@NapoleonWilson "we are discontinuing support for ID questions" certainly seems like a referendum. even more so when any discussion wanting to bring them back gets shot down. I think it very clear that a small minority of user, and in particular the moderation team, wanted them gone and made it so.

@Skooba I see no discussion, I see pissed comments with wrong statements, Skooba. Yes, it was a referendum, reached through thorough discussion, like any sensible referendum on meta.

This seems an odd assessment from someone once part of this supposed "minority".

sure, discussions that were against the referendum. There are very few if any answers in those discussion posts that were supporting the ban.

There were quite a bunch, I was counting at least three. How many throrough answers do you need on a meta discussion?

That is the point. There were solely answers supporting a ban.

and even if i was in the minority that wanted them gone at some point, i am willing to admit that the community doesn't and i can respect that.

You might be confusing them with answers arriving after the fact. Of course, take something away from people and they'll wake up what they took for granted. It happens, of course not everyone is happy with having something taken away. Ignoring the status quo is always easier than complaining about change when people finally act on the problems that the site is plagued by.

3 answers of at least 27 on the posts discussing the issue. yes seems overwhelming support to me! /s

at the cost of the actually having a healthy and viable site

I have no idea which posts you're gathering for your assessment. Note, though, that "where me ask my ID question now?" isn't discussion about how these questions work for the site and how to proceed with them.

There was ample discussion. Reversing everything every other month because people don't like change isn't a solution either. At some point the site needs to move on to the future and take a resume of half a decade of trying to make these questions work.

@Skooba I don't really buy this conflation of possible current site activity issues with the ID ban, though. In fact after banning these questions the site quickly flourished with less of this tripe. Granted, it might have sme activity issues right now. But thinking they'll be solved by adding a ton of terrible questions is not something that this site's history has proven to make sense.

The site suffered heavily during the end of the ID phase. Making this go on could easily have led to a wasteland like Music Fans has been (until they came to the same conclusion not too long ago).

The times they are a changing and yes, activity might be waning right now. And it seems easy to look back and say "this, this exact thing 5 years ago is what caused the activity issue we have right now". But the history of the site just teaches something else to me.

As said in a recent post, we need to be wary to automatically mistake question numbers for quality contributions, or we end up in the same content and "engagemant" over everything attitude that plagues the internet at large. Even though I understand there are users who want exactly that. More shallow empty quizes to gather internet points from. That is, however, not what the site set out to be (even though SE themselves kinda lose that out of sight lately).

the trend has been negative year over year. this isn't a "right now" problem. you have people who want to see the site saved but you seem to be content on being the king of ashes and die on the hill rather than even think about reversing an unpopuldecsion. it is clear to me that nothing will ever get through to you, so i am going to disengage here, but you can be damn sure i will continue" to whine in the comments"

Well, Skooba, I could say the same to everyone. We all have our experiences that teach us how we think the world and the site works and that make us do what we think is best for it. But that is an unfair statement. So far I haven't read much that ought to "get through to me".

As said a million times to Amy, I do acknowledge that the site has problems and I do acknowledge that activity might be waning right now. I simply don't believe ID would solve these problems. And I do believe that from over a decade of experience on this site and also observations on other sites. And other than "we need more questions" I haven't yet seen arguments that say how those questions would bring quality contributions.

I don't particularly appreciate being presented as actively trying to sabotage the site and I do think it's an unfair characterization. However, I can understand the frustration this assessment might come from. I also very much believe that you and some others do have the best interest of the site in mind, disregarding the means of how to achieve that or where you got these from.

I don't want ID back not because I'm afraid of reversing a decision, but because I think it would damage the site even more so than it might be struggling right now. If people could grant me (or actually all of the moderators) this honesty, even if we don't agree, this would be much appreciated.

This arising attitude that the moderators are out to destroy the site is concerning and frankly not very helpful. But there is also hardly anything to say against it when you're the devil already. Disenganging and nagging in pissed and sarcastic comments isn't particularly constructive or fruitful to the goal of actually improving the site, nor is a meta climate like on other sites where everything the moderators do is to be assumed first and foremost ill-intended.

But it's also a vicious circle. When the comments get ever more attacking, they will be deleted quicker, which again leads to disenfranchising of the commenters who already feel mistreated and frustration rising together with the vitriol in the comments and an overall further estrangement between the moderators and a cabal of "freedom fighters". All we can do is try to keep calm and tackle the site's problems constructively.

You see a chatroom is much more suited for some verbose soapboxing than a comment section. Even if noone is going to read it ultimately. ;-)

@NapoleonWilson I think it's clear to anyone paying attention that you deeply care about the site and want what (you think) is best for it. Surely nobody seriously believes that you or other mods are "actively trying to sabotage the site". There's just disagreement between different parties over what would actually be best for the site - disagreement which should, of course, be expressed constructively from all sides.

I also think, frankly, there's a lot of closed-mindedness from various sides which contributes to the lack of constructive discussion. Some people aren't even willing to contemplate the idea that ID questions really were bad for the site; some people similarly aren't willing to contemplate the idea that banning them was a mistake.

@Randal'Thor That is a reasonable assumption. But honestly, there are undercurrents arising not dissimilar to worrying situations on other meta sites. Or maybe I'm just as frustrated as anyone else.

@Randal'Thor That is a reasonable assessment.

(I'm not sure if you, Napoleon, think of me as one of the rabidly pro-ID crowd, but I'm actually not. You're aware that I feel the process of deciding to ban ID was mishandled, but I've never said that banning ID was actually bad for the site. I don't have particularly strong opinions either way on that, and - much like Brexit - now that the deed has been done, I don't see any reasonable path to reversing it in the future.)

The figures do show that post numbers were consistently increasing, year by year, until the ID ban and consistently decreasing, year by year, after the ID ban. One conclusion to draw from that data could be "banning ID was bad for the site", but probably there are alternative conclusions too. It could be interesting to discuss how to increase quantity without sacrificing quality - a problem that many smaller SE sites face.

Or indeed how to increase quantity and quality. There's a lot of crappy answers here, on non-ID questions I mean. (Why does every discussion have to come back to ID questions and the associated drama?!)

@Randal'Thor I know you aren't. I know that you primarily think the moderators didn't handle the situation adequately, diregarding its outcome. And you have your right to think that. I do, however, disagree with that.

However, and I'm dangerously blunt here, I also think that your generally noble attitude to jump for rescue when you see people mistreated can have the effect of having you play devil's advocate a bit too often now and then and causing unnecessary drama in the course.

@Randal'Thor Yes, it certainly reduced the amount of questions trememndously. That was expected. And yes, it also causes a lot less users joining the site, even users who would go on to contribute valuable content. Nothing is perfect, I agree with that. Nor did it magically solve all the problems on the site.

@Randal'Thor And also that is true.

If only we could all ask and answer great questions all the livelong day. Alone this is futile to hope for. And also activity wanes over time. I answer like, what, 2 questions a year? What we can do, though, is try to guide the site into the direction it set out for and hope for the best. ID wasn't the only bad content to do away with.

It was, however, content that violated this very goal the site set out for and was actively detracting from it. And I figure it wouldn't be different now. If nobody wants/can write insightful answers, that's not good. But would anyone want to when the questions for that are buried under "gimme that YouTube clip I dreamed of yesterday" (or the "Isekai manwha I read as a kid", for that matter)?

We all like to look back to the old days where everything was joyful and the site was thriving. I did so too, just for me those old days were even earlier. I had these same feelings of users vanishing and quality content decreasing back in, I don't know, 2015? Before I became a moderator even. Maybe that was true and maybe the site is constantly on its way downward. Or maybe we always long back to less worrying times where we ouselves were more active, too.

@NapoleonWilson I have tried to keep my nose out of your site's drama for a good long while, and I hesitated a lot before even posting in this room now. But, as said, I feel that I'm potentially a middle point between the "bring back ID now" and "ID should burn in hell forever" viewpoints, and middle points can be useful in bringing unity.

On the theme of being dangerously blunt, though, I'm sometimes put in mind of a particular kind of parental love, someone who's totally committed to doing what they feel is best for their child and will unswervingly do absolutely anything in support of that goal, disregarding any other viewpoints because they're sure they're right.

That is a nice parable.