Opinion-based questions alpha experiment on Stack Overflow

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

bug

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:

• How to load a website (HTML) and click a button?
• How to integrate JaCoCo into a spring boot OCI image to measure E2E testing code coverage?
• Copy out file from build state to host
• Ridgeplot with area charts in plotly (or any other free python library)

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 feature-request 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.

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 c 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.

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?

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:

• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
• https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com
• https://codereview.stackexchange.com
• https://devops.stackexchange.com

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?

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.

feature-request

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

When you hover on the "(?) Advice" tag/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.

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?

bugstatus-completed

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?

bug status-completed

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:

So why do I still see the third item below?

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.

bug

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

feature-request

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.

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.

The questions so far have proved that there's significant confusion about the categories. (I think part of it is regional English, as my experience working for a major multinational firm has accustomed me to being asked to "please advice [sic]" when being asked to answer technical questions.)

Suggestion:

1. Omit the type selector (advice, etc.)
2. Replace it with a "I'm looking for [...]" selector, with options "an answer to a technical question", and "an opinion from a subject matter expert".
3. (Optional) Recategorize everything asked so far into a regular Q&A, because the confusion has resulted in most "advice" questions to actually be proper Q&A.

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.

The UI implementation of this needs to be fixed into something that isn't just one big wall of text. With the current design, it is very difficult to understand who is replying to who, or the chronological order of posts. It is hard to see where one answer begins and another ends.

I'm watching one post here now and at a glance I have no idea who is talking to who or who posted first - everything is as of the point I'm writing this labelled "yesterday", no time stamp. Very unhelpful. The detailed replies with code examples etc melt together visually with other completely unrelated replies. It's just one big goo.

Again: threaded posts should not be rocket science to implement. The rest of the Internet had these for some 30 years.

bug

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:

• 10 Nov 25: https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/37040339 and https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/37040720 (found by M--)
• 18 Nov 25: https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/37046111
• 20 Nov 25: https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/37047811 and https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/37047830

My biggest problem with these questions, as is, is their lack of quality control. Even if we allow opinion-based questions, we should still allow closing them as blatantly off-topic (not programming related), very low quality, etc. I also dislike how downvotes are "hidden" like YouTube comments, as in they do not change the publicly displayed score. This behavior is very bothersome in that this seems to be coddling low quality/garbage content by not letting downvotes have any meaningful impact.

They need quality control. Opinion-based should not mean anything goes.

feature-request

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.

bug status-completed

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.