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Update November 4th, 2025

As mentioned in the initial announcement, we held a chat with the product manager leading this experiment to answer questions. The chat room transcript can be found here.

Update October 27th, 2025

We have officially launched this experiment to ten percent of all users on Stack Overflow who have not opted out of experiments. Couple of things to note:

  • We have moved the staff chat mentioned at the bottom of the post to November 4th at 9 AM EST. Again, please check back before that date and time for the link. We wanted to give the community at least a week from when the experiment launched before having the chat.
  • For any examples of opinion-based questions that you might come across and believe to be good or bad candidates for the site, please leave those examples and your rationale on this separate meta post.
  • All other feedback, bug reports, and long-form suggestions on the feature's design and concept can be left on this post. Please use the bug or feature-request tag in your answer for these specific purposes.

Today, we are following up on our announcement regarding the topic of including opinion-based questions on Stack Overflow. The Community Enablement team would like to share some details about our design perspective, what we hope to measure, and the specifics of our upcoming experiment, which will soon be launching on Stack Overflow to a small number of users in the coming days.

This project aims to create a designated space for technical discussions, best practices, tooling recommendations, and architectural questions or advice that are vital to a developer’s workflow but often are closed under our existing, highly structured Q&A model. Of all the questions asked since the beginning of the year, 24% got closed as opinion-based or off-topic. These questions aren't necessarily bad; they simply don't fit the definitive-answer format of traditional Stack Overflow. By allowing these questions, we aim to unlock valuable, previously unresolved questions.

Designing for the New User: A Softer Entry Point

The goal of this new approach is to add more quality information to the knowledge base. While also providing a softer on ramp for community members who can’t confidently engage in traditional Q&A.

We recognize that the strict, objective standards of traditional Stack Overflow can feel like a high barrier, and those barriers are there for good reason. New users often struggle to phrase their questions in a way that meets the minimal reproducible example or troubleshooting standards, especially when they are still in the planning or decision-making phase of their current project.

Visibility and Opt-Out

The new question types will be integrated into the question feeds, clearly marked with their category (Advice, Tooling, Best Practices). We are bringing this subjective content directly into the Stack Overflow experience because better visibility is one of the key lessons we took from Discussions.

Users who prefer the traditional experience will be able to opt out of this experiment to avoid seeing the new content entirely. If this experiment is successful, the next set of features to be prioritized will focus on user content filtering, allowing users to filter out specific content or selectively choose which types they want to see.

Screenshot of a logged-in user's personalized Stack Overflow home page, showing a welcome message, reputation, badge progress, watched tags, and a feed of questions including opinion based questions signaled by the following labels:Advice, Tooling, Best Practices.

Screenshot of the Stack Overflow operating-system tag page, showing a list of recent questions related to operating system development with some holding the new labels to signal they are opinion based.

Asking Experience

As you can see in the mockups, the key change is a simple ”type” selector on the Ask Question form. We ran some research with users to confirm if they could successfully and consistently label these questions based on the question labels we offered them. Based on our research questions, questions were labeled correctly about 90% of the time. We landed on these question types based on suggestions made during Discussion experiments.

  • Default: The experience remains Troubleshooting / Debugging for classic Q&A.
  • New Options: Users can now select categories such as Tooling Recommendations, Best Practices, or General Advice/Other.

When a user selects one of these new types, the guidelines on the right adjust to provide more specific guidance for consideration while writing their question. Such as:

  • Questions that invite more in-depth explanations
  • Questions that invite community members to share relevant personal insights, direction, or solutions that have worked for them in a similar situation.

Differences from traditional questions:

  • The UI for these new question types is intentionally simpler (see mockups below)
  • We're replacing the voting model with thumbs up and down
  • We're removing reputation
  • We're removing the ability to accept one of the answers

This shift is designed to encourage nuanced, conversational answers by signaling that there is no single “correct” response, allowing multiple solutions to coexist and be valued.

Screenshot of the Stack Overflow "Ask a question" form, with the question Type set to "Best practices" and a Guidelines sidebar explaining that this question type is for open-ended discussions about topics like best practices, recommended tools, or architecture.

Opinion-based question UI

Once posted, these questions look a little different. We have replaced the vote buttons with thumbs-up/down buttons at the bottom, and moved the user avatar and tags to the top of the question header. This is because the research group responded most positively to thumbs for the “score” behavior, instead of the other options that were presented to them. For this experiment, we will only ever show the thumbs-up count, both on the question post and in the question feed. Eventually, we intend to use this for filtering purposes in the feed, should the feature continue to demonstrate success. Given the opinion-based nature of these question types, we determined that showing a thumbs-down score may not be beneficial to the user experience and how welcome they can feel as a result. After initial testing, we may further improve the thumbs down action by incorporating a feedback mechanism that nudges the asker to improve their question based on feedback collected from users who give the question a thumbs-down.

We have also replaced the answers header with a “replies” header, and functionally made the replies look more like comments; ideally these will eventually support threading, and continue the design style of using thumbs up/down. Again, we will only show the up counter, and in the future, we will consider adding logic here to highlight better replies.

Options for flagging will be Spam, Abusive, and Other. For spam and abuse, four votes will result in the deletion of the content, while content that doesn’t meet that threshold will be directed to the moderator queue. For items flagged as “other,” the Community Enablement team will be monitoring them, as well as taking moderation actions on them when necessary, to gain a deeper understanding of the tools needed to support this content and to understand the moderator experience. Current moderators are welcome to participate if they like, but there is no expectation that they have to help. The Community Enablement team will stay in touch with Stack Overflow moderators through the process to take advantage of their expertise and collect whatever moderator specific feedback that comes up during this experiment.

Screenshot of an example Stack Overflow opinion based question titled "Good patterns or strategies for long term maintenance of mid/big sized apps," which is an open-ended question tagged as Best practices and includes a few example replies. The user avatar, and tags have been moved to the top of the quesiton instead of the bottom

Question Closure Options

While we won’t rule out some form of question closure in the future, we want to focus on improving the current process here to something more constructive that encourages the asker to refine their question in a different way, rather than the current closing process. Once we have determined whether this initial experiment has been successful, we will reassess the closing of these types of questions and how that is communicated to the asker.

Moderation, Community Guidance, and Staff Proactivity

Opening the door to subjective questions requires a commitment to quality control. We will not be leaving this content unmoderated. It took Stack Overflow a few years to establish its current standard of content quality; we don’t expect to reach that today, and should this team find success with these experiments, we plan to refine those standards over time. This team only asks that you keep an open mind while we work through the premise that opinion-based questions can be high-quality.

In that vein, we will be approaching this in a few different ways:

  • Proactive Staff Response: Rather than simply closing vague or low-quality questions, staff will proactively engage with users. Asking for more details and attempting to engage with those users to encourage them to improve their post and bring it to a better state.

  • Active Feedback: We will open a chat room and maintain a designated MSO post, where community members can provide examples of opinion-based questions they believe are of suitable or poor quality and explain their reasoning. The chat room will be monitored by members of the Community Enablement team and we will have scheduled time for staff to be present there to answer questions. More details at the bottom of the post in the, “We want your feedback” section.

  • Experiment Exposure: We will be releasing the experiment to ten percent of users to start. That ten percent will be able to use the new ask form, and everyone else who opted into the experiment will be able to view, reply, etc. The Community Enablement team will be monitoring questions that are asked, spam and moderation flags. We will continue to increase the exposure of the experiment for the next few weeks as we monitor activity.

The Alpha Test: Measurement and Success

We want to be crystal clear: what we are releasing here is an alpha test to validate the core concept, not a beta or general release. This initial implementation is bare-bones and lacks many features (like comprehensive tooling for comparing different variations of the UI to determine what the best experience is) that we would build out later. We are purely looking at this in terms of the concept's survivability:

  • Plainly, are we seeing opinion-based question closures going down, and a consistent stream of the opinion-based questions being asked?
  • Are we seeing responses? We want to see these new question types getting at least one reply, ideally within seven days.
  • Rate of flagged questions - We know that spam was an issue with Discussions. We’ll be monitoring this rate and prioritizing additional spam mitigation tools should we see related concerns.

Spam Prevention

We know that spam will show up in some form or another, so we have implemented the following to help mitigate that as much as possible:

We Want Your Feedback

As an alpha experiment, we want to be open about the fact that if this experiment continues to progress, it could change a little bit or quite a bit from what you see today. So if you have feedback on anything we have presented or changes on how you would like to see this presented on Stack Overflow, please let us know. We have set up two channels to capture your thoughts:

  • Designated Meta Post for content quality feedback: Please use this different meta post for feedback on opinion-based questions you see that you believe are good or not good candidates for the site. All other feedback, bug reports, and long-form suggestions on the feature's design and concept can be left on this post. Please use the or tag in your answer for these specific purposes.
  • Chat Room: We will be opening a dedicated chat room, once the experiment has been launched, where staff will be there at scheduled intervals to talk through the experiment. The first will be held on October 29th November 4th, 2025 at 9 AM EST. Please check this post to confirm the time, as it might change. Chat room can be found here It will be changed from gallery mode about 30 minutes prior to 9 AM EST.

We will be monitoring this post til November 5th, 2025 for feedback.

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    Calling something "best practices" is problematic in itself, as it surely will lead to "which programming language is best for x" type of questions, without anyone bothering to define "best". And it will quickly become very tiresome to point that out, over and over and over. Probably one of the main reasons why such questions aren't allowed on SO these days. Commented Oct 22 at 15:08
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    "Proactive Staff Response" We were promised that for the n most recent new features too and in practice it meant "some staff will check it out for 5 minutes upon the day of release then forget all about it and then leave it to rot". Notable examples being Discussions and the chat overhaul. Commented Oct 22 at 15:12
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    You don't need to wait to see. Discussions were full of awful "best language" type of questions, we already know that this will happen based on previous experience. Not only from Discussions but also from early days SO. Commented Oct 22 at 15:16
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    Surely the default should be to opt OUT. Let those who really want the pain opt IN. Commented Oct 22 at 15:20
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    @Paulie_D making it opt-out is far more effective at "proving" it's a feature that should exist. Remember the sticky header option that got removed because "almost no-one used it"? If the default is on, we're relying on positive feedback to determine success but have no means for negative feedback, and marketing it to the masses as some "anything goes" kind of feature, it's going to get (ab)used and there's no real reason to call this an experiment because the outcomes are known. Commented Oct 22 at 15:55
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    So the purpose is to divert opinion-based questions & your measure of a successful diversion is it gets a response? What about the quality of the response? Shouldn't you test the reason this experiment is being done, user engagement? I don't mean that to sound hostile. I appreciate that y'all have put some thought into how to get the content some visibility without impacting Q&A. I think English Language Learners could benefit from something similar, because there is a divide in the community over where "opinion-based" starts and some of those closed questions are useful to learners. Commented Oct 22 at 16:36
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    A lot of discussions in the previous "experiment" had meta replies, such as "this is off topic", would similar replies be considered a positive metric in aggregate? Commented Oct 22 at 16:41
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    @Hoid Seems you have a severe communications problem internally if you can't even interview those who participated in Discussions. I mean what's even the point of launching experimental features then.... Commented Oct 22 at 16:51
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    @Hoid The short story is that staff support was promised, a few brave diamond mods volunteered, only the diamond mods did actual moderation - they were essentially thrown under the bus. In the new chat lobbies staff support was also promised but staff didn't do jack, so those are also handled by a few diamond mods from underneath the bus. To launch a new system without even having a clue how it is going to be moderated is to set everything up to fail. Which we also learned from previous experience. Commented Oct 22 at 16:51
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    "We recognize that the strict, objective standards of traditional Stack Overflow can feel like a high barrier, and those barriers are there for good reason" Can't wait for you the company to break down those barriers anyway when this "experiment" is graduated after overwhelming success. Commented Oct 22 at 16:56
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    @Spevacus Umm... the lobbies were launched in May. You were hired late September. Concerns such as Is Stack Exchange pretty much finished with the two Lobbies? were completely ignored. As were the immediate concerns about consistent moderation outside US office hours here: meta.stackexchange.com/a/409038/170024 Apart from the initial 24 hours, what exactly did the staff do in these chat rooms from May to September. "Jack" seems quite fitting afaik but please prove me wrong. Commented Oct 22 at 17:28
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    Euh...!? Misconception...: "Default: The experience remains Troubleshooting / Debugging for classic Q&A." This is not correct, 'Troubleshooting' and 'Debugging' are more or less the same thing, "classic Q&A" means How to? + Why? Questions. (And 'Debugging' = Why? Questions...) // Opinion-based Questions would then be Which? Questions... Commented Oct 22 at 19:19
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    I also wonder what the purpose is of having a button (thumb-down) that has no effect. How will people react once they find out? Will they feel cheated on or just shrug it off? I know I wouldn't really like it and I think that only buttons with functions should be present and everything else is just bad UX. Or am I completely wrong? If you decide you need the button later on, you can still add it or not? Commented Oct 22 at 19:45
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    Can we please curtail this experiment NOW? It is actively doing harm to the network by confusing many people, even experienced longtime users, into directing questions that should go to traditional Q&A into the opinion-based streams instead, with no mechanism, as far as I know, to correct that after the fact. Commented Nov 7 at 13:32
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    I mean... these "questions" also have a different look to others, in the question list, that will naturally cause more clicks. They also tend to survive the "this is obviously a duplicate" step and thus receive duplicate help that otherwise wouldn't have been provided, i don't see how any of this can be reasonably compared. Commented Nov 11 at 22:06

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You claim that you've learned your lessons from Discussions (or maybe you just want the visibility), yet proceeded to remove/ignore (potato/potahto) downvotes (or thumbs-down) from these posts.

This has been a point of disagreement between community and the company forever and ever. And your only solution (to a problem that its existence is up for debate to begin with) is to remove downvotes; you've tried it multiple times, why not consider one of the other (maybe not perfect, but different) options laid out in the posts that have discussed downvotes (both here and on MSE)?!

You seem to prioritize reducing visible friction (thinking that encourages new users and product adoption) over refining the system that the established community values for quality control (which ends up being one of the reasons those products/experiments fail).

Updates to address Hoid's response in the comments:

First, let me say that I appreciate the discussion. I subscribe to this Cody's quote (fact) that Progress cannot happen without confrontation.

We are not saying the downvote has no value, just that we want to take this experiment as an opportunity to rethink that approach. Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece of content, but its less so for the author of a piece of content because it doesn't signal the actual problem and what might be causing it.

I understand that this is an important topic for you and you'd want to use every opportunity to revisit it. But I don't see any rethinking here. Just doing the same thing. I have previously suggested capping the score at -1 or 0 for the original author. I am not saying that's the best method, just something that I remember cause I suggested it (there are probably better suggestions across the network).

I don't see any value in testing something (with minor adjustments or not) that has been tried multiple times and has been proven to not work again and again.

When you do not show the score, you are ignoring that "Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece".

However, at this stage of experimentation, we are simply testing overall interest in this content type and potential spam exposure, before investing in answering that particular question.

I have already talked about these kinds of experiments/implementations and also pointed out what could've been done to save Discussions. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as I don't want to see any efforts go to waste, but I think this approach of we'll do barely the bare-minimum and we'd circle back later is just akin to setting yourself up for failure.

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    As a nuanced argument: voting in itself as means of doing moderation is problematic. A much better system is to have a well-defined scope of what questions should look like and then quickly just remove everything not fitting that bill, with as little drama as possible. Instead of the SO system of removing problematic posts as slowly as possible, down votes, close votes, comments, reviews, really rub it in how much we seem to like their post. -> Commented Oct 22 at 15:26
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    Nobody likes criticism in public no matter how well-founded so maybe don't build a system based on public humiliation as means of moderation. Tech nerds tend to not get this, or empathy in general, and SO was built by tech nerds. Commented Oct 22 at 15:26
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    The two big takeaways from Discussions were as follows: exposure and lack of spam support. So, for this initial experiment, we prioritized making sure we were set up to resolve those. You are right about the disagreement and its history, the team is aware of that. We are not saying the downvote has no value, just that we want to take this experiment as an opportunity to rethink that approach. Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece of content, but its less so for the author of a piece of content because it doesn't signal the actual problem and what might be causing it. Commented Oct 22 at 16:05
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    So we opted to keep it light in this case and then experiment with different feedback loops to the author to help improve their content. Of course, that then leaves us with a question of how to signal bad opinion-based content(OBC) to the rest of the audience. I personally think that just might mean some form of hiding till edits are improved or something like that. However, at this stage of experimentation, we are simply testing overall interest in this content type and potential spam exposure, before investing in answering that particular question. Commented Oct 22 at 16:08
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    I agree with Cody on that point, too, but I would argue that it goes both ways. If someone is asking for an opinion on a question they need help with, what kind of value does a downvote actually offer them? In most cases, it does nothing. I know that this particular topic has been circled a few times. I have two thoughts that I hold. One being that, for better or worse, we need more askers/answerers than we have today. The 2nd, given the first, we might need to start thinking about how to give more specific signals to people than a downvote offers. Commented Oct 22 at 21:50
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    I read your Discussions post, as I have worked with the enablement team to talk through feedback. That is why the first two points have been addressed, and for the third, I believe we can find a middle ground that works specifically for opinion-based questions that signal quality or something of interest to the community, while also helping an asker or an answer understand why it might not land with some people. Which I think is a core piece of allowing this type of content, not every single question or answer will be helpful to every person, and that's okay. Commented Oct 22 at 21:56
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    @Hoid "The two big takeaways from Discussions were as follows: exposure and lack of spam support." ????? Discussions learnings and potential next steps: "there was never a clear definition of what Discussions is for" "A key learning was that, while there is something to be explored in that realm ["Discussions as a way to start those conversations adjacent to (or spinning off from) a question"], sending users from one somewhat ambiguous space (comments) to another (Discussions) was not offering many users the clarity they needed." Commented Oct 22 at 21:57
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    @starball I am assuming you are referring to replies on an opinion question. If so, not for this initial experiment, but it's on the radar to add, we have reply threading as a fast follow to address first, so determining the best way to sort a set of replies or by score is something we have to keep in mind for that. There are questions if you should sort by the first reply's score or by the sum of all replies in that thread. Commented Oct 22 at 22:00
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    @philipxy I think you're trying to make a point about my two key takeaways. The first part of that quote explains that the lack of a clear definition was by design. We have designed opinion-based questions to be much clearer; that's why the type drop-down is there on the ask form that I shared. So users can signal what kind of question they want to ask. Thus, the two most considerable takeaways we had to resolve were exposure and spam prevention. Could you please clarify if you were trying to make a different point? Commented Oct 22 at 22:11
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    @Hoid I wasn't quoting Cody to argue for the importance of downvotes, just that I am criticizing your approach in the hopes that we can improve it through direct conversation. But I see what you did there :) When Bert first mentioned removing downvotes, I gave my two-cents on SOfT instance and posted a version of it here. Again, I think capping the (down)votes at 0 or -1 for OP is far better solution than capping it for everyone (what you're doing). Why don't you test that for a change? Commented Oct 23 at 1:29
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    The problem here is that we don't see a composite score. That's what I call illusion of choice. You give us the downvote (thumbs down) button, but it doesn't do anything. Similar to what was done with Discussions, taking away downvotes, or not counting them, does not "encourage users to express concerns about a post via flagging, and to provide constructive feedback". I would (and had) argue that it's forcing us to either flag/leave comments or simply leave the problematic posts alone. Commented Oct 23 at 1:40
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    What they mostly "learn" is additional unsuccessful avenues to get away with undesirable and inappropriate changes. "The community called us out when we tried it this way? Ok, next time we'll try sneaking it by them this other way". Commented Nov 7 at 12:41
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    "good ideas" must be tried repeatedly. them having failed every single time is no excuse to stop trying, but it is justification for trying again. they're "good ideas", so that alone makes them better than all other kinds, and requires that they be attempted over and over again. Commented Nov 13 at 17:46
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    @ChristophRackwitz Failure of the experiment merely proves that we haven't yet reached the optimum point of failure. If we just tweak the language around the failure and call it "pre-success data", the idea will eventually work. We can't let mere outcomes distract us from the beauty of the process. The problem isn't that the idea failed; the problem is that the execution, and by extension the users, failed to live up to the idea's potential. A truly "good idea" is like an heirloom tomato; it requires constant, delicate re-planting until the soil (the platform) is finally worthy of its yield. Commented Nov 13 at 17:56
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    the road to success is littered with abandoned 10k+ accounts. Commented Nov 13 at 17:59
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This experiment as you have envisioned it, will fail. I hope that you can take feedback given here and make improvements before you launch this.

Good

  • Spam measures
  • Wizard asking users to choose the type of questions
  • No accepted answer
  • No reputation
    • In long term there might be some value in giving reputation for good answers on such posts, but that is not relevant at this moment.

Bad

  • No community based moderation for questions and answers
  • Discussion style format
    • This format emphasizes the question, and answers look more like comments. We don't want casual chit-chat, we want full fledged quality answers even for such content. There is absolutely no reason why this new content wouldn't follow the UI style of existing Q/A (without the ability to accept answers).

Missing

  • Warning that AI generated or assisted (formatting, rephrasing, or similar) content is not allowed on Stack Overflow.

  • Rate limiting

    • Some users will post high amounts of low quality junk and there needs to be a system which will prevent that. Also users who are question banned should be prevented to post new types of questions, otherwise this will be used as a venue for asking questions by those users.

  • Moving posts between regular Q/A and new content type

    • This is critical for newly posted content as there will definitely be newly posted questions which are categorized in a wrong way and community and moderators need a way to correct that. Keeping same format between regular Q/A and new content type would make that possible. In long term this would also allow us to move old, currently not acceptable, but otherwise good content and give it a permanent home under a new content type.

  • Review queue

    • First posts by users (questions and answers) need to go through review queue

  • Sorting by votes

    • Good answers need to be on the top. We need the same sorting options like we have for regular Q/A pairs.

  • Community driven editing

If there is a room for such content on the site(s), and I believe that there is some room for additional content, then such content needs to be of high quality. We don't need a place where anything goes, and this requires community moderation and ability to prevent users who have proven that they are not capable of providing good content to post as they please.

We have content rating system for reason. Hiding downvotes (thumb-downs) is not going to accomplish anything. If someone posts something that is not good they need to know that. Yes, criticism hurts, but that is the only way to have and get something of value.

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    Rather than implementing down-votes, bad posts should just get removed. Optionally to some sort of backstage area where those interested in attempting to fix the post can do so. But the key is to remove bad posts from view and the person who posted it can get the feedback about why it was removed in private, rather than broadcasting how bad their post is to the whole Internet, which is one of the core design flaws of SO. Commented Oct 23 at 12:04
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    @Lundin That idea works, but based on what metric should removing be implemented? Also reducing visibility, reduces useful feedback because only higher rep users would be able to give some. I was giving useful feedback long before I had sufficient reputation to perform other kinds of moderation. Commented Oct 23 at 12:27
  • Ideally there would be some sort of scope and category system or otherwise it will be impossible to moderate it in the first place. Like for example making a rule that questions asking about "best practices" must define "best". Commented Oct 23 at 13:05
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    @Lundin Yes, but I am thinking more about the process of deciding that post needs improvement or it is fine. Right now we have queues and we have downvotes and we have close votes. Also downvotes from lower reputation users can leave signal to high rep users who can close vote that something needs attention. If we remove downvotes, we lose a lot. So the question is based on what would you remove LQ post to the "background" if there are no downvotes and there is no closure process. Or you think there can be closure process, but without downvotes? Commented Oct 23 at 13:38
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    Let users with a certain rep cast delete votes. And maybe "looks fine" votes. Votes aren't visible. If deleted then optionally the post can be taken "back stage" somewhere for feedback and fixing. The important part is that it is removed from the site as quick as possible, with as little drama and public shaming as possible. Give this voting privilege the same level of trust as close votes, so 3k rep. A similar system would work much better than the current close vote fiasco system on the main Q&A too. Commented Oct 23 at 14:26
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    This idea is coming from some old Codidact brainstorming btw, how to make something much better than SO. Didn't quite get implemented. The full proposal can be found at Codidact: Giving question feedback in private - a moderating system to reduce conflicts Commented Oct 23 at 14:29
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    @Lundin thanks. That sounds interesting. It is kind of reverse Staging Ground, where everything is posted in public first, but then moved if needs improvement. I just wonder how much friction would this cause here considering that single person would be able to move posts. I mean ideally, such system should work, but I am always thinking about possible abuse and borderline cases. Commented Oct 23 at 14:59
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    A couple of things I wanted to clarify. Editing is still here; any user with editing privileges can edit a question or reply. You mention review queues above that point, so it's not clear to me if your community editing comment is referring to the suggested edits queue or just editing in general. Commented Oct 23 at 20:44
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    On review queues, we actually can expose them to the first question/answers queue pretty easily, granted we have not checked if we break any of the UI there with this, but opinion questions are 98% regular Q&A code, so it's not hard to just turn that on. Though I am not sure we have actually written the code for turning it off just yet. Commented Oct 23 at 20:44
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    All existing rate limits for regular Q&A are also in effect for this. We did tweak a few of them on opinion-based questions, specifically, like you can post more than once every 30 minutes. I don't have the details handy, but I think we dropped it down to like 2 minutes. I will find out and clarify. There are a few others we identified that needed tweaking for opinion questions, but none to my knowledge were turned off. Commented Oct 23 at 20:55
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    On your point about being able to move questions back and forth, yes, I agree. That being said, we did look at moving questions between the two, and it's a bit more complex than we had assumed, given what we do with the original. But we wanted to validate our base assumption, that enough people wanted to ask and reply to these question types, before building that feature. We absolutely want to visit old, closed opinion-based questions and move them as well, but want to be delicate about doing so as it's an opportunity to reactivate users who have abandoned the platform in the past. Commented Oct 23 at 20:59
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    I also want to challenge your assumption that a discussion-style format is bad. If I were only viewing this through the lens of opinion-based questions being identical to objective Q&A, then yes, I would agree. But based on my reading of old conversations about opinion-based stuff, that is what we tried. So I think we need to divorce ourselves from that a bit and instead consider how these can coexist and eventually form meaningful connections. I think leaning a little away from the typical Q&A structure actually allows us to be more creative in creating space for high-quality opinion content. Commented Oct 23 at 21:10
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    @Hoid Correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK Discussions could not be easily edited by other users meta.stackoverflow.com/q/431222 Commented Oct 24 at 6:17
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    The problem you have with moving questions back and forth is because you opted for completely new format. If you would follow existing Q/A format and only add a marker which will define type of question, then you can easily move content back and forth without having to do anything to the original, because original would be merely categorized in different way. This would allow you to dig up and preserve old questions which were closed and many even deleted because they didn't fit into Q/A at that time. Even if you never allow that, you are tying your hands by choosing a different format. Commented Oct 24 at 6:26
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    Problem with opinion based questions and their answers within Q/A was huge number of low quality "me too" answers (and I don' think you want that in new format either), and the fact that all those could earn reputation which could then alter the balance between reputation and privileges on the site. Just like you significantly altered that balance by raising rep for questions from 5 to 10 points. Commented Oct 24 at 6:31
63

What makes a good opinion question?

This was obliquely called out in the main question comments, but I think it deserves to be bubbled up. With the removal of closures for content (besides spam/abuse), and the removal of the downvote to indicate "not useful for future audiences", it makes it seem like this is "anything goes".

... Especially since you're forcing moderation activities onto actual humans who have real work to do for a real site, and without the guardrails and community moderation that are built into the main Q&A.

So, preferably before this goes live, it's really important to figure out -- what makes a good opinion question? What makes it on-topic, appropriately focused, and answerable? What makes a good opinion answer? What does an upvote (or a thumbs up, I don't care what you call it) mean? What does a downvote (hidden or otherwise) mean?

Forget about users and friction and what not -- at the end of the day StackOverflow is a Q&A site ... what content do we want to see with these types of questions?

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    Exactly this. Will opinion questions on best soup recipes be allowed? Or questions asking for database administration best practices? Neither of those are on-topic, but how will that be moderated? Commented Oct 22 at 16:28
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    "What makes a good opinion question?" well, I still think Good Subjective, Bad Subjective is relevant even 15 years later. It somehow feels like the company is trying to re-discover this but via an entirely new question type. Commented Oct 22 at 17:18
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    Yes, it does appear to be an anything-goes type of situation. Practically, it's more of an "almost anything goes" situation. We offer some guidance in the sidebar, which serves as our baseline suggestion. That may not be good enough over the long term, but that's okay, that's the point of experimenting. Commented Oct 22 at 21:22
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    What would an interesting opinion-based question that is worth answering look like to you? Is there such a thing? If you went looking for an opinion on something you needed help with? What would you be expecting in the form of an answer? Maybe you brought an issue up with a colleague in the recent past, you could test run here to see what kind of response you got? Commented Oct 22 at 21:22
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    On voting, my favorite projects I have worked on in my time at SO was this one on the reputation system.. Most people don't vote for the same reasons, and what people receive from them think about them are not the same as the intention of the voter. They are a bright signal, but not always a very precise one. We could probably do better, but adjusting that tradition, if we should at all, is very difficult. But maybe this is the right space for it, or maybe not? Commented Oct 22 at 21:27
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    @VLAZ I am pretty sure everyone on the enablment team has read that post, and I think it's the right guide to fine-tune this alongside community feedback. Commented Oct 22 at 21:28
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    @devlincarnate No soup recipes, still a technical site for technical questions on software engineering. It is fall in my hemisphere, so if you have some good recipes that you are itching to share, please ping me in chat somewhere. Commented Oct 22 at 21:29
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    What would an interesting opinion-based question that is worth answering look like to you? Honestly, I don't care what a random shmuck on the internet's opinion is. I care about an expert's opinion. If Linus Torvalds or Uncle Bob showed up and gave their opinion on something in their wheelhouse, that's useful regardless of whether I agree with their opinion or not. Some random user12345 on StackOverflow who watched a Youtube tutorial last week and thinks that makes them an expert? Nope. @Hoid Commented Oct 22 at 22:01
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    programmers / software-engineering [sic] .SE all over again. "Programmers - Stack Exchange is for expert programmers who are interested in subjective discussions on software development."--Atwood "doomed"--Santayana Commented Oct 22 at 22:11
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    One that attracts lots of traffic. I mean come on, can we stop beating around the bush. Stack Overflow needs more traffic. Sacrifices will have to be made. Commented Oct 23 at 9:06
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    @RoddyoftheFrozenPeas, what if you could ask your question and limit answers only to community members who hold a gold badge in one of the tags you used on your question? I am speculating; this has not been discussed at all. But what if? Commented Oct 23 at 14:17
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    @Gimby I mean, I did try to make that clear in the first section, I think, but yeah, we are aiming to capture more traffic/users/content, etc. Commented Oct 23 at 14:21
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    Also there are small low-traffic tags which don't have any gold badge holders, and the actual experts who do participate there have no more than bronze. The gold badge process favors large, broad language tags (eg html, python), users who were around 15 years ago and answered the fundamental questions in those tags, and those users who've figured out how to "profit" in a fastest-gun situation. Commented Oct 24 at 16:15
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    @V2Blast Our regular systems handle that, because the level of self-promotion is limited by the requirement to justify your answer. If we allow opinions, 'its great because in our opinion as the product maker its great' is a valid answer. Commented Oct 26 at 16:06
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    @Hoid that's an option, but if you are going to say blanket no self promotion that needs to be made clear, as that's a stricter rule than stackoverflow currently enforces, where self promotion is allowed so long as it genuinely answers the question. Commented Oct 27 at 23:31
53

Seems like the only options for saying "this post should not be here" are flagging as Spam or Abusive, or "Other". Downvotes don't really exist either (you can "Thumbs down" but as I understand it has no effect). So all curation outside of editing is supposed to be done via a custom mod flag? You did not even think of adding an "Off Topic" flag for the inevitable posts asking about cooking recipes, or opinions on a TV show ("it had a l33t h4x0r in a hoodie so it's on topic"), or other things that have absolutely no relation to programming?

What kind of "Other" flags are you envisioning here? Without clear guidelines that spell out what kind of posts are definitely NOT welcome on SO, even in these new categories, I can only see this becoming a huge mess.

You claim to have learned lessons from discussions, but frankly nothing you've written gives me confidence that you learned something about content quality (not just spam; also useless and low quality content). You say

By allowing these questions, we aim to unlock valuable, previously unresolved questions.

But the "alpha" you describe sounds like simply opening the floodgates without adequate tooling, yet again.

Also,

The goal of this new approach is to add more quality information to the knowledge base. While also providing a softer on ramp for community members who can’t confidently engage in traditional Q&A.

These two sentences seem mutually exclusive. And weird as well, because help vampires and other users that get their questions closed don't usually lack in "confidence" to "engage in traditional Q&A", they just contribute bottom tier questions which are then not well received by the community. I suppose you envision the not-confident members asking questions which will lead to "quality information" provided by someone else... but that does need a quality question as the starting point, otherwise answerers cannot provide good information and content discoverability via search engines will be lacking as well (which is important for the "knowledge base" part).

I wrote a few meta answers about various projects over the years, and in some I referenced Yahoo Answers as an example of a service not to strive for. With these changes which as written now allow basically any content that is not spam or abusive, SO turning into Yahoo Answers might actually become a reality.

Also, I'm not a fan of your measures of success:

  • Will opinion-based closure go down and are questions asked in the new categories? - if the users asking questions understand your UI that seems like a self fulfilling prophecy; some will probably simply choose the new categories to prevent their question from being closed as closure is simply not a thing there.
  • Will opinion based questions get a response? - Yes absolutely, but that measure seems useless without also evaluating if the response has any value at all. I doubt you can adequately measure that with limited staff who are also probably not subject matter experts; and if you're thinking of using an LLM to find out then this is invalid from the start.
  • How much content will be flagged? - As above, it's not specified what kind of flag the company would even consider acting upon outside of spam and abuse. Without specifying that, this metric is useless as a) the community is not adequately informed how to flag and b) staff can tweak this statistic however they like by simply declining flags.
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    If I read the "Moderation, Community Guidance, and Staff Proactivity" section, which I personally do with a huge bias towards thinking these changes are to make Stack Overflow more Reddit, it comes over to me as that old style curation and moderation is going to be a little less of a thing for these kind of posts. At least for now while the experiment is ongoing. But that's what you get when you say "keep an open mind" - it's ambiguous what that means. Just come out and say "Let us do our thing and back off". Commented Oct 23 at 9:04
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    I just organically came across this question went to close it as off-topic since it's not about programing or software development, and the only action it seems I could take was flag it for a moderator. So I did that. What a mess. Seems like they could have easily anticipated we'd get off-topic questions that don't belong here. Commented Nov 6 at 21:37
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Will there be a process in place, on day one, for dealing with the inevitable situation where someone asks a Q&A as a discussion or a discussion as a Q&A?

On that same vein... how are we expected to handle discussions that would be better as a Q&A, like best practices questions that should be how to questions?

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    We could maybe close them as "not opinion based" if that reason existed. Commented Oct 22 at 17:38
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    No, strictly because we want to see how much that still happens. Does our type indicator catch most or all of them? If not, what are we missing, and how do we signal to people asking opinion-based questions to select the right type to ask an opinion-based question? In the future, there definitely will be a way to move them back and forth. Whether that is just a simple move and delete feature or we just "copy" the suitable question or question and answer pair over to traditional Q&A with a link. Its an interesting thing to think about. Commented Oct 22 at 21:33
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    Specifically, with the types, I was a little hesitant to only launch with four, and only having one that marks it as a traditional Q&A. This is something we can tweak pretty easily as we progress if we need to, but I do also wonder if maybe the filtering mechanism isn't the type, but rather some way to ask what kind of answer the asker is looking for to determine if its opinion based or not. Commented Oct 22 at 21:35
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    @Hoid I’m not sure how you expect to determine whether the wrong question type was used with no method to change the question type, particularly if the core community largely refuses to even participate in this project. Your alpha is likely to have negative impacts on people with real questions who get confused by clicking buttons in an untested UI and inadvertently end up posting in the wrong category because they assume the different categories are like tags or post type on Reddit - everything is identical once posted, so it doesn’t really matter what you use. Commented Oct 22 at 23:36
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    @Catija, Less trying to determine if the wrong question type was being used, and more seeing if questions are still being closed as opinion-based. In theory, these types should capture most of them, hopefully. But to start, we are trying to make sure we are appropriately capturing almost everything at the top of the funnel. Commented Oct 23 at 14:22
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    @Catija The UI hasn't been specifically tested, but the concept of labeling questions by type has. In our research, and doing some quick math rather than waiting on others, only 7% of the users mislabeled questions or couldn't decide on one. It probably won't be that low in this experiment. But even if we launched this and it's gone as high as 30% mislabeled or not labeled at all, it's a pretty good outcome. That is a net positive: decreasing curation workloads, fewer correctly labeled questions being closed, and maybe getting a helpful reply. Commented Oct 23 at 14:27
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    I didn't talk about the possible curation benefit in this post at all. Mainly because its not the intention, but this potentially lightens the load on curators who want to focus on curating solid Q&A knowledge. That does leave curation of this content up in the air, but I am optimistic about figuring that out. Commented Oct 23 at 14:28
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    ... I mean, the concern is that you do actually "Capture everything at the start of the tunnel", though... and I mean everything, @Hoid My literal concern is that people who should have posted a classic Q&A either accidentally or intentionally - to avoid the judgement and oversight of SO's fabled, mean Q&A - stop asking Q&A questions entirely. But you have no way to gauge or correct for that. Just because only 7% in whatever test you're citing picked wrong, doesn't mean the people actually using this tool on their own will use it correctly. Commented Oct 23 at 16:28
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    Hiding a bunch of questions in a dump isn't reducing curation loads. It's sweeping it under a rug and someone will eventually need to address that under-rug space. Moving a bunch of "questions" to a category that doesn't use curation tools doesn't reduce the load on curators - it starves the actual platform of potentially-valuable content with no way to actually put it where it's supposed to be. In reality, it means you're just creating a curation-free way of posting on this platform, which means there's no reason for anyone to ever ask a curated question again. Commented Oct 23 at 16:31
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    @Catija i have a feeling "[people] stop asking Q&A questions entirely" is kinda the goal. It's a process they see as failing that they don't seem willing to improve... so a new reddit style question is introduced to push it aside. Commented Oct 24 at 14:33
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    @Hoid There's a reason purely-opinionated questions stopped being allowed on SO, though - I'm sure you understand that they were here when the site first started and it was through experience that it was determined that they weren't a good fit? While factually supportable questions can end up with different answers due to technology changing, that's less common than with purely subjective questions. The best _____ for something or the best practice frequently becomes obsolete over time as trends and tools change. The questions frequently must be re-asked over time for that reason... Commented Oct 24 at 15:21
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    ... but the questions/answers here have no expiration date. When you add in a type of question like subjective questions, you have to understand what the end of life for that question will be and, if you fail to do so, you only make the struggle of curation harder. This is precisely why the platform is in the hell-hole it is currently. The company forgot to pivot to ensuring curation of aging content was facilitated and rewarded. Now you're building these new questions - which will be popular - with no apparent thought on what to do with them in 10 years. Commented Oct 24 at 15:23
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    Regardless of all of that - the impact on the platform - y'all still seem to be perfectly willing to ignore the impact in the short term on users who are trying to get their answers to questions and end up falling into this test. They're disposable mice to you in this system where there's no plan to rescue them from pits they fell into accidentally. The people you're testing this system on aren't choosing to use it - they're not going in knowing the risk of it - they just assume that's how it works on SO and are given no recourse - because that would void your test. Commented Oct 24 at 15:30
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    At least with the new question asking experience, people were given the option to use the old format. Y'all are neither acknowledging that it's different nor are you giving them a chance to use the standard question asking page. "We're testing a new way of asking questions on Stack Overflow - would you like to try the new format or stick with the classic Q&A experience?" Some people just need to actually get work done - not be used as lab rats. Commented Oct 24 at 15:34
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    @Hoid "Whether X still happens" is completely separate from "if X happens, how can we fix it?" From our experience, X is definitely gonna still happen, and without a way to do something about it, people who do X are gonna have a bad time and it will color the outcome of the experiment. This is why we keep asking for adequate tooling. Commented Oct 24 at 21:14
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It seems like you're expanding the scope of Stack Overflow and stepping on the toes of other communities. "Best practices" (which don't exist in the complex domain of software development) and architectural questions are already on-topic on Software Engineering. Software Recommendations serves for tool recommendation questions, assuming enough focus. Other technical questions exist on other sites, too. How are you ensuring that you aren't taking traffic from these other communities, especially when engagement in these other communities is also dropping?

You've taken some lessons on subjective content from Discussions. Did you take any lessons from Not Programming Related? The site that is today known as Software Engineering was specifically proposed and launched for questions closed on Stack Overflow as "Not Programming Related" and was full of these questions. It would probably be good to talk to people involved in that community to understand why the original proposal for highly subjective questions failed. You do have one such person on staff. Another person is a 3x moderator.

On a broader perspective, I'm worried about the excessive focus on Stack Overflow at the expense of the rest of the public network. dan1st brings up a good point about interactions with Staging Ground. There are also other Stack Overflow features that could be useful across the network - not only Staging Ground, but Collectives and the things that come with those (like Articles, Bulletins, and Collections) and a number of other improvements. I don't disagree with finding new ways to unlock knowledge and share experiences, but it seems like things are being thrown at the wall (where the wall is Stack Overflow), left half-baked, and not rolled out to the rest of us in the network.

From a cultural perspective, I'd also echo Kevin B's point that this is forcing a new type of content onto a community without buy-in. Again, I do think that expanding the type of content hosted on the platform can be a good thing. But it's being done very ad-hoc, without community buy-in, and experiments come and go.

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    The community moderator tools for Staging Ground is non-existent, it’s not ready for Stack Overflow, let alone other communities. Commented Oct 22 at 23:35
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    @SecurityHound That's my point about ideas being thrown at the wall and left half-baked. Staging Ground solves a real problem that exists elsewhere on the network. Why not invest in fixing problems there and rolling it out. I'm sure that Collectives has similar issues to fix, but it could also be useful elsewhere. But instead of fixing these things, there's yet another new thing that will probably be only on SO or go the way of Discussions and get ripped out. Commented Oct 22 at 23:38
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    Half baked is being generous, more like the box of uncooked noodles, is being throw at the wall and the resulting chaos of the box breaking and the noddles falling out of the box proceeds. Commented Oct 23 at 0:11
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    I don't think anyone making these decisions/plans really remembers/cares about NPR, and folks seem.. unfamiliar with the reasoning behind the best practices we had. Where the key metric is trying to bump up new user numbers over... the things we're good at, strange things are tried. Commented Oct 23 at 0:23
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    @JourneymanGeek That's also my point. These things have been tried before. I think there are some good ideas, but it doesn't seem like they are talking to people who have experience that can inform an implementation of those ideas. Commented Oct 23 at 1:56
  • ""Best practices" (which don't exist in the complex domain of software development) and architectural questions are already on-topic on Software Engineering." Maybe they were meant to be, but they close such questions as off-topic, making that site useless. So we shouldn't worry about their toes, because nobody even knows where those toes are at. Commented Oct 23 at 13:09
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    @Lundin - Outside of spaces over tabs, your right there is no universal best practices in software development, just don’t tell Richard that (Silicon Valley) Commented Oct 23 at 13:19
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    @SecurityHound There are plenty of non-subjective best practices if you just narrow down the topic sufficiently. Commented Oct 23 at 13:21
  • @Lundin - The spaces over tabs was a joke. It also is an example, where best practices, are very subjective Commented Oct 23 at 13:32
  • "The site that is today known as Software Engineering was specifically proposed and launched for questions closed on Stack Overflow as "Not Programming Related" and was full of these questions." Actually it was specifically launched for opinion-based programming questions. At least according to Jeff's blog post announcing it. Commented Oct 24 at 21:16
  • @TylerH Yes. It has to do with the original definition of "Not Programming Related" on Stack Overflow, which was a pretty poor title for what the reason was used for. Commented Oct 24 at 23:39
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    To be honest, Thomas, I've been tempted to post a meta question (meta.se) pitching the idea to start consolidating some of the tech-focused communities. I've seen so many questions on Software Engineering over the years that should have been posted on SO, and vice-versa. I just feel like the Software Engineering community is the awkward right pinky of Stack Overflow. We stick out, and people get confused because we don't think of ourselves as the rest of the hand, but everyone else does. We should too, in my opinion. (1/4) Commented Nov 12 at 21:27
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    Why go to a separate website just because you want to talk about if a piece of code follows the dependency inversion principal, or how to apply some design pattern because "it's not programming related" --- baloney. It's bang-on programming related; it's just not traditional StackOverflow Q&A. (2/4) Commented Nov 12 at 21:27
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    And how many questions have we gotten which we've down-voted almost immediately only to have the OP exclaim, "What!? Isn't this a community of software engineers!?" And our reply ends up being "this is opinion-based" or "this belongs on StackOverflow." Sometimes I feel like this separation of StackOverflow and Software Engineering is just plain silliness. The first thing I wanted to do was eliminate the Q&A questions on StackOverflow upon discovering this experiment. (3/4) Commented Nov 12 at 21:27
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    Why not consolidate some of the communities and allow people to filter questions better so the Q&A people can have their Q&A, and the conceptual, tool-related, and discussion-style questions can be in focus for people like me who don't mind the softer side of software? I don't necessarily always want hard Q&A, and beyond the dumpster fire that Reddit has become, there really isn't another place. Of course, this is its own can of worms and WAY off topic for this post. (4/4) Commented Nov 12 at 21:27
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Users are mislead to post what should be regular questions as the catchall “Advice” opinion-based questions because of the lack of correct question type options for what makes for the best questions on the site:

"How to" questions.

Instead only debugging questions have a straight forward path to a regular questions. That is very suboptimal and should immediately be rectified. In my opinion the experiment should be paused until it's fixed.

Examples:

As far as I can tell none of them are opinion based in principle. And that applies for pretty much any “Advice” question I've seen so far.

Maybe as a the catchall should allow for the community to decide which kind of question it should become through something like the staging ground or a similar process.

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    Yup. See also meta.stackoverflow.com/a/435312/781723. Commented Oct 30 at 20:18
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    Yep, exactly what I had meant in a Comment (to the Announcement/Question) about Why? and How to? questions, but Staff didn't notice/react..., and never rectified their wrong "assumption" or misconception about how the Site was built for... Commented Oct 31 at 2:27
  • Agreed 100%. I went to ask a how-to question and got stuck with this poor list of types. Commented Nov 3 at 18:51
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This may be the most poorly conceived new feature I have ever seen on Stack Overflow.

I have lost count of the number of "opinion-based" questions I have seen posted in the new format which should clearly be classic Q&As. I posted an answer several days ago under the related Meta question (What opinion-based questions and answers have you come across from this alpha experiment that you liked or didn't like?) when I saw the first of these. In that answer I mentioned that the poster of the referenced "opinion-based" question had been confused by the UI, meant to post a regular question, and had been unable to change the type of the question.

Since then I have seen many similar questions, and many other community members have seen similar mis-categorized questions. This seems to be fundamentally related to a poor UI design, to a poorly defined concept of question categories on the part of Stack Overflow, and to a poorly communicated concept of question categories such as it is.

It isn't only neophytes who have been confused. Here is an "opinion-based" question by a long-standing member of the community, one of the top contributors in the tag, which should have been a normal question. That user also found the UI confusing.

Worse yet, there is no way for a question poster to edit or revise their question to an appropriate type once they post and realize their mistake. And worse again, there is no mechanism for community members to collectively change the type of an "opinion-based" post, and there is no way for even moderators to adjust "opinion-based" posts when, for example, a poster requests it!

Such corrective mechanisms would be welcome in this debacle, but the new "opinion-based" question types seem to be more fundamentally flawed and I don't think that better moderation mechanisms can rescue this new feature.

The "Best Practices" category is a very bad idea that is bound to be confusing and problematic. We have always run into this confusion when an asker explicitly asks about "best practices" in a question which actually has an objective answer; many times well-meaning community members reflexively vote to close these questions as opinion-based. For example, see this recent "Best Practices" question. This question can be objectively answered (the code in the question is invalid in a way explicitly spelled out in the language standard; the posted question even cites this reference. It isn't really a matter of opinion that the best practice is to not do that and instead to do what the standard says). There is even a regular duplicate Q&A which answers this "Best Practices" question.

Aside from the lack of clarity about how questions should be categorized, I am not confident that the designers have considered well how this new feature may interact with the reputation and privilege model that Stack Overflow is built on.

The icing on the cake is that I didn't want to see any of this to begin with. I have opted out of experiments, yet I keep seeing these questions.

We have officially launched this experiment to ten percent of all users on Stack Overflow who have not opted out of experiments.... Users who prefer the traditional experience will be able to opt out of this experiment to avoid seeing the new content entirely.

For the sake of humanity and all that is good, Stack Overflow must stop this experiment now. Let us never speak of it again.

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Unfortunately it looks like this post has not resolved the outstanding (major) concerns raised in the first announcement.

This project aims to create a designated space for technical discussions, best practices, tooling recommendations, and architectural questions or advice that are vital to a developer’s workflow but often are closed under our existing, highly structured Q&A model.

You already have designated sites for most or all of those things:

Why aren't you trying to grow those sites, instead? Or automatically send users to them when they try to ask one of these types of questions on Stack Overflow? Why cannibalize those sites and slowly drown Stack Overflow in the process?

Of all the questions asked since the beginning of the year, 24% got closed as opinion-based or off-topic. These questions aren't necessarily bad; they simply don't fit the definitive-answer format of traditional Stack Overflow.

Yes, agreed! So why are you trying to bring them here?

Should we take this direction as the company stating it officially no longer cares about other sites on the network that are programming-related/programming-adjacent?

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    The other communities you've linked should have never been created. They have like a dozen of active users or even less. Their topics would be more appropriate on the main SO page as tags etc, where everyone is. Commented Oct 24 at 21:27
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    @t3chb0t That's... objectively incorrect. I guess you didn't bother checking those sites. Commented Oct 24 at 21:28
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    I have accounts on two of them and I know how dead and declining they are. Commented Oct 24 at 21:38
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    @t3chb0t Then I'm surprised how you could get that simple fact completely wrong. Commented Oct 24 at 21:41
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    "Why cannibalize those sites and slowly drown Stack Overflow in the process?" From the blog: "... a radical simplification of our brand architecture was in order. Our public platform, including the Stack Exchange network, will now be known simply as Stack Overflow ..." and "... we’re also actively experimenting with ... to reflect our new mission: to support ALL the builders of the future in an AI world ..." Meet everyone's needs, fail to serve anyone (including yourself). Exemplary for leadership without vision. Commented Oct 28 at 23:56
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    I have to agree with @t3chb0t. There is too much overlap between the communities noted in this answer. It's almost like communities got split apart too finely; the scope is almost too narrow to facilitate if viable community long term. Commented Nov 12 at 21:30
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    @GregBurghardt Your comment makes no sense. Is there overlap between the communities or are their scopes too narrow? You can't have it both ways. Commented Nov 12 at 22:42
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    @TylerH I think greg-burghardt is trying to say that the fragmentation is killing the smaller, non-SO communities; They are thematically all related to "effectively using/programming computers", so overlap by audience, but by narrowly defining them, it fragments the user base for the niche-topics to below critical mass. The same topic as a tag in a broader SO would benefit from the larger surrounding community for general support. Commented Nov 13 at 8:40
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    @JulesKerssemakers The problem there is that questions about those topics are not good fits for the requirements of Stack Overflow in particular. There's a raft of things that can be done to improve the issue of fragmentation without defragmenting, itself. Like making the question migration tool actually useful, for one. If we defragment those communities, we'll just wind up back in the same spot we were before: bad questions getting closed about things that aren't about programming. Commented Nov 13 at 16:21
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I recognize that you have to try something. I'm not going to try to provide comprehensive feedback. Rather, I'd like to offer some narrow feedback on one specific issue:

I do not like that the label for the classic experience is "Troubleshooting / Debugging". That sends the wrong signal. From my perspective, the primary purpose of Stack Overflow is an archive of knowledge that will be useful to others. That primarily means questions about how to solve practical problems. Stack Overflow also accepts troubleshooting/debugging questions, but a bit reluctantly, and that is arguably a bit of a compromise, because those questions are less frequently useful to anyone other than the original poster. Spotlighting troubleshooting and debugging as if they are the central focus or purpose of the classical experience seems harmful to the site.

I ask that you replace "Troubleshooting / Debugging" with something else, e.g., "Programming problem" or "How-to" or "Knowledge" or "Knowledge Library".

Please, as a baseline, do no harm to the classical experience.

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    I fear "Knowledge" or "Knowledge Library" would not be very clear labels, and I suspect "How-to" would be equally as ambiguous. But I'm sure there is room for improvement in those labels/options. (To be clear, I'm not currently working on this project, just sharing my personal thoughts.) Commented Oct 23 at 16:08
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    @V2Blast, Sure. Those suggestions have some issues. Feel free to suggest something better. But please don't let the perfect get in the way of the good enough. In my opinion, something imperfect would be better than Troubleshooting/Debugging. I see "Troubleshooting/Debugging" as actively harmful to the site. Commented Oct 23 at 19:25
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    Interesting thoughts. I do feel pretty confident that most askers that stop by don't ask in the spirit of "I really want to add this question to the knowledge archive. That seems like language specific to power user types. Most people come here looking to get unblocked. I do, however, agree that these labels are not complete and are certainly worth thinking about more or different ones. The tricky part is that we can only realistically get away with maybe 5-6 of them? Commented Oct 27 at 18:36
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    @Hoid, For purposes of your experiment, perhaps "Programming Problem" could be an acceptable replacement for "Troubleshooting/Debugging", for now (and people could keep thinking to see if they can come up with something better if they like). That doesn't increase the number of labels. Commented Oct 27 at 18:51
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    “I do feel pretty confident that most askers that stop by don't ask in the spirit of "I really want to add this question to the knowledge archive.” – well, yeah, new users expecting Stack Overflow to be a help desk that it never really was supposed to be isn’t exactly a new problem. (I also shared some thoughts on debugging questions over at <retrocomputing.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1300/15334> – which applies to this site just as well, I think.) Commented Nov 3 at 21:19
  • Also, I can’t help but wonder if this was done on purpose to artificially inflate engagement metrics. Commented Nov 3 at 21:52
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    @Hoid I do feel pretty confident that most askers that stop by don't ask in the spirit of "I really want to add this question to the knowledge archive." That's not a good reason to reinforce their incorrect assumptions. Troubleshooting / Debugging questions are the least desirable type of question you can ask on Stack Overflow and still be on topic. (Unless time-complexity questions are still on-topic, in which case they're the second least desirable.) Commented Nov 4 at 1:16
  • "have to try something" - no. They do not have to try anything intended to achieve undesirable goals. Commented Nov 7 at 12:43
  • 2
    Yeah, right now there's no option for "how-to", which is one of the best "types" of questions on SO, e.g. How do I parse a string to a float or int? [python]. I just went to ask a how-to question about my IDE, but none of the options really fit: "tooling recommendation" is the most specific, but I know from experience that that's not what I want. Commented Nov 11 at 13:18
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    There's also no good option for "What does this do?"-type questions, which is 3/5 of the top Python questions. Commented Nov 11 at 13:26
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    "Stack Overflow also accepts troubleshooting/debugging questions, but a bit reluctantly, and that is arguably a bit of a compromise, because those questions are less frequently useful to anyone other than the original poster. " — valid questions of this type are those where OP has already effectively "debugged", and is really seeking an understanding of the results of the debugging effort. Commented yesterday
31

Please restore proper comments on these types of posts.

Even though we may have a relaxed standard for what counts as an answer/response for these types of questions, I assume we are still doing Q&A and not just trying to resurrect Discussions. As such, those replies (or whatever you call them) should actually contain (short-term or long-term) technical values. On the other hand,

Comments are often used to ask for clarification on, suggest corrections to, and provide meta-information about posts.

It is quite natural that these new types of Q&A would still need remarks related to clarifications and corrections that basically can be flagged as No Longer Needed once the concern is addressed. Meta discussions (such as whether that question should instead be asked as "classic" Q&A instead) also do not have any short-term or long-term technical value and should not be replies in the new Q&A model. I think it's a mistaken perpective that a broader scope of answers/replies implies that comments is a no longer needed/relevant feature.

For example, this reply should not be considered a proper answer in a Q&A model and instead fits the conventional comments model well. It likely does not hold any short-term or long-term technical value once OP finishes the clarification.

What do you mean by "is down"? For me, the page seems to load normally.

And here (user name redacted) is part of a discussion about what type the question should be which should also really be a comment. They are just noises to a technical discussion that may otherwise be useful (though in this particular case it maybe better the whole thing be transformed to a classical Q&A).

I wrongly chose the type of question as "General Advice/Other", as @username commented. I tried to change the type, but it cannot be changed.

Ideally, there should be some curation tool to convert the replies that better fit as comments. This will increase the signal to noise ratio and make these new types of questions more helpful to any future reader.

Technically, it is already possible to add comments to these replies using the URL trick, as this comment indicates. Basically, you have to find the ID of the reply from the "share" link or alike, and then go to the standalone edit page at stackoverflow.com/posts/[reply id]/edit, and then you'll see the "Add a comment". However, this is deeply hidden (and the comments thus added are not displayed at all if you look at the question), and almost certainly not an intended feature in the current model. I'm writing to ask for a proper UI to add comments to questions/answers(or replies) to the posts related to these new question types.

I really don't think a broader scope of replies is an excuse for this currently messy comment-answer mixture, nor is threaded replies if it is ever implemented.

4
  • The OP says a future version will have reply threading to accomplish a similar thing, similar to Discussions, which is why no comments. But I agree that a simple "conversation view" is not good and separating comments from answers would be more readable—this was part of the Q&A improvement over forums. Commented Nov 4 at 18:11
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    I am fully against it if it is intended as another attempt to resurrect discussions. Also as I said, comments are just comments and should be treated as such. Threaded replies is orthogonal to the proper comment feature and the reason should be quite clear from this answer. Commented Nov 5 at 1:53
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    I fully agree with this feature request. Comments are comments and even new type of content should have those clearly separated from what are supposed to be proper answers to the asked question. This would also make new questions compatible with the current Q/A post format (which can easily work for new types of questions, too) and this would make migration of wrongly classified posts easier. And in the future opens possibility of migrating old questions which are off-topic for Q/A to new question type if they fit there. Commented Nov 5 at 10:19
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    I still prefer to post comments as comments even though they are not obviously visible outside the inbox, and I'm glad that it has actually resulted in an improvement to a reply. Commented Nov 7 at 7:45
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This is more or less a form of forcing a change in what kind of content the community is accepting... which is typically something that should come from within the community with community support given it is the community that will be creating, curating, and reading this content... but instead you're approaching this in a way that eliminates the discussion of what the community wants to promote and support. Every iteration of this thus far has come from the same position: the company is trying this to expand the type of content the community accepts whether the community wants to support it or not.

It first happened with collectives, when articles and discussions was first put in, and when collectives were created for topics that were mostly off topic on stack overflow other than a few niche ideas surrounding them, then again when discussions was more broadly opened to everyone, and now despite that receiving little to no support from the community we're expanding it again and even further integrating it into the Q&A process in a way that will more or less make it indistinguishable from just no longer having standards.

The question of what makes a good, useful opinion-based question is a good discussion that we should have that very well may lead to allowing new types of subjective content, but that's a discussion that hasn't honestly happened in recent time here and doesn't necessitate an entirely new way of asking questions until we've decided such topics even belong here.

The Q&A product, as it stands, has problems that need to be resolved to help deal with the difficulty that comes with asking questions and integrating into the community. Creating a question type where quality and usefulness simply doesn't matter and placing it at the same level as regular questions only makes this worse while not doing anything to solve any of the existing problems.

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I just saw this experiment. I didn't have much hope for it, but I thought I would at least try it out.

During my attempt to familiarize myself with the new UI, I misclicked the "thumbs down" button. I tried to remove it. Here's what the site told me:

Changing your vote is not currently supported, but coming soon.

Really, Stack, really?

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    Unfortunately, yes. It will be supported in the nearish future. It's already on the board to be worked on. Commented Oct 29 at 15:35
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    Could you clarify 'nearish future'? Please don't come next week with a 'we saw an 100% increase in votes' if we can't undo misclicks.... Commented Oct 29 at 16:01
  • Implementing the feature immediately was too difficult, but implementing detection for attempts to do it and popping up an error message was not too difficult? Commented yesterday
28

When you hover on the "(?) Advice" /button, the question mark is only confusing. I clicked on it, nothing happened. Hovered, nothing happened. Please don't include a question mark unless you can get some info about it there, otherwise it is only a symbol of how confusing itself is.

why no tooltip

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    Ha! I did the exact same thing! I thought, "where's the tooltip?" Commented Nov 12 at 21:32
  • @GregBurghardt I wish this was posted on MSE so I could get rep... lol, if MSO rep counted, I would have more than double my rep :P Commented Nov 12 at 22:05
27

Given the opinion-based nature of these question types, we determined that showing a thumbs-down score may not be beneficial to the user experience and how welcome they can feel as a result.

This modification renders the current experiment a complete failure in my opinion. If the question author is unaware that the community is rejecting their question due to its quality, they are unable to edit their question to enhance its quality.

Question seeking an opinion on a topic can still be bad quality, due to any number of reasons, primarily linked to the amount of effort the author has shown to understand the topic they are asking about.

Sadly it appears that not showing the reception of a question, is now considered to be welcoming. Perhaps said in another way, providing that reception, is now considered unwelcoming by SE staff is extremely worrisome.

Options for flagging will be Spam, Abusive, and Other.

So there won’t be a way to flag one of these questions seeking our opinion as out of scope, when the topic, isn’t within our target audience?

This is because the research group responded most positively to thumbs for the “score” behavior, instead of the other options that were presented to them. For this experiment, we will only ever show both the thumbs-up count on the question post and in the question feed.

Please show your work. I absolutely hated when YouTube took away the thumbs down counter, you cannot actually tell if something is poorly received, if all you show are the upvotes. If your not going to show the downvotes to the author you shouldn’t show the upvotes either.

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Regarding flags:

  • Will you show us the fate of our flags or will it be deferred like it was for Discussions?

  • Why don't you include "Should be a (normal) question" flag option? It was the most received type of flag in Discussions (for a good reason).

  • I don't think you have enough resources to accomplish this:

    For items flagged as “other,” the Community Enablement team will be monitoring them, as well as taking moderation actions on them when necessary, to gain a deeper understanding of the tools needed to support this content and to understand the moderator experience.

    This didn't work for Discussions, Challenges, and Lobby Chatroom and you had to turn to community for help. What makes this different?

    Do you have any plans for when the rate of opinion-based posts coming in ramps up?

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    To your first question, yes! Practically speaking, under the hood, this is reskinned Q&A proper, not a whole new thing. So you will be able to see how flags are handled. To your second point, that's a good question. Ultimately, we decided, yes, we need that, but only if this experiment shows enough to continue justifying its own existence. I would rather just trust the community more and allow curators/mods to just move things over when it warrants it. To that end, if/when we build that functionality, we probably will enable some users to just take that action and make it happen. Commented Oct 23 at 19:16
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    To your third point, yes. But to begin, we are not scaling to all users immediately, and I think this is the best way to make the team intimately familiar with which tools are needed in the most obvious way. It might look a little rough, but I also think it helps determine the right guidelines sooner. There have been numerous requests or critiques from the community stating that we don't understand the platform, norms or problems, etc. I don't want to argue with that, but if we believe this is true, isn't this a great way to get a better understanding faster? Commented Oct 23 at 19:19
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    @Hoid thanks Hoid. These are all valid responses/points. Speaking of gaining more knowledge of the platform, I wasn't actually suggesting sidelining CMs, but rather having them work side-by-side of the community (working with Sasha and Bert on Collectives and then Discussions, I can attest that their general understandings have probably surpassed mine a good while ago, so yes, that's a great way). However, as you siad this will be a temporary approach. It's good to know that you've thought about these all. Thanks again for the response. Commented Oct 23 at 20:28
24

I am seeing a lot of questions being posed in the new opinion-based mode that really ought to be traditional Q & A. This is presumably driven by the new category selector, which is awful.

  • My primary beef is that the only category (of four) that feeds traditional Q & A is "Troubleshooting / Debugging", which is outrageous. Traditional Q & A does see plenty of debugging questions, but it is in no way limited to those. Most of the best traditional questions don't fit in that category.

    And Having 75% of the options feed the new mode doesn't feel like an add-on. It feels like a takeover.

  • Also, it's poor UI design in that one control does two different things that aren't (shouldn't be) directly related -- selects both a question type and a question mode. I know the feature has been couched as supporting "new types of questions", but the implementation of the categories conflates the subject matter of the questions with the kinds of answers / responses that are wanted. There are correlations, but one is not wholly a function of the other.

  • Additionally, setting up three categories plus "other" seems to convey that what SO mainly wants is questions in the first three categories. This is needlessly restrictive.

It might be an improvement to be more direct by starting with a binary selection along the lines of "I want primarily objective answers to a question" vs. "I want open-ended responses about a topic". If you want to have a subject-matter classification too then fine, but that should be a separate, secondary consideration.

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    "a binary selection" would be a fine improvement. Commented Nov 5 at 15:12
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We have officially launched this experiment to ten percent of all users on Stack Overflow who have not opted out of experiments

I have opted out of experiments; so why am I still seeing this?

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    Seems related to comments in this answer Commented Oct 28 at 12:28
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    Where are you seeing these opinion-based question posts? On the home page of the site, or somewhere else? Commented Oct 28 at 22:10
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    @V2Blast, I just checked the home page, and yes, I see them there, but also when viewing tags, which is what I always use: stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c%2b%2b Commented Oct 28 at 22:20
  • I am seeing "advices" everywhere (using this link as landing page). I have experiments disabled. Can you please remove me from experiments? Commented Oct 30 at 10:58
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    Sorry, I missed your answer and wrote the same again. I'm seeing these "questions" on the homepage, on the tag page (/questions/tagged/xxx) and when applying custom filters, so pretty much everywhere. Commented Oct 31 at 12:59
  • The only place I'm not seeing them is stackoverflow.com/questions Commented Oct 31 at 14:49
19

To me this looks mostly like integrating the previous Discussions into the main Q&A list (or a second go at Programmers Stack Exchange). I think you unfortunately do not put enough emphasis on quality of the content and more emphasis on no obstacles, no pain, anything goes instead.

This might work in that it generates traffic but it also might not work in contributing significantly to the knowledge library. People might ask themselves why they should visit these new discussions and what one can learn from them if anything?

Fortunately you plan to include a switch to turn them off if I understood it correctly. That's a great idea. The feature might simply not be for everyone.

Even though these questions will be opinion-based I could still want to decide if they are useful or not useful. Taking away downvotes might make people feel more welcome but would also lose the quality signal. Losing this information will make the whole feature less useful.

Overall, but this is only my personal opinion, I would have preferred a stronger focus on quality of produced content. Opinion based questions already have a problem in that they do not contain much knowledge if done wrong and that their content ages faster. As it is, I doubt that it will be worth reading there much.

I think that you need a strategy for coping with low effort, low quality questions in this new category to avoid people quickly losing interest in the feature.

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  • I don't think they necessarily need a strategy for coping with low effort low quality questions when that is literally the point of the feature existing. If these questions provided value we would have made room for them ages ago. Commented Oct 22 at 19:14
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    @KevinB Maybe you are right. Risk of failure is extremely high here. Still I want to argue as if there was something of value here and we wanted to lift it. I don't believe that we were infallible. We might have overlooked something along the way. However, this is not the way to find it. Commented Oct 22 at 19:19
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    I do believe there is value in good subjective content and that it's a discussion that should happen, but i don't think creating a feature and releasing it to the wild is the way to have that discussion. Commented Oct 22 at 19:40
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    "or a second go at programmers" – I'm assuming this is referring to "Programmers Stack Exchange" / "Not Programming Related" -> Software Engineering Stack Exchange? Just checking since it wasn't clear to me. Commented Oct 23 at 16:13
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    @V2Blast Yes, Programmers Stack Exchange. Have see you seen some of the questions from that time? Something like "What is the worst interview question that you got?" and this was regarded as a good highly upvoted question. Commented Oct 23 at 17:54
  • 2
    "but it also might not work in contributing significantly to the knowledge library." Frankly I think it's pretty clear they don't care about SO's original ethos of being a knowledge library. They have a product, and want the monthly and daily active users of that product to go up so they can make money selling data and ads, no matter how they get there. Commented Oct 24 at 21:26
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    @TylerH But (fortunately) reality doesn't work that way. We try to tell them that again and again, partly to preserve our mission but partly also to spare them the wasted effort but they simply fail... and fail again. I'm getting tired of trying to argue how it could done better. This is not productive enough for me and I don't want to sound like a broken record all the time. I will try to cut myself lose. It's surprisingly difficult for me. Commented Oct 24 at 21:43
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The new answer UI looks so much like the regular comments that people confuse them for comments and recommend to post an answer instead.

Screenshot for <10k

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    I suppose that's the natural follow-up to their last "experiment" of making comments look more like answers. Commented Oct 28 at 18:45
  • also, where can I comment a question I don't want to answer? Commented Oct 29 at 13:05
  • @BendingRodriguez there is no differentiation between answers and comments, just start discussing away that's the way it's intended anyways. Commented Oct 29 at 15:34
17

Users who prefer the traditional experience will be able to opt out of this experiment to avoid seeing the new content entirely.

How do I do that, exactly? I don't see any relevant toggle, and the umbrella "please no experiments" does not seem to work either, I still see these non-questions. I encountered at least four such questions, three of them - like this that somehow even made it to HNQ - so bad that I am really considering deleting my SE accounts and moving elsewhere. (I even answered the remaining one because it's halfway between "software rec" and "howto" and can be rephrased into a normal on-topic question).

Obviously I have opted out of all experiments long ago:

preferences screen

So why do I still see the third item below?

question list

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    Hmm, real quick: when you hit the ask button, does it show the question type dropdown, or do you get the regular editor? Commented Oct 31 at 13:20
  • @Hoid just the usual editor, title-body-tags, no "type" select there. (tried hard refresh, logout-login, and two browsers) Commented Oct 31 at 13:24
  • And it's still the same even if I enable experiments, so I'm lucky enough to not be one of those 10%? Then why do I see those questions at all? Commented Oct 31 at 13:26
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    Weird I will flag this, seems to be blocking you from the ask flow, but not visibility. Thanks for flagging. My impression is that it should hide both. Commented Oct 31 at 13:35
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    @Hoid looks like I'm not that special, another report about the same at +10: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/436351/14401160 Commented Oct 31 at 13:41
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    Same here...how do I opt out?! Commented Oct 31 at 18:47
  • 2
    How do I opt out? Commented Nov 3 at 18:52
  • @Hoid could you label this as [bug] or [by-design] depending on the results of your investigation? I really hope it's a bug that will be fixed soon, but given how the community input was treated this year won't be terribly surprised to hear "yes, that's how it is supposed to work, you cannot opt-out everywhere". Commented Nov 3 at 19:04
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    It is indeed a bug, its being worked on. Commented Nov 3 at 21:00
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    @Hoid And because of this critical bug, you have made every user who does not wish to participate in experimental alpha testing actively hostile against these questions, creating maximum badwill. So you have essentially killed the experiment here. Also if this was acknowledged as a bug on November the 3rd, why is it not fixed yet? This is a programmer site, you can't pretend that this is a complex thing to fix, because we won't buy that. It should not take 1 week to fix for a single dev let alone the whole department. So it really comes across as if this project too has simply been abandoned. Commented Nov 12 at 9:01
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    @Lundin counterpoint, we didn't abandon this project. We are just prioritizing work according to impact. First, we fixed where it was leaking on the interested posts list, which went out last Thursday, I believe. Then we addressed where it showed up on the related posts list. I am pretty sure that fix went out Monday. Now we are working on it so it doesn't show up in tag-filtered searches. I am not a dev, so I am not gonna make any claims on complexity, but it is being worked on as well as half a dozen other bugs and improvements. Commented Nov 12 at 14:40
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    @lundin I get people not wanting to see it, but the labels are there on the questions; nobody has to click on them if they don't want to see it in tag-based searches in the interim. It's okay if you hate the experiment. I am not asking you to like it. Commented Nov 12 at 14:42
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    @Hoid you have to specifically look for those marks to notice them. I usually read the question title first, and this time is essentially wasted as soon as I see the label. There aren't that many "questions" of this kind to quickly train my eyes to ignore them immediately. A minor background color change would be much more prominent, allowing to skip those "questions" completely. But obviously it's better to fix the bug so that we never have to see them again. Commented Nov 12 at 14:48
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    @STerliakov That's really interesting. These opinion questions, even if mislabeled, are getting about 3x the engagement as regular Q&A (answers+comments), and my first assumption was that the additional label was making them stand out more. Commented Nov 12 at 15:09
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    @Hoid Thanks for responding. The main issue is indeed that the posts pop up in tag-filtered searches since that's how the vast majority of seasoned users interact with the site. The main stackoverflow.com "feed" is just suggesting irrelevant posts to everyone, so no veteran user that I know actually uses that one. As for hating the experiment... personally I like the idea but I don't like the implementation. But I see that a lot of veteran users that never participate on meta now show up to express criticism. Whenever that happens, it is usually a sign that fundamental site usage has derailed. Commented Nov 13 at 8:50
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Please make a more rigorous commitment about who has responsibility for the "Other" flags. I think it's important to know who has responsibility and that they commit to reviewing and handling all such flags.

Saying that CMs will be "monitoring" these flags is not sufficient and not encouraging. That stops short of promising that CMs will act on them or take responsibility for reviewing and handling all such flags (acting on them or dismissing them, as is appropriate) within a reasonable timeline. I am concerned that CMs are going to be inconsistent about reviewing them, and after a few weeks handling flags will cease to be a priority for CMs (through no fault of CMs themselves, but due to structural incentives and priorities within the company). Trust has been broken, with similar promises made in the past and not followed through, so I ask for you to make more explicit statements about what you are and aren't committing to. And if you're not committing to review and act on all "Other" flags, please say so forthrightly, and I'm concerned about the implications of that.

15

we want to focus on improving the current process here to something more constructive that encourages the asker to refine their question in a different way

That assumes that the question the user is trying to ask belongs on the site. We still need basic off-topic close options for when it doesn't.

Even open-ended questions need to be open-ended programming questions. Taking questions from Seasoned Advice and posting them on Stack Overflow in the "Advice" system is not appropriate and deserves closure and deletion, exactly like conventional Q/A.

And the same is also true for non-programming computer usage, video games, consumer electronics, home improvement, etc.

15

Replies can end up in LQA review queues: https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/37037121. I don't think this is as designed since "Not an Answer" is not available from the flagging interface.

Also:

  • You can add comments to them from the review queue.
  • The comments cannot be seen on the main site, so if somebody replies, you can only see the reply from the review page.

Of course, if this is by design, then I am not 100% sure how I'm supposed to review this. I just selected "Looks OK" as I think it's acceptable to have such a response for an open-ended question.

Found more:

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    "Of course, if this is by design, then I have no idea how I'm supposed to review this. I just selected "Looks OK."" I skipped that review, the only correct action when you are not sure. On a general note: In all review queues (and staging ground) wrong outcomes are due to users who don't understand a review privilege means they are trusted to judge according to pre-defined guidelines. Such votes deny informed reviewers to apply their insight to judge according to whatever policy applies. Unfortunately review guidance does not sufficiently emphasise that. Commented Nov 6 at 22:42
  • OK, so maybe not "no idea." I erred on the side of "it's an open-ended question, so this should not be deleted as a non-answer." Commented Nov 6 at 23:00
  • Natty autoflags, perhaps? Commented Nov 10 at 13:39
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    @GeneralGrievance I can't find either the first one or the second one in the messages by Natty. For reference these are the automatic flagging messages and you can find a post by ID there. So, don't think it's Natty. Commented Nov 10 at 13:55
  • stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/37040720 Commented Nov 10 at 22:27
14

New types of questions are not visible on all questions list. They are visible only on tagged questions lists which makes them less discoverable. Since there are no other options to filter them, being visible on all questions list is critical.

We cannot monitor or give feedback on the new kinds of questions if we cannot see them. Please fix this.

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    Could you share which question you couldn't see and which list it wasn't showing up on? I am not seeing any issues on my end. Commented Oct 27 at 23:49
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    @Hoid I've yet to encounter any of the new questions on stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=newest (I've also tried other sorts), I've scrolled to where the questions are 6h old, so to my understanding I should see stackoverflow.com/questions/79802131 (5h at time of writing) amongst them, but it's not there. Same for the home feed at plain stackoverflow.com Commented Oct 28 at 0:05
  • If it matters I'm being served rev 2025.10.27.35959 for that page. Commented Oct 28 at 0:12
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    @cafce25 there are only two of them as of my initial comment. One at the bottom of the 1st page when sorted by newest and the second on the second page about 5 hours ago. Commented Oct 28 at 0:13
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    @Hoid I don't see either of them on that page. Commented Oct 28 at 0:14
  • @Hoid I was specifically looking for question mentioned in other thread, since that is the only one I know of: stackoverflow.com/q/79802131 I can see that one when I click on any tag and scroll down, but not when I go looking for it on list of all questions looking in the timeframe the question was asked. And I did that very carefully not to miss it by chance. Commented Oct 28 at 7:33
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    This is a very good point, apologies for the oversight, we're currently rolled out to 10% of all users but mods should have been included, this has been corrected Commented Oct 28 at 10:09
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    @cart I have tried both as mod and with completely anonymous account. In both cases I am seeing the question on tagged questions list, but not on full list. So if you are doing gradual rollout, you still have potential bugs because there is discrepancy between what can be seen on full question list and tagged questions list with the same account. Commented Oct 28 at 10:30
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    So 100% see them in filtered questions lists but only 10% see them on unfiltered ones? Still quite unclear when they should or shouldn't. Commented Oct 28 at 12:26
14

Please visually highlight responses by the OP, so it can be seen that a response was written by them. It makes it easier to follow the conversation when the OP discusses their question with other users, and also when the OP has a common name.

1
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Ugh. Just as they did with Discussions, SO is sabotaging opinion-based Q&A with a deficient user interface. We can't even comment on responses.

Advice Q&As should use exactly the same format as any other Q&A. Advice could simply be a tag that people can ignore if they want. Or Advice could be its own SE, as Discussions should have been.

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    I just noticed that there are those ugly "advices" everywhere. Why are they trying to build into Q&A some forums? Stupid. Commented Oct 30 at 10:54
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    Yes, this is my thought too. The UX genius of the QA-Format forces the gist of the page to be directly responding to the question, instead of becoming an endless, meandering discussion with drifting topics. Why would you not want the same for opinion-based questions? SE sites which by their nature often don't have a single correct answer (cooking, parenting, workplace, christianity...) all use this QA UX because it makes sense. Commented Nov 3 at 11:09
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    Separate site yes, tag - no. That just mixes "advice"/"opinion-based" with the general questions, diluting the latter unnecessarily. Commented Nov 7 at 12:48
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    @einpoklum If you don't want to advice questions, just ignore the tag. This leverages the existing mechanisms for correcting a question's tags. Commented Nov 12 at 15:13
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    @KevinKrumwiede I think what you want is meta tags, they existed a long time ago. subjective was one of them, technologically they were just normal tags. Here is an explanation of why they got removed: stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags Commented Nov 16 at 1:37
  • and no, I personally don't see why meta-tags were harmful. Maybe the information they contain should not be in a tag but in some other system. But I feel like SO could have avoided a lot of the loss of activity if posters could use beginner and subjective and so on to (1) apply different moderation rules to their question and (2) allow other people to ignore them without kicking them off the site. But what do I know, I wasn't there back then. Commented Nov 16 at 1:40
  • @julaine "I personally don't see why meta-tags were harmful." The linked post makes that pretty clear (it's not exactly a matter of opinion). "apply different moderation rules to their question" Sure, if everyone gets a veto on their own questions, what could possibly go wrong? The experiment already gets used mainly for regular non-opinion based questions, because that bypasses the rules. Then stricter rules for others, wouldn't that be discrimination, just formalised? Also, nobody was ever kicked off the site for being a [beginner] or posting [subjective] questions. Commented Nov 16 at 2:42
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Please distinguish these from normal questions when shared with other parts of the Stack Exchange network (e.g. Realtime Questions).

At present, it's unsettling to follow a link expecting a Q&A only to find a much lower-quality page.

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    Ditto answers. It is disconcerting to having "answers" (responses) show. up in the low quality review queue and to be expected to judge them on different criteria. Commented Nov 7 at 10:16
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The UI for these new question types is intentionally simpler

There's an "edit" link on the question & each reply yet there is no button/link for the corresponding timeline or revisions. Normally these are reached for a post via its clock icon button and "edited ..." link.

It happens that the corresponding URLs can be reached by clicking on "edit", which for those posts goes to an URL of the form

https://stackoverflow.com/posts/postid/edit

and changing the last word, edit, to timeline or revisions.

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    This actually has legal implications, since the CC license requires that modifications be disclosed and attributed. I've contacted SE Inc about this via the "Contact us" form. BTW it also affects Staging Ground pre-publish edits. Commented Nov 4 at 15:19
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    We have a fix in progress on this one, think it will be ready as early as tomorrow morning or laster this week, but its a high priority. Commented Nov 4 at 20:44
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    This has now been fixed, the creation / last modified date on opinion-based posts now link to the corresponding timeline page. Commented Nov 7 at 11:39
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    Like I mentioned on your answer you've used the wrong URL for the "last modified" text, @Darce . That should be the revisions page. Commented Nov 7 at 12:59
  • @Darce The timeline & revisions pages, currently reached via 'clock icon button and "edited ..." link', are not appropriately reached through 'creation / last modified date' labels & I don't know why you would think they should be. I can imagine an obscure rationale that associates creation with timeline & last modification with revisions (and another for vice-versa), but it's not a reasonable labelling of what the pages are--timeline & edits/revisions. Commented Nov 7 at 13:07
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    @Darce "This has now been fixed" I don't know why you think you fixed access to both my issues, ie also the revisions page. Do you understand that my answer here is about both timeline & revisions & ThomA's question is only about revisions & your fix is only about timeline? Commented Nov 7 at 13:31
  • @Darce Please give a link to a Question & Response page that exhibits your (eventual) solution(s) accessing timeline and/or edits/revisions, ie one that has an edited response. Commented Nov 7 at 13:37
  • @Darce It's bad design currently that "edited ..." & a date get to revisions instead of "revisions" or "revised ..." getting to revisions .... And that it's a "revisions" page not a "versions" page, so that there's never a revision page that contains just one version even though every revisions page has the first version .... Commented Nov 7 at 13:42
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    @V2Blast This is NOT status-completed, did you read my comments here in reply to Darce saying it was? Did you read my question & confirm? Post time links to timeline, that is NOT all this is about. Although a timeline page does offer some of what a version page contains. Commented Nov 9 at 4:30
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How does this interact with the Staging Ground?

You created a new sort of question flow but you didn't mention how interactions with the Staging Ground would work.
Can these questions get in the Staging Ground?
If so, what happens?
Are the reviewers informed about the "type" of the question?
Would it affect off-topic reasons/comment templates?
Can they be approved normally?
Can the question type be changed while a question is in the Staging Ground?
Is it possible to change a normal question to an opinionated question in the Staging Ground?
Does the Staging Ground workflow change in any way?

I can understand the Staging Ground not being considered to be important for this alpha test and these questions being excluded from the Staging Ground for now (as long as there are no internal server errors or unreviewable questions) but if it goes well according to your definitions/metrics, you'll have to make a decision at some point.

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    Staging Ground is just full of spam and unanswerable questions that cannot be moderated by the community. I don’t have high hopes for this new question flow. I suspect it will just be full of AI generated opinions and questions that don’t need to be answered Commented Oct 22 at 23:26
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    Do you have any evidence for the Staging Ground being full of spam? While there is some spam there (just like on the main site), it is handled by Charcoal and others. And it containing unanswerable questions is intentional - questions are supposed to be improved (or not published) and not answered in the SG. But to be honest, I'd say it isn't 'full' of anything. I also don't get why you think the SG couldn't be moderated by the Community. Could you expand on that? Commented Oct 23 at 5:14
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    To start, these won't be exposed to Staging Ground. Not saying its a forever no, but probably something we would add much later once we have a stable feature and a lot of the finer details of it are resolved. But their good points, and I don't disagree, but like you mentioned in some of your questions. SG was designed for objective Q&A, so it would need some tweaks to support these question types. Commented Oct 24 at 15:08
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