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 change in the reason this experiment is already a failure. If the question author doesn’t know the community is NOT receiving their question well, then they cannot improve the quality of their question. The fact now showing the reception of a question is considered to be welcoming, or perhaps said in another way, providing that reception is 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.

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.