Podcast 351: Here’s how we built our newest product, Collectives™, and why
There's a new way to organize knowledge on Stack Overflow, and a new content type users can create.
Ben Popper
Director of Content
This week we launched Collectives™ on Stack Overflow. It empowers the organizations connected to certain technologies to more directly support the communities that have grown around various topics, bolstering the quality and health of our content in a way that benefits our users as well. In this episode we chat with our Chief Product and Technology Officer, Teresa Dietrich, and Jascha Drel, a senior product manager, about how and why we built this product.
Episode Notes
You can check out all the details about Collectives in our launch post here.
We detailed the user research that allowed our community to help shape this product in a Meta post here.
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10 Comments
Could you implement a volume control? It would be very useful, thank you.
Can’t you control the volume in your tabs using system driver? 🙂
Could you make commenting not refreshing the page? That’s very weird and inconvenient.
I know this (and my previous comment) must have been said several times, I just want to add to it so you know it’s important for some of us.
If you can’t explain what it does in a few sentences on this web page you’ve lost touch with what stackoverflow is.
I won’t listen to 20 minutes of blahblah just as I won’t watch a ten minute YouTube-video to show me something that I can read in one sentence.
Write a non-management-style article with ideas & concept and how we should use it. Done.
In other words: I won’t use it. For now.
>” The technology organization doesn’t own the tag, but it has the ability to organize and highlight information it feels is valuable.”
Hmmm. I expect that will be a mixed bag in terms of usefulness. The great thing about StackExchange as it currently exists is that it’s USER-driven. Users determine what questions and answers rise to the top. Software designers think that they know what users need to know (and what users are confused about), but as SE questions show, users often need perspective, clarification, specific problem-solving or handholding that is _not_ found in the official documentation.
Also ClintM is right: you ought to be able to explain Collectives more clearly in a few succinct sentences.
im not to up todate pleasehelp
I swear I read the description 3 times, and I still don’t understand what Collectives does. It honestly sounds like business jargon: “A strategic paradigm that maximizes synergistic overflow”.
Collectives is a new set of spaces on Stack Overflow where content related to certain technical languages, products, or services can be grouped together. It’s a place for users who regularly interact with this content to collaborate, and for the organizations who help build or maintain this technology to share their expertise. Collectives are defined by a set of specific tags relating to the technologies that an organization builds, supports and has an authority over. It aggregates all content for those interested in these technologies and gives them some special handling of content posted in those tags. This content includes questions and answers as well as new long-form content related to the organization’s products and services. The technology organization doesn’t own the tag, but it has the ability to organize and highlight information it feels is valuable.
Each participating organization will have a Collectives page, which acts as its “home” on Stack Overflow. Questions and answers will continue to belong to the Stack Overflow community, but the Collectives page will aggregate all of the relevant content from the associated tags. Users can join any Collectives page, participate in its leaderboard based on their contributions to its associated content, and find the users that are Admins or Recognized Members of a Collective.
I still dont get it