Something I am wondering about as I consider my own use of the site Is - are you changing your leadership in these areas?
I realise you can’t talk Individual personnel matters on here, and that’s not what I’m asking for. I’m not trying to kick the IT team while they’re down. I expect your they’ve been run ragged trying to make everything work for us and I really appreciate the work they’re putting in. But this sort of screwup doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This is a lack of leadership in these areas and not just in the short term.
Both the CTO and CIO roles in your organization seem to have dropped the ball. Maybe they were underfunded, under resourced, under skilled, inexperienced, and/or something else. But this upgrade has exposed some pretty rudimentary weaknesses and since it’s pretty much your whole business, that’s scary.
You’ve been blaming all sorts of stuff on the old platform for years, but the upgrade has exposed a lack of investment in the technical side that goes far beyond simply using old technology for a bit too long. When your CTO left months before the role out, did that not give you pause? What senior leader does that unless they think the project’s a disaster and they need to jump ship?Testing was haphazard and many issues either ignored or missed. I know there are always going to be complaints when a UI changes and sometimes to move forward you have to leave some loved options behind. But that’s not all that’s been going on here.
There has also been a cavalier attitude towards users in so many ways. The big UI changes without well designed testing and feedback. But also, before that, a lack of concern for user experience as though the people making decisions are either unaware of the technical issues, legal obligations, industry standards and best practices that go along with online communities or they don’t care about treating us with respect or being deserving of our trust. Things like the cookie consent introduction, the badly done Premium role out, the too-frequent data breaches, etc.
This is just what can be seen from this side of the boards. I’m sure on that side there are people who are pretty horrified at the tangle they can see.
MN was a godsend while my kids were young and has been a huge cultural benefit for women, especially mothers, in the UK. It is pretty heartbreaking to be considering whether I ought to pull away from the site, but that’s constantly on my mind when I come on here now - which I do less than I did. I think it would be a massive loss to women in Britain and English speaking women all over, if the site cannot recover and improve.
So what’s happening on this front? Is MN leadership making big changes? Are you hiring in more expertise or increasing budgets? Are Sue and Justine going to give more prominence to these areas? Are you giving your DPO role a boost? After you’ve put out all the fires are we going to have a smoother ride or will there just be some other scapegoat now you can’t blame the “old clunky platform”?