Please scrap the highly-problematic "how are we doing" survey

3 min read Original article ↗

It's been a while and there is no official answer yet, so let me chime in with a few observations.

As an alternative to scrapping the survey it could also be improved. It's not beyond repair, one would just need to respond to your points: for example wordings can be made neutral in order to not suggest things or the amount of questions and options could be extended to cover more areas and make it a more full fledged survey. The confusing "how often have you stopped" question could be clarified. The race question can definitely profit from a more scientific and professional approach (just reading Race (human categorization) - Modern scholarship and that already takes some time, it's complicated) or be scrapped altogether and replaced by country of origin or other relevant categories like level of education.

I wonder if the survey results have a great impact at all currently. Either the community comes out as quite welcoming or if not, it doesn't seem to have any obvious influence on actions taken currently. Layout changes, collectives, unpinning accepted answers - I'm not aware of any recent change that was concerned with a potentially unwelcoming community.

Indeed, the survey is only one of many ways to give feedback. 1:1 interviews with a few selected users, surveys, meta discussions, the general behavior of the users - all that is the pool of feedback the company can draw from. I remember the unfriendly comments robot (a machine learning project to identify potentially unfriendly comments) showed a lower and lower unfriendly comment rate year over year in the past. And the number of newly registered users or new questions remains quite stable on a high level over the last years, if I'm not mistaken. It could be that a potentially unwelcoming community is much less of an issue now than it may have been in the past.

As a summary: I agree with your points, but they can be corrected. The survey should either be improved or if that is impossible scrapped. As long as either of this doesn't happen, users should better not take part in it, because the result likely isn't useful and the time to take part in it might rather be wasted.


P.S.: A little more than three months later, the company seems to have come to the same conclusion and stopped the survey and works currently on improving it. Hopefully they will succeed.

Temporarily pausing the site satisfaction survey

We understand that many of the community members feel that the wording in this survey can use improvement and thus we are currently working on revising it