Anna Lear on Developer Community and Conference Conversations | UGtastic Archive
Anna Lear, a community manager at Stack Exchange, discusses the role of community managers, the importance of meta sites, and the challenges of moderating a large network of Q&A websites.
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
[Music] Hi, it's Mike again with UGtastic. Today I'm sitting down with Anna Lear, who is a community manager with Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange is a pretty large site, and if you're a developer, you probably have spent a good deal of time either asking questions or getting answers from the site. Thanks a lot for sitting down with me, Anna. I really appreciate it. It's good to be here. Thanks. Can you tell me a little bit about what is Stack Exchange overall, and what is a community manager, and how did you get involved in that? Sure.
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Well, Stack Exchange is by now a network of 100 question and answer websites. We started out with Stack Overflow, which is a site for programmers of all kinds and pretty much any language. And our basic goal is to provide a place or several places where people can come with their questions and they can get expert answers on whatever topic that they happen to be interested in. So as a community manager, I'm part of a team. There's about six of us. What we do is we try to work with different sites and different communities and try to teach them about what makes a good Q&A website, what kind of things make up sites that are truly helpful. So what we usually do is we spend a lot of time. Well, okay, let me back up for a second. Each site, including Stack Overflow, has a corresponding meta site that allows its community to kind of gather and talk amongst themselves and determine how the site is going to run and handle different issues that come up. So as community managers, we spend a lot of time monitoring those meta sites and jumping in to help out with answers and kind of sharing our expertise and lessons learned over the past several years.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
What are some of these meta sites? What is a meta site?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
It is literally pretty much exactly the same as any main site. So let's say Stack Overflow. On the main site, on Stack Overflow, you will have questions about programming, you know, C#, Java, whatever. On the meta site, the only thing that's on topic is Stack Overflow the site. So people would come in with questions about why a certain question was closed, for example, or what kind of things are on topic. They might want a clarification or they might want to say, well, we have a couple of different tags that need to be merged.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Can somebody help us out?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And that happens basically with every community. We provide a way for the community to self-govern like that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So it's a way to say, oh, you posted this WordPress configuration. Stack Overflow isn't the right place to do that. Check out WordPress. Is it WordPress.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
StackExchange? Yeah. So I mean, basically, you help redirect people to the right place?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Potentially, yeah. If somebody came to Stack Overflow and they posted a WordPress configuration question and it got, well, now it's put on hold. We recently rolled out some changes to make closing a little nicer. But they might come to meta. But they might come to meta and they can ask why that happened. And somebody would say, hey, we have this other site. You know, your question would be more welcome there.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So you're dealing with a lot of developers who are maybe dealing with an issue and they're trying to get information. Do you ever have to defuse any kind of situations or do anybody get really angry over a question being closed? It certainly happens for sure. Our site moderators actually take care of a lot of those disputes. That's what moderators are there for is to kind of keep things running smoothly. They're all volunteers and they're doing a fantastic job. But once in a while we as community managers also step in. I don't know that it happens a lot, but there's definitely situations when somebody gets really upset and we have to be very careful about explaining to them how the site works without invalidating what they're feeling and invalidating what their experience is. And so you work with a team of six people and you mostly interact through meta or do you work with the moderators? Yes, to both. So we make heavy use of chat rooms. So Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange has a chat system as well. So we have internal chat rooms that we use within the team and across the teams at Stack Exchange. And we also have moderator only chat rooms where we talk to moderators and kind of provide more real time interaction. So, and as far as the kind of information you're probably seeing, I'm just curious, has there ever been, as you're going into moderating things, I mean, I'm sure there's some of the questions where you're like, why are people asking this?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Don't they read the FAQ?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
But have you ever read anything about like, wow, that's really, is there any like, questions that stick out in your mind that you might have seen or moderated or help move into the right location that like, wow, that, I never thought about that before. That was actually really interesting. Um, that's a good question. I mean, there's a ton of interesting questions that come through, um, pretty much every day. I don't know that anything really sticks out right off the top of my head. Um, Oh, no, that was one. Oh, um, yeah, this is not going to be helpful. Something on Stack Overflow that ended up talking about railroads.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Oh, really?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
I think. That's a good word. Yeah, well, now, yeah, now watch somebody try and find it and it's going to be something completely different. But, uh, yeah, no, nothing that's off the top of my head that I can point to right now. Just maybe, is there so much information that you have to troll through to, to, to manage that it's not much that you can actually read? Uh, pretty much.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
I mean, I don't spend a lot of my time, um, anymore, unfortunately, uh, look like actually browsing Stack Overflow and reading questions for kind of personal, um, enjoyment. Uh, most of the things I ended up seeing right now are actually problematic in some way. Uh, somebody emailed us, uh, to get support or I'm responding to a flag, um, for moderator attention or something like that. So I ended up seeing a lot of kind of average type stuff. Once in a while though, I mean, I still, I still watch like hacker news and all that kind of stuff. So great questions still happen and, uh, they get promoted in those ways.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And, um, as far as dealing with people that are, uh, looking at trying to get their, you know, again, with the questions trying to be answered, um, are there any myths that you've run into where people make assumptions? Like, uh, I know on Reddit people often get angry at the mods and there's occasionally moderator revolts where they try to take down a moderator who people disagree with, uh, how their, uh, uh, uh, how a moderator decided a certain set of questions should, or posts should be handled, uh, or changed rules. Uh, is there any, uh, has there been anything like that with stack exchange where you've, you've had people directly come in conflict with a moderator or question? Oh, definitely. Definitely. Uh, there's many, many examples on meta stack overflow of that. Um, one that, uh, kind of sticks in mind, uh, is, um, not the last moderator election, but the one before it, I think, uh, we elected four moderators. Um, and, uh, one of them, uh, I think at the time he was 19 and, uh, somebody, uh, and I think he closed the question. I don't exactly remember the specifics anymore, but somebody came to meta and basically wrote this giant rant about how teenage moderators are ruining stack overflow.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Oh, really?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And it is the worst thing that has ever happened. So it was basically like he picked specifically on that moderator and, um, things just went downhill from there. It was interesting. You mentioned moderator, moderator elections.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
How does that work?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Uh, so about once a year, uh, give or take, uh, we run a moderator election. So what happens is all of our moderators are volunteers. Uh, and, um, when the site, when a site is still in public beta, um, I should probably explain that too. So when somebody, uh, before we create a new site in the network, um, we work, uh, from a list of site proposals, uh, that are brought to us by anybody on the internet. Uh, we have a special site for that area 51. Um, and once a proposal, uh, gathers a certain, uh, number of followers and people who kind of commit to making that site reality, uh, that site goes into a private beta for about a week to kind of hash out the immediate issues and whatnot. And then it goes into a public beta. And during that time it's open to anybody, anybody can participate. And for that period, we appoint moderators based on a few criteria, people who were active early in the site, who kind of showed aptitude, uh, for community moderation. Um, but once the site graduates from public beta, uh, we hold moderator elections. Uh, so this gives the opportunity, uh, for any community members, uh, who are interested to nominate themselves. Uh, and, um, kind of, you know, basically they, they come back to come forth with, uh, their platform, uh, and kind of explain how they want to make the site better. What, you know, what attracts them, uh, to being a moderator, what they like about the site and, uh, then people vote for them. And, uh, you know, uh, so we have an entire system built for that. It's basically, um, open STD. Um, so it's, um, oh man, the way it works is, uh, somewhat complicated. Uh, and I can never quite remember that there's a meta post on how exactly the votes are counted, but it's basically people pick their top three, um, picks. Um, and then, um, the first, uh, there's a count of like first votes, um, that a person gets. And then once they hit a threshold, they're elected.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And then like other votes that are cast for them trickle down to other people. And yeah.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
What's the Australian voting system?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Possibly. Not too familiar with that. It's, it's, it's, it's, uh, I'm not going to be able to explain it well, but it's basically sounds like you have three candidates and then you vote and there's a way to hash out which one actually got the most votes of the three candidates. Uh, I'll link to it in the show notes cause I'm not from Australia. I just know that it's been explained to me by an Australian. Uh, that's how it worked. Um, so, um, okay.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
So, you know, just, uh, to speak personally about you, how did you get involved with stack exchange?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Uh, so, I mean, you talked about how moderators get elected, but how, how did the community manager position evolve and how did you end up becoming one? Well, how it evolved is slightly before my time. Um, from what I know, uh, Robert Cartano, uh, he's our director of community development. Uh, he was the first community manager that, um, stack exchange, uh, ever had. And, um, all I know about that is that at some point he was approached by Jeff Atwood and they worked something out, which is basically how pretty much everything I believe got, uh, done in those days. Um, but, uh, eventually, you know, the team grew, uh, by the time I got to it, uh, I'm a, I'm a software developer by trade. Uh, so I joined stack overflow, um, didn't really spend a lot of time on it. Uh, but when programmers stack exchange launched, uh, I kind of really got into that. And, um, it was, um, it was, it was somewhat controversial, uh, at the time it, uh, it was a proposed as a place where everything that's off topic on stack overflow can live. And that really didn't work. Uh, it just really created a terrible site. Uh, and eventually it evolved, you know, and it, and now it became kind of, you know, the, the whiteboard side of stack overflow where you can kind of hash out, you know, software practices and design all that kind of stuff. But anyway, um, I was elected a moderator on programmers. So I nominated in the first election and ran. Um, and from there I just discovered kind of the rest of the network. Um, and I spent more and more time on metas. Uh, and, uh, I eventually went back to stack overflow and became a moderator on stack overflow. Uh, and from there I got the job.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Is everybody on the community manager team coming through a similar path or?
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Um, not necessarily. Uh, unfortunately she's no longer with us, but we had, um, um, a community manager, Earthy, uh, who did not have a developer background. Uh, she, uh, got on the team through an internal, um, arrangement. Uh, I think right now everybody on the team has some sort of development past.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So everybody has a little bit of, uh, skin in the game, so to speak.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Anna Lear
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Understanding what, what is being talked about and, and a concept of what is, what is the, the, um, spirit of the, of the conversation on, on stack exchange. It isn't people who are marketing experts. It's people who are developers who are passionate about these topics and are good at working with a lot of people. Well, on stack overflow for sure. Um, I mean, we have, we have a lot of sites, uh, on topics that aren't really developer oriented. Uh, we have a site about cooking, photography, uh, video games, you know, all that kind of stuff. Uh, there's definitely sites where none of us have any experience with whatsoever. Uh, but a lot, but most of the lessons that we've learned from stack overflow and from other sites, they really just translate across the board. So, okay.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down with me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Critical Insights
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"Community managers play a crucial role in teaching communities about what makes a good Q&A website."
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"Meta sites allow communities to self-govern and provide a platform for discussing site policies and issues."
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"Moderators are volunteers who help maintain the smooth operation of Q&A websites."
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"Community managers and moderators often work together through chat rooms to address issues and provide support."
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"Conflict with moderators can arise, and community managers must navigate these situations carefully."