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.