Prosus letter re: Stack Exchange moderation strike

prosus.md

Here's the email I sent.

From: tripleee
To: communications (at) naspers (dot) com (sic)
Subject: Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange moderation strike

Sorry for writing to your press address. I could find no more suitable address under "contact us" on your web site www.prosus.com.

I'm writing as a concerned user of Stack Overflow and the network of sites they operate as Stack Exchange, Inc. As you may be aware, the community of moderators and curators of the site are on strike to protest the company management's recent actions to hamper their ability to moderate content on the sites.

My worry is that the company will also have been reporting these events to their owners without providing the full context of the situation at hand and the special status of the community as the final guardian of the content on the Stack Exchange sites. Unlike many other sites which accept and publish user-submitted content, Stack Exchange is uniquely vulnerable to a curation strike because community empowerment is at the very foundation of how the sites work.

Newcomers to Stack Overflow famously complain that the community is harsh (even "toxic"); but this is the price we pay for maintaining a focus on only accepting high-quality content, by actively reducing the visibility of, and ultimately deleting content which is not up to our standards. But if this aspect of the site stops working, the value of the content that the sites have collected so far could be very quickly diluted when you can no longer rely on the controls being there, and effectively turn the sites into just another landfill with content of dubious quality and uncertain provenance.

In so many words, my impression is that the current management is jeopardizing your investment into one of the premier sites on the Internet by angering its most crucial user population.

Much has been written, and continues to be written, around this conflict, and I can't hope to adequately summarize all of it in this short plea for your attention. I invite you to familiarize yourselves with the situation and assess it yourselves. Here are some starting points:

• Jon Ericson's blog: https://jlericson.com/2023/06/04/signing_on.html

• Hacker News is hard to read if you are unfamiliar with the site, but a very high-profile site which gets widely read and quoted; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36167586

• Stack Exchange Meta; the community's own summary: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-strike-stack-overflow-inc-cannot-consistently-ignore-mistreat-an

Thank you for your attention; I hope you will stay in touch with the community, if not me personally.

--
Sent with Proton Mail secure email.

Very nice ... if a tad optimistic in terms of the expected outcome?

At best, they might read it, at worst, they might use some statistical guacamole to summarize what you said in the email. Either way, I think you did a great job writing it :) let's hope for something happening thanks to it.

No upvote buttons in gists? But I feel a need to click one here.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I have no illusion that this will make a difference, but I thought it might still be worth a try. On reviewing it, I'm thinking maybe I should have made it even clearer that they own Stack Exchange Inc. and that this might affect the valuation. But oh well.