Timeline for Opinion-based questions alpha experiment on Stack Overflow
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 24, 2025 at 21:14 | comment | added | TylerH | @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. | |
| Oct 24, 2025 at 15:34 | comment | added | Catija | 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. | |
| Oct 24, 2025 at 15:30 | comment | added | Catija | 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. | |
| Oct 24, 2025 at 15:26 | comment | added | Catija | Reddit just has a timer that means a post is "archived" or whatever they call it after X amount of time or inactivity... it's accessible but essentially dead. SE has no similar concept but these question types you're adding need something - either that or some other solution to address end of life - either a planned removal or locked state where they can't be engaged with. But y'all are so focused on getting people to use the site - as they were back in the early days - that you're not thinking about 10 years in the future, thus dooming the content to following the existing status-quo. | |
| Oct 24, 2025 at 15:23 | comment | added | Catija | ... 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. | |
| Oct 24, 2025 at 15:21 | comment | added | Catija | @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... | |
| Oct 24, 2025 at 15:03 | comment | added | user400654 | It's all too convenient. We all know the Q&A process is unapproachable for new users. We tried SG for some reason, thinking it would improve the process but it just further restricts users by the same hostile process. Now we're giving users the ability to just choose up front to not be "burdened" by the old asking process and instead use a new one where their post can't be closed and can't be criticized... instead of doing anything at all about the unapproachable Q&A process. How else is this supposed to be viewed? | |
| Oct 24, 2025 at 14:54 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | @KevinB Not remotely the case, but unfortunately, there's a perception among many devs that the existing community doesn't want them to use Q&A at all. We very much do, but the barriers to participating successfully there are tricky. I think with opinion-based questions, we might be able to offer an easier on-ramp so they feel a bit more confident and willing to learn the network's norms and approach Q&A more sincerely. | |
| Oct 24, 2025 at 14:33 | comment | added | user400654 | @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. | |
| Oct 23, 2025 at 16:31 | comment | added | Catija | 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. | |
| Oct 23, 2025 at 16:28 | comment | added | Catija | ... 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. | |
| Oct 23, 2025 at 14:28 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | 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. | |
| Oct 23, 2025 at 14:27 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | @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. | |
| Oct 23, 2025 at 14:22 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | @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. | |
| Oct 22, 2025 at 23:36 | comment | added | Catija | @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. | |
| Oct 22, 2025 at 21:35 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | 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. | |
| Oct 22, 2025 at 21:33 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | 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. | |
| Oct 22, 2025 at 17:38 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | We could maybe close them as "not opinion based" if that reason existed. | |
| Oct 22, 2025 at 16:41 | history | edited | user400654 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 160 characters in body
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| Oct 22, 2025 at 16:22 | history | answered | user400654 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |