A two-part episode: In part one, Ben chats with friend of the show and senior software engineer Kyle Mitofsky about Staging Ground, a private space within Stack Overflow where new users can receive guidance from experienced users before their question is posted. In part two, Ben talks to Stack Overflow moderator Spevacus, who participated in the beta of Staging Ground. They talk about why we wanted to build a safer asking experience for new users, the positive feedback we’ve gotten from the community so far, and the challenges of building Staging Ground within the existing Stack Overflow architecture.
Learn more about Staging Ground on our blog or in the help center.
Find Kyle on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter.
Spevacus is a full stack developer and Stack Overflow moderator. They’re a participant in Charcoal, a user-run group that fights spam and rude/abusive content across the Stack Exchange network.
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BP Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. We’re going to have a great episode today. We’re going to hear from two folks on different sides of the Staging Ground launch– Kyle Mitofsky, who is working on the engineering side at Stack Overflow, and Spevacus, a community member and one of our beta users. I'm your host, Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow, joined by my newly-minted father figure back from his paternity leave and hard at work.
Kyle Mitofsky I am!
BP A former frequent podcast guest, hopefully in the future, a frequent podcast co-host, Kyle Mitofsky.
KM Hey, Ben. Good to be chatting with you, good to be back from leave.
BP So you came back from leave and you joined a team that was working on a product called Staging Ground. Tell me a little bit about where this idea for a product came from and how we pulled together a certain team to work on it.
KM It's nice because I actually bookended Staging Ground. We've been working on it for long enough that I was working on it before leave and I came back and we actually got to deploy it to GA. It was in beta previously.
BP It's like the trick I do. You're at a restaurant and the food's not coming so you get up to go to the bathroom and by the time you get back, the food is there. Perfect.
KM Exactly. That's right.
BP You go on paternity leave. You come back, you get to finish the project.
KM And now it's ready for GA. Everyone buttons stuff up while I'm out.
BP Exactly.
KM What Staging Ground solves within our ecosystem is that when new askers go to ask a question on Stack Overflow, we have a lot of community norms around what a good question is. And new users are often not well-versed in every single one of those community norms. That seems fair, but they can get met with people downvoting them for the quality of their question, or close votes– things that don't feel great as a new user. And what we wanted to provide was a safer asking experience where questions asked inside of Staging Ground have reviewers to give you feedback on the question, but they don't have downvotes. The goal is to give only feedback that makes the post recoverable and do that in a private setting that is not as public as asking a question and immediately being judged on the caliber of that question as existing on Stack Overflow in perpetuity.
BP I think I just want to establish that there's a lot of things that go into the quality of a question, and Stack Overflow is committed to creating these knowledge artifacts that will stand the test of time. I stand behind that mission, but how we do it in a way that continues to allow new users to come in and participate is what Staging Ground is all about.
KM A knowledge artifact that stands the test of time is a huge bar to clear for somebody who is a new asker, who is brand new, who's seen lots of other questions on Stack Overflow, hopefully has helped them from a read-only perspective, but we want to make the barrier to contribution easier for people. So that was some of the motivation behind where this product fits inside of our existing offerings– to have an easier entry point to asking questions for particularly new askers. There are two types of users in Staging Ground. One is a new asker, just somebody who has not yet asked two successful questions on the platform. Could be zero, which is the mode. The most number of users we see have asked zero questions before, but it could be they asked one and it didn't perform particularly well. And then we have exit criteria for as soon as they've asked two successful questions, then you can go post directly on the main site. And the second user type that engages in Staging Ground is a reviewer, and that's someone who is well enough established on the site. Our entry criteria for that is they have 500 reputation points. 500 rep is a pretty good proxy for that you are well enough established on the site to understand some of the rules, and it also happens to be the number at which we allow people to come in and monitor review queues as well. And while this has big differences from a review queue in terms of the burden that we ask on the reviewer, there are similarities in terms of what we're expecting out of someone. You've been around long enough to understand the norms and give people good guidance on how to ask a question.
BP So along with what level are you at in terms of your reputation or your participation and therefore you're a good guide, there is a little bit of value to the other side of saying, “If we intercede at this point and we connect people who are experienced with people who are not as experienced but want to ask questions, we will end up creating better questions and less work in the aftermath.” That was another thought?
KM Correct. A lot of Stack Overflow is on the backs of people who put in a lot of effort as reviewers, as content creators, as answerers. There's a huge community that we have here. I was telling my dad a while ago, “Oh, I contribute to Stack Overflow and I write all these answers and I do all this stuff in review queues,” and he was like, “Why would anyone want to go do that? That sounds like a lot of work.”
BP Dad, have you not heard of free internet points, Dad? Come on.
KM And I was like, “Well, this is my dad.” When we were kids, he served on the zoning commission. You don't get paid to do it. It's just somebody who is invested in that community and wants to show up and help shape the rules that everyone lives by, or help make sure that things kind of look nice and you're invested in it and you want to make sure it goes well. And that kind of sat with him really well. He's like, “Oh, yeah. I did do all of that work for the community that I was a part of.” And so we help build the tools to create that community, but then we give them to the community and say, “Here. This is a tool that we've made for you to help encourage good content on the site.” So we rely on those reviewer contributions, but it's from people that we've already seen. We have almost a thousand different unique reviewers who have already come in in the last two weeks and reviewed stuff on Staging Ground. That's a huge number for a product that we just launched into GA. And the average post per review is like four posts, so people are coming in and making a difference and helping new authors find their voice on Stack Overflow, which is really cool.
BP I also think it's neat to have a new role for folks who have been contributing for a while or maybe have been moderating for a while, and now there's a new way of approaching how you interact with the site, so that's kind of cool. All right, so we've talked a little about what it's for and the different sides of the table in terms of who's using it. Let's talk a little bit about how we built it and made it work with this glorious old monolith of ours.
KM So the monolith, blessing and a curse. I think we've talked about the monolith and kind of our architecture on other podcasts occasionally, but we built this squarely inside of what our existing Stack Overflow schema looks like. So core data elements that we have and think about in Staging Ground are posts– we have a post history that helps track revisions to posts. We have post comments. We have all the same sorts of data types that a regular, graduated, public post on Stack Overflow has, and so in the process of developing this, we reused a lot of those and we get some pros and cons there. One is that we get a lot of stuff for free. We get revision history for free. I can go look at a post timeline and that gives me all of the diffs and deltas between a previous revision. We just have all these nuanced rules even in the way that we look at revisions. There's something called a ‘ninja edit,’ and if you edit a post within five minutes and no one else has commented on the post –some preconditions need to be met– then we don't have a whole new revision history get added because you quickly caught a typo. After five minutes that thing gets baked. We get all that for free. It's nice to have all the ways that we've built up this platform over the last over a decade kind of get baked into how we think about Staging Ground posts. As a technical detail, we have something called a ‘post state’ on every post. We introduced this with Collectives. Collectives had the way to have a draft article and then a published article. Everything else before that on Stack Overflow was always just published, there was one post state. And so we kind of leveraged that in Staging Ground to say that we can move through different states. The first is when you submit something to Staging Ground, it's in a new state. It's ready to be reviewed, but somebody can review it and say, “This needs major changes.” That changes the state of that post to say ‘major changes.’ Somebody could say it needs minor edits, somebody could immediately approve that post and graduate it. And those are all managed through our regular posts object and just changing the state that that lives in. So we get a lot of stuff for free, which is great, and then the con to building this on top of a whole bunch of already existing stuff is that it introduces a lot of edge cases that we need to guard against. So I have this thing that's a post type of a question when I'm looking at the main page and I don't have permissions to see Staging Ground stuff. I don't want that to show in, so we have to make sure it doesn't show up where we don't want it but we get it in the places where we do for free. So that's been tricky and also beneficial to work with.
BP Tell me a little bit about some of the early impact that you're seeing. I know internally, one of the things that I've been hearing is that not only is it helping more users to graduate questions, which is great, but that we're seeing the sort of engagement rates of new users tick up, that we find that it's sort of solving that pain point of having a negative first experience, and that also it's saving time for the folks who used to be clearing these review queues and so they can feel like they can focus elsewhere. So kind of a double whammy, but what do you think some of the highlights have been from your perspective?
KM So there are a couple primary metrics that we're evaluating this feature against. One is post survival rate. Of the things that come out of Staging Ground, how well do those posts stay on the platform? Surviving just means It didn't get deleted and it didn't get closed, and that happens to a good number of posts for various reasons. Sometimes there's a spam post that comes in and it's deleted, it doesn't survive, but sometimes there's something that the author decides to delete. Sometimes it gets enough negative votes that they delete it because they really did want to ask the question, but the community, I guess, didn't align behind it and so just to get it off of their resume there. So one is post survival rate. One is post success rate. Okay, not only did it stay on the platform, but in order for it to be successful, was the post itself upvoted, which means the person asked a good question, or really, did it get an answer and did it get an approved answer from the owner, which means that person got their question answered, which is ultimately always the goal. If we can get every question answered, we're pretty happy. And then the third metric that we want to align Staging Ground against is what our new user retention curve looks like. When somebody comes to Stack Overflow and contributes for the first time, do they ever come back in a month, in two months, in three months and continue to perform actions on the site? Right now, we have a lot of experienced users on the site who help maintain the quality of the site by doing review queues and by submitting flags even or making suggested edits on content to improve it. All of those people were once a new asker asking their very first question, and they've held on through the retention curve through their entire journey through Stack Overflow. They came back and they asked another question, they got enough value out of it that they said, “Ah, I want to keep investing in this place.” And people who have better initial experiences on Stack Overflow, our theory behind it is that they are going to stick around longer and continue to perform actions with the site to help increase the community health. So those are the three metrics we're kind of looking at as KPIs for Staging Ground. Right now for Staging Ground posts, our survival rate is about 85 percent of those things coming out of Staging Ground stick around. We're always looking to increase that number, but that's already an increase over just the baseline numbers.
BP Let's say a significant increase, yeah?
KM Yeah. And it's a little early days to figure out a retention curve because we just GA'd. We need to know does this have an impact on people in a month or two months and three months coming back? But it's our hope and we'll continue to look at that and evaluate those things as we have Staging Ground live on the site for longer.
BP Nice. You had said there's a thousand unique reviewers and then two thousand graduated posts, which is nothing to sneeze at in the amount of time it's been around. We got 2,000 new Q&A couplets that could go on to serve people for many years. And then four posts per reviewer, meaning each reviewer doesn't necessarily feel overburdened. This is a manageable load for them to be able to contribute.
KM And we want to also set up a system that incentivizes reviewers. Like I said with my dad doing zoning commission, a lot of people just do this job because they care about it. But also, when we can gamify things in certain ways, when we can kind of give you some internet points, that also feels good too. One way to incentivize reviewers is with the tools in our bag that we have on the platform, and they're not huge, but they’re internet points. We have badges that reviewers can get when they perform enough actions. We have a Guide Badge. When you review 10 posts in Staging Ground, you get a Guide Badge. If you review 250 badges in Staging Ground, you get an Instructor Badge. This certainly incentivizes me.
BP As a video game lover, I understand ‘new achievement unlocked’ is the ultimate lure.
KM That’s right.
BP These badges were not available before Staging Ground and now they are, so come on in. Wonderful. What was the experience like during the beta testing and working with users who had signed up as well as people who are doing reviews, and how did that inform the product? What kind of evolution did it have based on that interplay?
KM This was one of the first features that I've been a part of that we kind of got a big group of beta testers together from the public community to help us co-create this feature, really legitimately co-create, help us think about the way we thought about features, not just give us bug reports, but really bring them on very early into the development process. So one of the first times that we had gone to these lengths to do that, we created a Stack Overflow Teams instance where people can ask Q&A, kind of submit feature requests through a question. “Are we going to do this? What do we think about doing this thing?” and submit bug reports through that Q&A mechanism there, and that was invited to all the people who wanted to participate in the early beta. And we just got hundreds of posts under that from people who are saying, “What about this thing? What about this thing?” And we had that up and running for a very long time with beta users as a great source for ideas, as a great source for things that could get handled better.
BP Were they spotting edge cases? Were they able to do that from that perspective?
KM Of course. You always just get so many more edge cases as soon as you throw something onto production that it's hard to always think of. So they're spotting edge cases, but also we would post early design drafts from our designer– screenshots in Figma saying, “This is the thing that we're going to build. Is it worth building? Any notes before we actually go do the dev work to do this?” Because it's way easier to get those notes on the screenshot of a Figma file than it is once we've already baked it. I'd rather know ahead of time if we get any feedback on it. So it was a really great development experience getting beta testers who are as heavily vested. We got very lucky with people who really wanted to see improvement on the platform and really got behind this idea of having Staging Ground as well. That was something that reviewers and tenured users on the platform had asked for a long time, so as soon as we gave them the opportunity to contribute to it, I think a lot of people bit on that.
BP Nice. Spoiler alert– the other part of this podcast that you're listening to is with Spevacus, who is a user on Stack Overflow and has been around for a while and contributed a bunch of knowledge in different ways.
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BP We want to shout out some users who contributed to Stack Overflow, helped to spread a little knowledge, to share a little curiosity, or in this case, to make sure somebody got to ask their question and that it will survive the test of time. The Instructor Badge– it's a new one. You may not have it, you’ve got to go out and get it. We're going to shout out, of course, Spevacus, our guest who was awarded this badge on June 22nd. I see one awarded to Yaakov Ellis, long-time Stacker, and about seven other folks have already earned this badge for reviewing 250 posts in Staging Ground.
KM I am Kyle Mitofsky. I exist on the internet on Stack Overflow as user1366033. You can go to stackoverflow.com/stagingground to find out more about Staging Ground. And you can find me off the internet or you can find me hanging out with my 8-month-old daughter, Aurora. That's what I do most of the time outside of work.
BP Thank you, Kyle.
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BP All right. Moving on, we are going to now hear from Spevacus, otherwise known as CJ– someone who's been participating on Stack Overflow for many years, participating in a user group that fights spam and rude, abusive content, loves being wrong on Meta, and recently helped us out with our beta testing of Staging Ground. That feature is now out and we'll put the blog link in the show notes. But the nice thing about it is that both for moderators and people who help to maintain the site, as well as for new users who are trying to ask questions, we've seen a positive response that allows new users to ask better questions, mods to have to do less work, and overall just lets more people be curious, ask questions, and get answers. So exciting stuff there. So CJ, welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast.
Spevacus/CJ Thanks very much for having me.
BP So tell folks a little bit about how you got into the world of software and technology and how you ended up as a Stack Overflow user and also a participant in some of what goes on behind the scenes.
CJ Absolutely. So I started programming when I was a kid, I would think I was 11 or 12, maybe even younger, playing around with very, very simple programs to get into the world of software. That kind of segued into high school programming courses, and that was a great time. Inevitably, you run into problems, and when you run into those problems, you hit up Google. And when you hit up Google with a programming problem, inevitably you land on Stack Overflow.
BP So I’ve heard.
CJ And it wasn't long after that that I made an account and just kind of started hanging out there. I didn't really start answering questions until quite a bit later, though.
BP So do you currently work in the software industry? Has this gone on to be your career? Did you go into other things?
CJ I do. I currently work as a software developer, full-stack for a payroll company.
BP Nice. So tell me a little bit about how you got involved with Charcoal. Let's start there. We can use that to transition a little bit into your experience recently helping us trying to get Staging Ground right.
CJ Absolutely. So Charcoal, if you're not aware, is a user-run group that fights against all kinds of spam and other rude content all across the Stack Exchange network. I got involved with them not long after I really started participating in all different ways across the Stack Exchange network. I think what attracted me most to that was how quickly I felt I could make a difference when fighting against stuff that just shouldn't be on the internet, period, and I kind of used that activity to segue into furthering my participation all throughout the network. I think it kind of opened me up. It showed me sites that I hadn't previously seen.
BP So I think one of the things I've heard from Philippe, who is our Vice President of Community, is that the stats are pretty staggering in terms of the number of people who work behind the scenes versus the amount of traffic we get and just the flow of engagement, whether that be questions, answers, comments, votes. Do you have a way to give people, if you're talking about a sense of scale, what you see on a daily or weekly basis and how your group tries to handle so much raw material?
CJ Absolutely. Charcoal is a very, very transparent organization. I'm only affiliated with the project insofar as I am a volunteer, and I do believe the API stuff rolled over just recently, but as of right now, 160 posts were reported and about a quarter of those were deleted with the help of Charcoal. To put that into a broader perspective, 92,000 posts over the course of Charcoal's history have been auto-flagged by the Smoke Detector Project. And that is at a 99.4% true positive rate, which means it was very, very, very accurately deleted.
BP Okay, so the system is working in that sense. And what kind of spam do people post? They're trying to promote their own websites, or what are people trying to sell us?
CJ It's a wide variety. Sometimes it's just people promoting their own blog site, sometimes it's people trying to sell you something. Sometimes it's malware. It ranges all across the spectrum. Sometimes it's an innocent user who just wants to answer a question but in a roundabout way, and in those cases you have to be a little bit more delicate than you would if you were just trying to delete something that a robot had posted.
BP Gotcha. So speaking of being delicate with users and trying to guide new users or help folks who aren't new but don't ask a lot of questions, we recently announced Staging Ground. I've been working with the company for five years now, and one of the truisms has always been, “Let's try to find ways to make our community more welcoming. Let's try to find ways to bring down the barriers to entry.” When I was working on the Student Ambassador program, there was no college student who hadn't heard of or used Stack Overflow within the last week or two if they were getting a CS degree, but there was only a very small percentage that was able to get over the hurdle of creating an account or asking a question. So how did you first get invited into the beta test, I guess, is a good place to start,
CJ So back in, I believe, 2022, Stack Overflow said that they were going to start looking into different ways to allow users to better moderate the content that was coming in from new users. I'm a pretty big advocate for the user-based moderation model that Stack Overflow employs, so I was like, “Hey, sign me up.” Initially, I was invited as just a Charcoal member. For the first beta round, Stack Overflow invited a variety of users to be both reviewers and also just be there as Charcoal members to just maybe flag spam if it pops up. But eventually that access turned into being a full-fledged reviewer and reviewing a lot more than I probably should have originally as a Charcoal member being in there. I do think that the way that it panned out, the way that the Staging Ground is currently formatted and modeled is really attractive as an alternative to the rudimentary review queues we've had for years.
BP I think that a lot of people who post their first question may not be aware of how things work behind the scenes. And we also recently tried to sort of push to the forefront an Ask Question Wizard, which is to say, there's a lot you need to know beforehand going in about what's allowed, what's not allowed, how to structure a question well, and so there was kind of a guided tutorial, a little bit of automated assistance. Staging Ground is a little bit different because it connects the front end user who may not know a lot with the back end who's actually really seasoned in this stuff. When you first got in there, what does a review queue look like? This stuff is flowing in, how does a mod triage that? How do they respond to it? And then what is Staging Ground trying to do to further optimize that workflow?
CJ So just to make a quick distinction for the general user out there, there is a big distinction between a mod and just a user who has the reputation necessary to perform user-level moderation actions. Unless you see a diamond next to a person's username, that person is not going to be a moderator. Moderators sign an agreement, they need to be held to a little bit of a higher standard. But in terms of the review queues, the review queues are a small environment in which questions that may need the attention of the community are brought forward– not just questions but also answers– and there are a variety of actions you can take that you may sometimes not be able to take outside of that. In other words, it's a way to surface information or posts that may need a second look. And within those boundaries, a reviewer should generally be able to take all actions necessary to either remove that content from the site, either do it directly or to help remove it from the site, flag it for attention so that somebody else can come along and take care of it such as an elected moderator, or edit it themselves to make it a little bit better.
BP What is an example of, let's say I come in, I've got a question about JavaScript and how it works with lists and queues in relation to containers. It's not something I've done before, and I post the question, maybe I'm not aware that I need to show my work, or I'm not supposed to link out to my own stuff, or that I need to have checked and made sure that this question has been answered before. How would you go about sort of annotating or editing that so that the question in its final form works for the site?
CJ So I think a good question generally has two really key elements, and both of them can be finicky to get right. The first one is that it meets Stack Overflow's rather rigorous quality standards, and the second one is that it's useful to any future readers. Both of those are very, very difficult to achieve. Stack Overflow does have those rigid equality standards that I just said, but while it does seem taxing to adhere to them, they're there for a reason. Stack Overflow's entire goal is to be a massive library of knowledge that will stand the test of time. It just so happens to be in a question and answer format. There's a lot of utility to this format –there's a reason it's employed in the Stack Overflow for Teams product– but these quality guidelines exist so that all future readers don't have to sift through a bunch of cruft to find the right information that they're looking for. So in order to tailor a question to fit the quality standards portion of this, we'd have to make sure that first it's an actual question. Don't just throw a problem out into the wind. You have to explain what exactly it is you're working with, and what exactly it is that you're looking for, and what it is you're looking to do. Give us all of those details that you might need for us to solve the problem, but maybe not too many. There is value in being succinct. If there's code involved, make sure you give us that code in text format. Don't take a screenshot of it, please. If there's an error message, give us that whole error message and imagine for a moment that you're a future reader and you've happened across the question that you've written. Does that question have enough information for you to answer it? As you've kind of concocted this question, did you tell us everything that you've tried yourself to fix it as well? And then lastly, make sure it's got a good title and make sure it has some tags that fit it. If you mess up any of those things, such as maybe it's not a great title, maybe it's not a great series of tags, someone else can come along and fix those. Those are somewhat minor.
BP The one that seems most difficult to me is, maybe as you said, “I've tried everything I could to solve it.” I guess the assumption there being, what kind of knowledge do I have? How many different angles should I take? How much time do I need to invest before this rises to the level of, “Okay, I need to reach out and learn about this from the community.” Do you have a sense of what our cultural norms are there?
CJ In a way, the longer that Stack Overflow continues to live on, the more information should be available there. Technology will continue to develop and new problems will arise, sure, but it's likely that the problem you've encountered has been encountered by someone else before, and we have to make sure on Stack Overflow that that information is available. If you don't find an answer to your question, just go ahead and post a question.
BP So I myself have been through this a few different ways, and here's one question I would pose to you. If I post a question or I post an answer and it's clear from the response of users, in the sense that somebody gives me back an answer and I accept it or my answer is accepted and the responses and the comments are positive, I feel like value has been exchanged. But I've since then had a few of those comments closed, and I think the distinction there is, “But will it stand the test of time?” Which is to say, is this question clear for other users? Does it include all the details that need to be included? Is it not a duplicate, et cetera, et cetera. And so a lot of times I think the frustration comes from a user saying, “I took the time and effort to engage with the site.” That's a pretty high bar for somebody to put themselves out there. “I saw value generated between me and other members of the community, but then the folks who kind of operate behind the scenes came in and in some ways dismissed that or obviated that.” How is Staging Ground, and you got to test it, a good way to avoid that conflict in which the users seem to be getting value, but the long-term viability of the question doesn't meet our standards?
CJ So on the main site outside of the Staging Ground, there are times when a question gets closed and it's not immediately clear from the close reason why exactly that fits with the question. And I believe in the Staging Ground, because there is a requirement on the onus of the reviewer to provide in a comment everything that they would like to be fixed before it goes public, it begins to be a little bit more personal. Inside of the Staging Ground, reviewers typically spend quite a bit more time handling a given question than they would in any of the existing review queues.
BP Good to know.
CJ And inside of that paradigm, there's the opportunity, with all the tools that the Staging Ground currently offers to reviewers, to give targeted feedback to a user about their question. The goal of it all is to try and get it as close to perfect as they can within time constraints and reason, such that it can thrive when it's made public.
BP We have a whole blog post detailing this, but what are some of your favorite features or what are the highlights of Staging Ground in terms of, like you said, the tools available and the different kind of engagement that it builds between the reviewer and a question, which goes beyond what we used to do?
CJ Absolutely. So a solo reviewer has a lot of power to come in, see an obvious problem with a question that would inevitably lead to it being closed on the main site, and then take that problem, format it in the form of a feedback response and a comment on that, and immediately change the status of that question to be ‘requires major changes’ or they could vote to close that question as not being a good fit for Stack Overflow. Then the user immediately gets an email or a notification –the question author– and they get the opportunity to read that feedback and immediately act upon it. Some of the tools that are very powerful in this situation are that exactly. One person can come in and say, “Hey, here's a really big problem you might have with your question. We want these details, or we need this code, or we need this formatted because you may or may not have gotten lost in the sauce when you were editing your question.” Nothing's wrong with all of that. It's just, hey, maybe you fix this and then we can move forward. Some of the other tools available are comment templates. So we see a variety of questions that have very similar patterns of problems across all of them lacking the background research information that would help us ensure that this problem is unique from others we've seen before, lacking the code or error messages that we might need. All of these are packaged into comment templates that we can grab, we can paste, and then we can edit to tailor the specific situation we're looking at.
BP So one of the things that I'm curious about is as you were in this during the beta, did it change in any significant ways? Were there things where you or other folks who are more on the side of helping, whether they're mods or just power users or group members, was there feedback you gave that you felt was really critical to getting this to its final form?
CJ Absolutely. And it is in this moment that I will take the moment to sing the praises of all the developers, the community managers, the project managers that made the Staging Ground a reality. In particular, I have to shout out Yaakov Ellis, who is unfortunately no longer with Stack Overflow, but was a prime reason why it is what it is today. It was very, very frequent that I would leave feedback or I would raise a problem or I would see someone else do the same thing, and that bit of feedback would be ticketed, handled, and adjusted in the production environment all within a couple days. That is an experience I have never had before on a public facing product, especially one that deals with user-submitted content. It really was an awesome experience to be a part of that development process and I hope that as the Staging Ground continues to experience maybe a little bit of growing pain –Stack Overflow is a massive site– that Stack Overflow continues to give it some degree of attention and ensure that it doesn't get stale. There are still just a couple outstanding things I'd like to see change, but absolutely, I definitely feel like I had a pretty positive impact on the final product.
BP All right. Well, is there other stuff you'd like to touch on before I take us to the outro?
CJ Sure. I wanted to bring up just a little bit about how big of a boon the Staging Ground is to Stack Overflow, broadly speaking. I talked a little bit before about how a user can give targeted feedback about a new question that comes in within the boundaries of a private space where they can take a moment and tailor that question, hopefully to perfection, or halt a question that is completely irrelevant and not suitable for Stack Overflow in its tracks, all within an environment where there is no voting. There is neither positive nor negative voting. And I think that the absence of voting in this paradigm will help a new user feel a little bit more personally touched by a reviewer and hopefully eased into the public site. And additionally, in the Staging Ground, questions don't leave until either 24 hours have passed, in which case nobody really wanted to touch it, which that's an unfortunate scenario but it does happen, or much more likely, like I said, a reviewer comes through and approved it. When a reviewer leaves a comment or submits some sort of action on the post, the responsibility shifts immediately back to the question asker. In a situation on the main site where maybe a question gets closed as needing additional details, that question can still be edited by the community, it could still be voted on, it could still have multiple other comments attached to it, or it could even be deleted by the community. In the Staging Ground, that really isn't the case. It's just status switches and then you either edit it and fix it or you don't. In the event that an author doesn't quite get it, the reviewers have the tools necessary to make sure that that question doesn't hit the main site unless it, within reason, fits quality standards.
[music plays]
BP All right, everybody. It is that time of the show. Usually at the end of these episodes, I shout out a user for earning a Lifeboat Badge or asking a great question, just making sure we acknowledge the folks who are contributing knowledge and curiosity to our community. But today, Spevacus, we'll give you a congrats on your two gold badges, both Marshal and Fanatic. Marshal for raising 500 helpful flags. So appreciate your time on the site and your contributions.
CJ Hey, thanks very much.
BP As always, I am Ben Popper. I'm the Director of Content here. You can find me on X @BenPopper. You can email us with questions or suggestions, podcast@stackoverflow.com. We've been having lots of listeners on to discuss their jobs, what they're seeing in the market, how they're working with software. Speaking of jobs, Stack Overflow Jobs, at least a version of it, is back up and running. If you haven't played with that in a while, you can check it out. Obviously, Staging Ground is a new thing that you should check out. We'll put a link in the show notes. And the 2024 Developer Survey is open, so if you haven't contributed, we would love to hear from you.
CJ Hey, I'm Spevacus. You might see me around the Stack Exchange Network. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. Hopefully, you don't see anything I've written because it's not very good.
BP Aw, come on.
CJ Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciated the opportunity to chat with you.
BP All right, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you soon.
[outro music plays]