Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants We are talking about how we handle difficult users. Links If you’ve never played Lemmings, fix that. Wikipedia’s Assume good faith policy. Don’t flip the bozo bit. (Not defined in The Jargon Lexicon as I assumed.) Our Code of Conduct. For many years, we relied on a general be nice policy. I’m not sure if this is the article Abby was talking about, but The Paradigmatic Nature of Biblical Law is something our team has discussed over the years. A key quote: Ancient laws did not work this way. They were paradigmatic, giving models of behaviors and models of prohibitions/punishments relative to those behaviors, but they made no attempt to be exhaustive. Ancient laws gave guiding principles, or samples, rather than complete descriptions of all things regulated. Ancient people were expected to be able to extrapolate from what the sampling of laws did say to the general behavior the laws in their totality pointed toward. Ancient judges were expected to extrapolate from the wording provided in the laws that did exist to all other circumstances and not to be foiled in their jurisprudence by any such concepts as “technicalities” or “loopholes.” If that’s not the right link, it’s still fascinating. ;-) Many of the CMs took the TKI conflict style assessment a few years ago. Most of us preferred conflict avoidance, which probably explains a lot. Meta Juan remembered that Abby mentioned that difficult users are not always “negative”, but couldn’t remember the other word she used. Listening back, I can’t tell what word he forgot. Maybe “problem”? Since this podcast was recorded back in April, if you are having a conflict with one of us right now, we weren’t talking about you. After many years of interacting with members of the community, we’ve accumulated plenty of experience with just about every sort of person you can imagine. So any similarities to specific individuals are entirely coincidental. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants We are talking about aspects of leadership in our communities. Links Abby’s definition of a leader reminds me of the Potter Stewart test. Joel’s book is Smart and Gets Things Done. We set up a Team just for out moderators to share their wisdom and knowledge. Our elections uses a single transferable vote system for taking your preferences into account. Meta “This is the no touching podcast.” This is certainly correct since none of us are even in the same state. If anyone ever asks you to explain a double entendre, change the subject immediately as every word out of your mouth will instantly take on an unintended sexual meaning. My title really did change to Community Product Manager. It’s mostly ceremonial. “Unfortunately, as you probably already know, people” could be a leadership motto. It’s tempting to blame folks for problems we have as Community Managers. On the other hand, we benefit from leaders empowering others to accomplish our goals. I am forever in their debt. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange Community Management Team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants Back in May, I interviewed Nicolas while we both were in NYC for a meetup. Nicolas has been instrumental in helping out international Stack Overflow sites to be among the most active on the network. Links Stack Overflow на русском Stack Overflow en español Stack Overflow em Português スタック・オーバーフロー Русский язык Meta Jon Ericson interviewed several community managers at our most recent meet-up. There were three questions: What, if anything, gets you excited about your job? How did your life experience before Stack Exchange prepare you for this role? What is your favorite site? We’re running these interviews for the summer (or winter, if you are in the southern hemisphere) and we’ll be back to the regular format next episode. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange Community Management Team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants Back in May, Jon interviewed me (Catija) while we were both in NYC for a meetup. Serendipitously, I get to share it with y’all on the one-year anniversary of my first day working for Stack Exchange. The interview was a lot of fun to do and I hope you enjoy listening to it! Links Arts & Crafts Interpersonal Skills Transcript Some users have generously volunteered to transcribe episodes on the podcast wiki. Meta Jon Ericson interviewed several community managers at our most recent meet-up. There were three questions: What, if anything, gets you excited about your job? How did your life experience before Stack Exchange prepare you for this role? What is your favorite site? We’re running these interviews for the summer (or winter, if you are in the southern hemisphere) and we’ll be back to the regular format around August. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants An interview with Cesar M, our newest community manager. Links CMX Training Writing Role-playing Games Board & Card Games Transcript Some users have generously volunteered to transcribe episodes on the podcast wiki. Meta Jon Ericson interviewed several community managers at our most recent meet-up. There were three questions: What, if anything, gets you excited about your job? How did your life experience before Stack Exchange prepare you for this role? What is your favorite site? We’re running these interviews for the summer (or winter, if you are in the southern hemisphere) and we’ll be back to the regular format around August. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants We are talking about the attributes of a healthy community. Links Our Gardening & Landscaping, Puzzling and Judaism sites. Either “neesh” or “nitch” work for pronouncing niche. "Big Dreams, Small Spaces is on my list of shows to watch . . . eventually. I believe Abby refers to season 2, episode 2 “Hitchin/Worthing”. We exercise our communal sense of humor at least once a year. My proof God programs in Perl. Transcript Some users have generously volunteered to transcribe episodes on the podcast wiki. I’m extremely grateful for users who helped fill in some of the previous episode’s transcript: bvanrijn ocæon MilkyWay90 Meta This episode makes me think we need a real audio editor to get rid of plosives. It’s not an easy signal processing problem. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants We’re talking about whether or not there is such a thing as a bad question and how we might detect one if it exists. Links How is question quality measured in A/B tests? Ask a question template v1 experiment results “Ask a question” wizard prototype Transcript Some users have generously volunteered to transcribe episodes on the podcast wiki. I’m extremely grateful for users who helped fill in most of the previous episode’s transcript: grooveplex ocæon MilkyWay90 Meta It was my turn to host and I think I’m not overly biased when I say that Abby and Juan do a much better job in that role. For one thing, I was pretty anxious that we’d end the recording before we ran out of things to talk about. Not entirely unrelated: I say the word “template” in a weird way. It didn’t make the recording, but Abby started talking to her cat right after we said goodbye. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

Welcome to the second episode of Unicorn Meta Zoo, a brand new podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants We’re talking about moderation and how it’s different on Stack Exchange than on forums. Links Our OG Theory of Moderation Our refined Theory of Moderation My explanation of moderator elections Transcript I used YouTube to produce a raw, automated transcript of this episode. There is a wiki for transcripts, if you’d like to produce a cleaner, more coherent transcript. I’m extremely grateful for users who helped fill in most of the first episode’s transcript: grooveplex Jeremy Banks MilkyWay90 Meta Moments before the start of this episode, Abby asked if the name of the podcast is “Meta Petting Zoo”. In the heat of the moment I couldn’t remember and just said yes. In reality, the name we decided on was “Unicorn Meta Zoo” based on actual unicorn petting zoos. Abby just changed to the wrong word to “meta”. At around the 18:40 mark in the recording you can hear Abby’s tea slide off her tilted desk and fall on the floor. No mugs were harmed in the making of this podcast. The same can’t be said of the tea. For some reason, Juan’s channel got really noisy in the beginning of the episode with my podcast editing script. I fixed the problem by making the pre-channel loudness normalization optional. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a brand new podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants We’re talking about why we’re doing a podcast. (I believe this is the traditional podcast pilot topic.) It’s not intended to replace Stack Overflow podcast, which is on hiatus. For one thing, our audience is much smaller. If you are reading this post, you are one of the super-engaged users we want to talk with. For another, I pitched this as a quick-to-produce podcast. It takes less than an hour to record and edit. Links I mentioned the Meta Stack Overflow announcement, which includes a link to my UserVoice request (archived in the WayBack Machine). Abby’s go-to site is Worldbuilding. Jon has a soft spot for Biblical Hermeneutics. Juan is a fan of Stack Overflow en español. This episode was sponsored by the Ask Question Wizard. Meta For recording we use Zencastr which has a free plan that allows up to three participants. Each participant channel is exported to an MP3 file when the recording session ends. In order to merge the three channels into one channel and add the intro/outro, I wrote a script, edit_podcast.rb, to create FFmpeg commands. Juan M wrote and performed our music. Cover art was generated by balpha’s excellent Unicornify script. For the moment, we’re serving the files from a GitHub repository and you can grab an RSS feed there. It’s not terribly useful just yet, but when we have more episodes, they’ll be delivered automatically to your podcatcher of choice. We mentioned that we might invite Jaydles to be a guest. We’d recorded the episode well before Jay left the company. I’d still be interested in having him on the show to find out what he’s up to and get his thoughts after being away from the company for a while. What do you think? Take a listen and respond in the answers below.