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I come across a lot of "answers" to opinion-based questions in review queues that don't actually answer the question. I've noticed many of these are either requests for clarification on the question or requests for clarification on another answer. In regular Q&A these would be asked as comments. Opinion-based questions don't have comments. (Well, they do but they're not visible)

This leads to opinion-based questions having a thread of conversation that needs to be followed in order to get any value out of the answers. Having discussions on certain topics can be helpful (has SO considered adding such a feature?) but just like regular Q&A opinion-based questions should have specific answers so that if a user is visiting one later down the line they don't have to follow an entire conversation.

If, for example, I'm looking for recommendations for an IDE and I find an existing opinion-based question like "What is the best IDE for JavaScript?" I want to see answers in the format of "I like IntelliJ because these features I find useful for web development" or "I like VSCode because these other features are also useful for web development" and not an entire 20 reply thread where the discussion is fragmented.

TL;DR Objective questions consolidate objective answers. Opinion-based questions should consolidate opinion-based answers. What we have right now is discussions. We already tried those and they didn't work.

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    Tangential addendum: This I think is the reason why the reception on Meta has been so negative for this feature. Instead of figuring out a way to allow opinion-based questions to join StackOverflow's existing well-curated library of knowledge we got Discussions V2 with none of the curation or moderation features that keep up the quality of the content across the entire site Commented Dec 8, 2025 at 21:48
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    Related: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/436408/781723 Commented Dec 9, 2025 at 0:38
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    There is no such thing as an opinion-based answer. There are only replies. It is the review queue that is the confusing part. I can understand replies still go through review as they can still use a basic code of conduct check, but right now reviewers are tasked to keep track of two sets of reviewing guidelines essentially. Commented Dec 9, 2025 at 9:57
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    From the body of this question it seems like you are more asking for threaded replies, instead of proper comments as in my answer (Also linked to by DW's comment above). I think maybe both are needed. Threaded replies (or anything functionally equivalent, the form is less important) for posts with short-term or long-term technical values but may not serve well as top-level replies, and comments for those without technical values and should be NLN'ed. Commented Dec 9, 2025 at 12:14
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    @Gimby I think it's both; reviews are definitely confusing, but so is the lack of comments. Replies can be called whatever, but on the main sites comments act as a home for meta commentary, where no such place exists in the "opinion-based questions" section (we really need a less wordy name for this); and I'd argue that even in the midst of opinion, there's still a difference between such meta commentary and "real" replies to the core question. Combining those together is very noisy (and is literally one of the exact reasons cited for SO's design, I'd add). Commented Dec 9, 2025 at 17:11
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    As a side note, unless I'm mistaken, with comments and replies not being distinguishable anymore, there's no way to tag someone that asked for clarifications to let them know that you did so. Commented Dec 9, 2025 at 21:20
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    There is, you just add another reply, further confirming how helpful discussions are. Commented Dec 9, 2025 at 21:29

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