Return to Answer

First off, I've seen several inconsistencies between what you've said, and what has actually happened. The blog post completely nailed the cause of the anger, which along with the implementation of feature requests and so far fantastic work from the dev team made me hope the site could improve. Yaakov Ellis wrote an answer to a "thank you" question after feature requests started being implemented and wrote something you should think about:

But what you're now saying is that you're removing Hot Meta Posts because "I have not observed this to be a place where people are polite and professional." and you therefore "don't want to send new people to a place where people have these experiences."? As far as I can tell from the answer, it outlines bad psycological affects on employees because meta is unpolite. Personally, I feel the positives are assigned less weight, even though you claim you're not overlooking positives.

Hot Meta Posts has never forced anyone to participate. It's a suggestion for stuff to read and maybe participate in. The removal resulted in the mods reaching out for ideas. The highest upvoted idea at the time of writing is creating a script that uses views and votes to determine what should be featured. Doesn't that sound an awful lot like Hot Meta Posts to you? The only difference, if implemented, will probably be a minor algorithm difference, but overall result in the same recommendations. Potentially, all you're going to end up with is Hot Meta Posts in a different form, manually re-written from scratch under a different name.

Users will find their way here in one way or another. Employeees are (were?) apparently forced to participate here as well, so why remove it at all?

If something nasty shows up, there's flags, and mods who review them, and take action. Last I checked, employees have as much access to flags as regular users, if not more (especially if they have cross-site diamonds).

If the issue is negativity, decisions like this one will not give you a better view of how the community react. Hell, I'm negative to this change, presumably along with the (currently) 403 users who downvoted the question. You can't get around negativity, but negativity isn't inheritly bad. Toxicity is bad, however, and by giving moderators full access over [featured], you're indirectly forcing them to take on more responsibility, while trying to handle toxicity, potentially slowing down response times (which have been amazing up until recently, with a response time on flags in a few minutes, if not seconds).

If HMP really was removed to prevent users from coming to meta, that kinda explains your motivation behind the new homepage...

Have you thought about the moderators? The ones you're now pushing more work on? They're already busy enough because of the system in which there's a very limited amount of mods. You're also pushing away all kinds of users - both users who may have an interest in meta, as well as people like me (at least a month ago) who's a passive meta reader.

Not to forget about flags - IIRC, the idea is to flag posts that should be featured. How long does it take until the flag queue here on meta requires as much job as on main, if not more? What do you do if mods stop reviewing meta flags entirely to focus on main?

• You're loading the few mods with even more work
• You're depriving passive meta users of access to posts
• You're removing it to potentially be replaced with a script that does, well, the exact same thing HMP does.
• The psycological wellbeing of employees is still an issue

No matter how you look at it, breaking down communication further while you try finding an alternative to meta will not benefit anyone. We're still stuck with this sytem, and breaking it further won't help with consensus on future cases, and it won't help with the meta participation percentage.

First off, I've seen several inconsistencies between what you've said, and what has actually happened. The blog post completely nailed the cause of the anger, which along with the implementation of feature requests and so far fantastic work from the development team made me hope the site could improve. Yaakov Ellis wrote an answer to a "thank you" question after feature requests started being implemented and wrote something you should think about:

But what you're now saying is that you're removing Hot Meta Posts because "I have not observed this to be a place where people are polite and professional." and you therefore "don't want to send new people to a place where people have these experiences."? As far as I can tell from the answer, it outlines bad psychological effects on employees, because meta is unpolite. Personally, I feel the positives are assigned less weight, even though you claim you're not overlooking positives.

Hot Meta Posts has never forced anyone to participate. It's a suggestion for stuff to read and maybe participate in. The removal resulted in the moderators reaching out for ideas. The highest upvoted idea at the time of writing is creating a script that uses views and votes to determine what should be featured. Doesn't that sound an awful lot like Hot Meta Posts to you? The only difference, if implemented, will probably be a minor algorithm difference, but overall result in the same recommendations. Potentially, all you're going to end up with is Hot Meta Posts in a different form, manually rewritten from scratch under a different name.

Users will find their way here in one way or another. Employees are (were?) apparently forced to participate here as well, so why remove it at all?

If something nasty shows up, there are flags, and moderators who review them, and take action. Last I checked, employees have as much access to flags as regular users, if not more (especially if they have cross-site diamonds).

If the issue is negativity, decisions like this one will not give you a better view of how the community react. Hell, I'm negative to this change, presumably along with the (currently) 403 users who downvoted the question. You can't get around negativity, but negativity isn't inherently bad. Toxicity is bad, however, and by giving moderators full access over [featured], you're indirectly forcing them to take on more responsibility, while trying to handle toxicity, potentially slowing down response times (which have been amazing up until recently, with a response time on flags in a few minutes, if not seconds).

If HMP really was removed to prevent users from coming to meta, that kind of explains your motivation behind the new homepage...

Have you thought about the moderators? The ones you're now pushing more work on? They're already busy enough because of the system in which there's a very limited amount of moderators. You're also pushing away all kinds of users - both users who may have an interest in meta, as well as people like me (at least a month ago) who's a passive meta reader.

Not to forget about flags - IIRC, the idea is to flag posts that should be featured. How long does it take until the flag queue here on meta requires as much job as on main, if not more? What do you do if moderators stop reviewing meta flags entirely to focus on main?

• You're loading the few moderators with even more work
• You're depriving passive meta users of access to posts
• You're removing it to potentially be replaced with a script that does, well, the exact same thing HMP does.
• The psychological well-being of employees is still an issue

No matter how you look at it, breaking down communication further while you try finding an alternative to meta will not benefit anyone. We're still stuck with this system, and breaking it further won't help with consensus on future cases, and it won't help with the meta participation percentage.

Have you thought about what happens when there's conflict about the tag? What do you do if there's disagreement and it turns into a featured rollback war? The chance of a rollback war happening are low because, well, moderators, but there's still a chance it can happen.

Not to forget about flags - IIRC, the idea is to flag posts that should be featured. How long does it take until the flag queue here on meta requires as much job as on main, if not more? What do you do if mods stop reviewing meta flags entirely to focus on main?

If meta is the problem as a system, replace it. I know you have plans to find an alternative, but temporarily reducing access to it while you're literally 6-8 arbitrary time units away from finding alternatives isn't good for the community.

What's worse is that this is actually by design.

If meta is the problem as a system, replace it. I know you have plans to find an alternative, but temporarily reducing access to it while you're literally 6-8 arbitrary time units away from finding alternatives isn't good for the community.