The single post that we published could have probably been broken down into quite a few, where we spent more time talking about the individual reasons why people don't find the site to be welcoming, followed by what we could do there.

There was an underlying theme that presents itself with a rather heightened sense of urgency, people are increasingly and appreciably reporting that the site is not welcoming for a variety of reasons, and they're reporting this with their words as well as their actions.

It wasn't a question of whether or not we'd be overwhelming and very likely misunderstood, it was a question of how. I think we knew that no matter how we did it, our post talking about people not being sensitive to other people's feelings was likely to be taken as insensitive to other people's feelings by some. If we had a few more months to work on it, I'm sure we could have done a better job, but I'm pretty proud of what we published.

We were told about, and found:

• Blatant racism
• Blatant sexism, along with strong evidence of unconscious bias clouding dialog (assuming everyone not obviously female as being male being a good example)
• Blatant ageism
• People ... enforcing these crazy unwritten rules that good grief can't I even ask a question stupid moderators editing my .. or, essentially, feedback we've been getting since the dawn of Stack Overflow because the system is so very distant from anything else, and since the community makes many of the rules, it feels like walking on egg shells because who knows what someone might do wrong next time!
• .. more reasons that Tim wishes he hadn't stopped drinking

###That's all a big problem in that we're actively unwelcoming in many cases.

We tried to stress a big part of that, and maybe it should have been a lot bolder and probably clearer:

*... it's not really your fault. It's our fault, as a company.*

I'll just rattle off some stuff that has been frustrating the heck out of me for a few years now, anyone agree with any of this?

• It's hard to find any kind of consensus on meta, and governance fails to carry over anywhere meaningful in the UI. This erroneously sets people's expectations.

• The /ask page has not been touched since we added that tiny bit of help in the sidebar over half a decade ago. (Jeff, you're preaching to the choir.)

• Review feels like a bolted-on game of mousetrap. If one more person feels bad due to a failed audit I swear I'm gonna OH LOOK IT JUST HAPPENED AGAIN!

• The mod dashboard is probably the one thing on this planet that needs less jQuery. I'm serious. No offense, Sam.

... I could probably complain my way through a case of beer shared with anyone that's been using the site since 2008 about this stuff. And if you're wondering why I'm rambling about that, it's to say that we know and aren't minimizing this stuff, there just wasn't enough room to show it at real scale in a single post.

###I'm sorry that we didn't do enough to keep you from internalizing this.

I was worried about that, we worked hard on revising the post, and ultimately I think we got it in the best possible shape we could deliver in the time that we felt we needed to get it out.

But what you just did here is tell us something we did made you feel bad, we listened, and we'll get better at not doing that. That's what all of this is about.

###Default-public time!

A great thing about working here is, if it's not about strategy or financial stuff, I can talk about it without having to worry! We call that default-public.

When Jay approached me with the post I flat out told him that I can't ask a single thing more from anyone else working earnestly in good faith to keep the site running clean until we are positively willing to invest in the tools that make the absolute best use of the time they're willing to give.

He (and Joel) agreed on that, and we'll be putting our money where my mouth is very soon. It wasn't forgotten. I'm saying this only because I want to directly contradict the narrative that we didn't care, or didn't pay attention - we were just struggling to get things done while hoping for the best, like many do.

When we hit problems, like this one, we adjust - like anyone else, and will be putting more focus on what gets touched a whole lot by a small subset of users (review, mod tools) and get serious about overhauling pages we know to be problematic like /ask.

###Seriously, I am sorry.

Not sorry like "oh hey I just stepped on your foot" but sorry as in I really regret that something I helped work on left you feeling like an apology was in order. So, you're getting one, for us making what you do feel insignificant and taken for granted. It's not.

That was just a really, really, really hard piece to write. I'm glad it's done, I'm glad it's out there and while I have not been this busy in years, I'm glad to see us coming back on track and having these discussions out loud in sunlight. I firmly believe in the course we're taking and I'll be out there helping people understand it and hopefully embrace some needed change.

Thanks for calling it like you saw it.

There will be more about all of this, and ways folks can actively ensure that they come off as nice as they intend to that don't cost anything, but we know the tools being under par and our slowness in doing anything about setting new user's expectations based on what they're about to submit have been a major cause here.

So if you didn't feel like we owned that part enough, I'm here to own it.