The goal of creating the library has long been accomplished. I can't point to a particular moment in time where we passed it, but Robert Harvey's answer captures the artifact pretty well.
What we need to do now is maintain it and set our expectations for what that looks like accordingly. In the thousands of questions that come in every day, one or two might be the nice hardbound volumes that we put on the highly-curated shelf.
In 2008, every question had the potential to be the wonderful, hard-bound book, bound for the shelves in the largest collection of programming knowledge. In 2010 this still mostly held true, but you see where I'm going here. We're still asking people to bring real-world problems that they face every day to the site, and folks are doing that, but we're finding less gold as we pan through sediment. We're a library that was created through the process of people simply asking questions.
Sediment is something we must embrace or at least tolerate, because that's where the gold comes from. Are we still optimizing for the best case? Yes. But to reach that, we need new generations to keep bringing the problems they encounter as they do their work to us. Since many questions exist and have excellent answers, there isn't a huge value proposition for many folks to create and maintain an account here. That means people drift off faster than they replenish.
But, what does optimizing mean, in 2019?
It means finally getting a handle on things that have been kicked down the road for probably too long. How we empower people to deprecate information, for instance. Have you ever seen an old accepted answer with hundreds of votes that was great in 2008 but actively harmful today? Yeah, we have to deal with building tools and having discussions around specifically how we'll deal with that.
We have to identify and mark differently true canonical questions. We need to put more sanity around the question merge process and let trusted users with certain tag badges use those tools. We need to do almost everything related to duplicates better than we currently do.
We need to re-work the way we show things so people don't feel so overwhelmed that they're terrified of failing a few times in order to learn.
Objectively and critically, I can say that the experience for experienced users AND new users are both suboptimal. However, the experience for new users is disproportionately suboptimal. To go forward, we need to bring them into roughly the same space, and work on them together.
But here's the thing: I don't want to work a helpdesk, or "mentor" anyone, and nor, I think, do most of the best answerers here.
And we need to come up with other things for folks to do. Even if everything was otherwise perfect, people get tired of answering questions eventually. New things feel exciting and terrifying because we don't want to do too much, but what do we have for folks finding their interests wandering? I'm really glad we're re-investing in the network, but we need more.
However, it's up to you to decide if the relationship is healthy. We're not a perfect actor on this stage, we've made plenty of mistakes. But, we need to think more about where we go from here.
In short, we have to create a reality in which we remain relevant to generations to come, with ample opportunity for those that have come this far with us to stay on and keep enjoying the ride. We're working on that, these are major themes that Q&A product teams are thinking about and know we need to solve to make meaningful leaps forward.
So, what about meta?
We're not going to showcase a place that is supposed to be a means for primary engagement if it's full of hostility, unwritten rules, cynicism, personal attacks and unfocused angst and rage. That's why the links were removed, because when we were rewarding the most controversial, pushing folks away was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And, we simply can't put employees in a position where they endure 100% of the accountability with only a little influence on decisions that get made. And before folks chime in with "Well why don't you just change your process?" I'm going to tell you, it's not that easy. It takes 5 people to get a line of text changed, that's the reality of working on large product teams. You lose some agility in exchange for an end-product that isn't bolted and taped together.
The level of condescension, ridicule, hostility and outright rudeness breached a limit that we consider to be tolerable, and Meta will continue to be de-emphasized until it reaches a point where that's no longer the case.
There's no person to point to, no single discussion that's an example, it's the sum of it over time. Blame isn't really helpful here because it detracts from going forward. A hundred people taking a tone that's a tad harsh, when directed at one or a few people, is crushing. It was happening to employees, new users, moderators, even seasoned contributors that haven't been on meta for a few years emailed me to ask what had gone so terribly wrong. No one person is responsible for deterioration over time that went unnoticed until it was a major problem. If anything, we waited too long to step in. Nobody is blaming you or anyone else. But we have to deal with what we have in the present.
I don't know if this is the answer that you want. I firmly believe we're capable of creating a future in which anyone that still has spare cycles to give can center themselves as a contributor doing something to advance a common good.
But, above all, if you take nothing else away from what I've written - things have changed, and we have to remain relevant. I can't lay down a more detailed vision for what that means because I'm not our new CEO. But we know what we need to do in order to support what that ends up being, and that's what we're doing right now.
That's... the best answer I can give.