites where we might need to click through or ignore a bunch of ads in order to get to what we need). Partly it's also helped by the ability of SE's best users to present knowledge so clearly.

Who are we capable of becoming?

In some particular domains, SE already dominates. Maths Stack Exchange and MathOverflow are known to mathematical students and researchers around the world as useful resources to get answers (sometimes from famous global experts) on whatever topic they may need to ask about. TeX-LaTeX Stack Exchange is the go-to resource, for me and many other scientists writing papers in LaTeX, for finding out how to get a certain layout or eliminate a certain error. [Presumably Stack Overflow, the flagship site, enjoys a similar reputation among programmers, but as a non-tech person, I can't speak to that myself.]

Imagine if SE sites on other subjects could get the same reputation. Imagine if this network became known in academia, research communities, or other groups of experts as the best place on the internet to get answers about such-and-such a topic.

I don't know how we'd actually reach that stage - attracting some experts or expert-level users to begin with would probably be a prerequisite - but it's a nice dream, isn't it? That would be relevance for the SE network, as mentioned in my answer to your previous post. And, if we can keep that relevance (either by attracting more experts to counterbalance attrition of the userbase, or by training new users to become expert-level answerers), the future of SE could be assured.

What need does the public have that this group is best suited to serve?

Answers to questions that haven't already been answered. If an answer already exists on the internet and all we're doing is quoting/linking it, then we aren't providing something new - and AI can be better than us at finding information that already exists. Where SE really shines, in my opinion, is in providing information that's never been provided before. The old adage of "we want to be the top Google search result" suggests that we want to provide answers that, before that SE post existed, couldn't be found on the internet. I've personally written several answers on Literature SE that, even if they were based on information which already existed on the internet, compiled and presented that info in a clearly distilled form which didn't exist before.

Let me end on a quote, from verbose to Gareth Rees, which epitomises the awesomeness that SE can, at its best, provide:

How on earth did you find in the space of an hour a reference to Bede that explained this idea, when none of the other commentators over seven centuries gave as watertight a source? And as always, your answer is a model of clarity and lucidity.

A need(?)

This recent post on MSO says "Collections and learning pathways – does the concept of collectively-curated public lists interest you, why, and how might management of it work?" The idea of this has interested me in the past year- as something not limited to collectives. I get the feeling that a very large part of the people coming to SO are newbies. I think people like that need help with picking up foundational information in an organized/orderly way, for some topic or subject. Sometimes I see the sorts of questions where our guidance says "you could write a whole book about this. close.", and wondered about the possibility and value of giving some more help than just closing (sometimes I see this accompanied by a comment like- "you should go study this at school, or read a book").

I've got a draft of a post seeking community thoughts about whether we think there's a need out there for that, and whether we're a good fit to help. Ex. could a subset of the kinds of questions we close as needing more focus instead be answered by breaking down the question and linking to other Q&A that either provide useful information in the form and level of granularity we're used to, or that further break down a sub-question? I'm sort of thinking "learning pathway", but maybe more like "learning trees". To some degree, some tag wikis try to do the first level of that, but I'm interested in potential value from going further with that idea. In areas where I'm a newbie myself, I often don't know how to break down my question because I don't know what I don't know.

What we are

This is where what we are and what we have comes in. We have:

• Invested, hard-working, smart volunteers willing to lend strangers on the internet a hand and build a useful, lasting resource.
• A platform supporting, curation and user-ranking of content
  • a platform which- theoretically- could support this idea with little change to mechanisms. Just use answer posts, and people can write their own answers if they don't agree with other ones, or make community wikis, and people can vote on them. (In reality, I expect it would be messier than that when it comes to at which point something should be broken into a separate Q&A, but I don't feel like that's a showstopper, and more like something to workshop on meta)
• A focused, high-level goal, methodology

Just musing. I haven't gotten to finishing that draft discussion post. I know it could be a controversial idea. Please be gentle.

This question first sounded to me a bit like "please develop a new business model for us" in that it basically asks for all the things needed to build a business, and I will answer it, but I hope to hear in time about the vision of the company too. Preferably before nobody asks new questions / reads questions here anymore. It may be already very late for getting a lot of feedback.

To 1. who we are: some engineers paid to built a web application, which allows to collaboratively create some kind of knowledge system, and a few people with money that would like to have even more, and a bunch of knowledgeable people willing to spend their private time donating the knowledge for the good cause as long as there is one, even accepting a bit of sweeping dust occasionally, and lots of people interested in getting answers to their questions, learning something new, or just getting help with their daily work.

That's what we are currently, but it's a loose connection and the allegiances can change every day.

To 3. what needs there are:

The public needs I can identify are:

• help desk/instant problem solving of localized problems
• teaching, learning new skills
• satisfying curiosity about a topic
• generating, storing and adapting knowledge

However, and hopefully without sounding needlessly bleak, automated LLM based systems might nowadays scale better and be cheaper with the instant problem solving, universities or specialized sites like for example kaggle might be better with the teaching and for satisfying curiosity other services like Wikipedia might offer a more coherent experience (instead of all these competing answers to random questions).

To 2. who could we become:

This part is a wide field. We could become (among others):

• 2a) Those who answer the questions that cannot get answered by AI and those who check that the AI answers are correct. Surely there will be questions where humans make a difference, and surely AI services would love us, but I don't need to be a cynic to foresee severe motivation problems of the experts there. It would be working in the back office (caves) mostly.

• 2b) Those who boycott AI and live on an Island of strictly only human service. This proposition surely has its supporters but maybe not that many. It could become a nice evolutionary niche (similar to handmade). But it won't rock the world.

• 2c) If we cannot compete with LLMs in the instant problem solving domain, we could go towards more lengthy answers (tutorials, guides, best practices, courses). Say the idea of collectives, only done right this time. That is, until the time LLMs also learn that.

• 2d) Concentrate on the knowledge library thing. Structure the knowledge better. Clean up better. Surely there is inherent value in creating a structured database with all the human knowledge inside. I mean not only Q&A, which is like a query of knowledge and its result but rather also the underlying database. Who knows better than us how to keep such a database updated, how to foster a community where maintaining such a database is actually enjoyable. If LLMs access it, fine, we may operate our own service even. On the other hand, is this enough, it's so far away from the actual user and how to get feedback or new inspirations? Can I say that I'm a bit pessimistic there?

That are my answers to your questions. I personally like to contribute to something good like a knowledge library, I also like to get credit for my contributions (being listed as author somewhat visibly and knowing that many people see my content). I enjoy (mostly) interacting with other humans. I would like to keep on doing all that.

But of course I also use AI to help me in my daily tasks (who doesn't). It seems I myself am the problem. How ironic.

P.S.:

From recent announcements of the company it becomes partly clear what their vision is. I would say it's something like 2a: becoming human AI fact checkers. I don't think this will fly because while it may fulfill a need, it's much less rewarding for the users and the usefulness is not convincingly demonstrated yet.

P.P.S.:

After the AMA on Feb 26 the planned three lane model (Q&A, discussions, chats) with various content including war stories and jokes (I don't make that up, just quoting) was presented. It seems to be a combination of different content types and a social network. Basically the only way to attract people is thought to be becoming a social network, it seems. This might work out, after all the popularity of the big social networks is so far largely unaffected by AI (or not?). Although I personally wouldn't feel very attracted to it. This is the moment I can proudly refer to my earlier question about exactly that, which got heavily downvoted (if you never experienced that you haven't tried hard enough). I was 5 years ahead of the time.

They need a Q&A site. A place where they can ask the questions they still can't find the answers to.

This need is one that existed before chatgpt, and one that would have continued to exist without it, but it will become more and more necessary as less and less people are willing to provide those answers.

I would like to see SO, and the network as a whole, move more in the direction of being a Q&A site first, and a knowledgebase second. What I mean by this is, the goal of curation should expressly not be preventing answers to "bad" or "not useful" questions that won't contribute to the knowledgebase, rather, the goal of curation should be ensuring the posts that do contribute to the knowledgebase are as good as they can be and can cut through the fog.

I don't like the normal ideas that are associated with this goal. I don't like the idea of removing downvotes, or close votes, or increasing barriers or any of that, I'd rather this be approached from more of a cosmetic, or presentation direction.

One example I've been thinking about for a good while:

People find asking questions daunting and likely to fail.

Change the way curation affects users. Don't remove it, just make it less antagonizing. An example would be more or less doing away with reputation and focusing on "People helped" (not to be confused with the horrendous "People Reached" metric.) Make upvotes give 1 rep and downvotes remove 1 rep, and instead of showing a post score, show "N people found this post useful. Y people found issues with this post.". This could be done without even changing how reputation works, meaning it could be tested on a willing network in a way that has no permanent side effects and could be completely rolled back; we would primarily need to hide reputation and instead show upvotes received minus downvotes received in place of reputation. I would also, in this scenario, remove the existing voting buttons/display and have a more standard "This was helpful" and "there are problems with this post" buttons, with the second optionally leading to a comment (hopefully more often than not.)

The benefits of this are people can directly see, without needing any reputation or a browser extension, if a significant number of people have found a post to be problematic even if it was heavily upvoted, and of course the opposite is true, people can see how many people were helped by a post regardless of whether or not others found issues with it. It prevents one form of voting from hiding the other and provides a direct meaning to the votes such that there is far less confusion in what voting should mean and what people should do if they receive downvotes.

Obviously, if something like this was tried and found to be a good way forward... the way we give people access to curation tools would need to change to match the new system, ideally by making them based on positive actions rather than just flat reputation. For example, after x approved suggested edits, you can make y edits without review per day, increasing as more suggested edits are approved should you ever go over y. This creates a sort-of dynamic throttle that prevents users from making a lot of edits in a short period of time unless they're a user that consistently does so in a positive way. Honestly this should just be how we handle access to curation tools in general regardless of if we go this route.

Who are we/what are our best assets?

The company consists of people who seem to have a lot of interested parties pulling at them to create products that serve them. You guys have a lot of talented individuals who could realistically be putting their skills to the benefit of any initiative, provided they're given the time and funds to do so. The community consists largely of drive-by users, but also of incredibly dedicated folks who believe in a (semi) common mission of creating a grand library of knowledge. When I say dedicated, I do mean dedicated; we've spent countless hours editing, contributing, moderating, and building tools revolving around a site that's old enough to drive (in the US).

Who are we capable of becoming?

A lot of things, but obviously narrowing that down to "What would be WORTH becoming?" would be better, so... If I were to scope this to be within the context of public Q&A (and do bear with me, I'll look beyond that after this), I'd say we need to become simpler. There are too many things going on with this site. The complexity is absolutely insane, and for a newcomer, that's incredibly offputting. We've given the company a lot of crap about onboarding (myself, pretty recently, included), but how do you really onboard someone to the absolute monolith that is Stack Overflow/SE? Even when you get onboarded with the bare minimum, the complexity moving forward is still crazy: Reputation and privileges, the concept of contributing "positively", the idea of collaborative effort and that all content is changeable by anyone, the concept of scope for each site... It's maddening to keep track of. The time needed to become a "curator" here is unbelievable, let alone the time needed to become comfortable enough to say something on Meta, where you're surrounded by folks who have been here for years and are far more in the know than you are. Not to mention, changing ANY of these intricate concepts is met with some serious pushback from the community, and oftentimes for good reason. But I can't stop thinking about the plethora of people that have been sent away from here, that could very well have been amazing contributors, because of that intricacy.

This isn't even to begin to speak about the mountains of technical debt, insufficient UX, and lost initiatives that the community found worthwhile, which exacerbate the new user experience. That's not intended to be a snide remark, it's just laying out our reality plainly. However... Let's say the company were to discard all other initiatives and commit 100% to doing all of the things we've been asking for over the years, with the end goal being to increase (good) participation and improve the new user experience. Would we really see the results we want to see? Or has the world moved past the niche that Stack Exchange was meant to serve? I don't personally think it has, at least not yet. Participation is down, but our wealth of knowledge still has a lot of worth. Why else would AI crawlers be yoinking our data?

So let's broaden that scope a bit. Let's assume we took Stack Exchange the company and some really open-minded folks from the community, told them to "Make something great", then locked them in a box for 2 years. What would they emerge with? Frankly... I don't know. "Anything" sounds like a useless answer, so let's refine that a little. Each technological step that the world has taken over the years has been in the service of making our lives simpler and more streamlined through methods that are accessible to as many as possible. Stack Overflow was the same way during its time. I guess, based on question #3 here, you've already thought about SO's history and kinda concluded the same thing: It identified a need (a core lack of centralized programming knowledge, compounded by poor documentation) and through the creation of a software, utilized the power of community to satisfy it. We need another big need that the people here can tackle, one that suits the community's skillsets and is achievably resolved with software that the company can create. So, I guess, I'd say: We're capable of becoming the next solution, provided it plays to our strengths.

I'm going to answer the "What need does the public have that this group is best suited to serve?" question in chat, partially because I think it's a better venue for this sort of thing, but also because it's the golden question that has to be answered if we're to transform into something else, and it's necessarily an incredibly difficult question to answer.

Who are we?

I think it's fair to say that we are an eclectic bunch. The Stack Exchange network is like an extensive food buffet with many bowls; the good posts are like different kinds of food. Good post creators bring the "food"; bad post creators bring other things.

Some sites might look like huge fruit bowls.

Some people dispute what constitutes a fruit. For example, is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Some people think fruit should be served in slices, and some do not. Some of these discussions occur in the Stack Exchange network, and some occur elsewhere.

The public includes people who know and don't know that buffets exist, those who care about them (buffets), those who like and dislike them and people who don't want them. It also includes people with food allergies, among others.

As with real people and places offering authentic food buffets, not all members of the public can be served. So authentic buffets don't worry about serving the public; they worry about serving good food to specific segments and having good public relations. So, it should be the Stack Exchange network.

To answer the question about what the public needs from the Stack Exchange network is a clear identity. This includes a clear scope, purpose and workings. This means that the segments of the public that are served are clear, among other things.

To have good public relations, public expectations should be managed appropriately.

What does the public need from us?

Let's start by rehabilitating our image. StackExchange has a image of overzealous "mods". The reason this happens is because people keep landing on closed questions. That shouldn't happen. The solution to that is technical, because there's no way a casual reader would have the interest to understand the nuance of a closed question. So, if a question isn't edited to be reopened in a expedited manner, it should just be deleted. A decay algorithm could be implemented, but it should be a ticking bomb.

Same with duplicates. For some reason the public keeps landing on them. That implies a problem: either the target has crappy keywords, or the target doesn't solve the problem being searched. There's a mechanism to feed these to the reopen queue, the problem is that nobody votes on them to reopen them, despite there being reasons to do so. The Community user should just reopen them and cast a duplicate closure suggestion in the other way. That means that the current system that suggest to reopen popular question, instead is used to close as duplicate unpopular ones.

That would help towards at least not reinforcing the view that we close questions willy nilly. Our closing rate is pretty consistent in the long run, but as years passes, the number of closed questions still visible will continue to raise, so we better start steaming the flow by being more aggressive in pruning these questions.

What does the public really need from us?

Most of my questions fall into 2 categories:

• Easy questions, which GPT or other assistant typically answers well.
• Hard questions, which SE typically removes with Roomba (no upvotes and no fast answers since too niche, or sometimes closed by some users who don't understand that niche).

So I'd need SE to stop removing the remaining questions that GPT can't answer well.

Also, I'd need SE to give me a way to easily download all the Stack Exchange content under the CC BY-SA license, which SE stopped last year. Otherwise it's hard to establish any trust with SE, since they could disappear overnight as Yahoo Answers did.

I'll share my vision of a future Stack Overflow, and hopefully by this provide the answer(s) you seek.

First of all, in my vision (never said it's a good one), Stack Exchange shrinks back to be only Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow, 2030 model, is completely open source run by non-profit organization.

The design and UI is pretty much the same, except for some major accessibility upgrades.

The way to become open source and non-profit isn't clear in my vision, but something along the lines of "it was either shutting down or hand everything over to group of noble people from within the community who took it on themselves to operate it".
Note: the above is most likely the most relevant part here, aka that's what the public really needed.

That is my vision for a while, I was playing along with thoughts what to do with it, e.g. answering some existing question about SO to become open source, but saw here the chance I was looking for.

Is this a good future? Well, for the company it's surely not, actually the worst: the company cease to exist. For the community? In theory yes, but then there's the question of money, and funding: it costs a lot to operate Stack Overflow properly, so this part I leave to the future itself to write. :)