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user56reinstatemonica8
user56reinstatemonica8
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And there's a bigger, more fundamental question here - why is it that in recent months, the company keep blurring the line between comments and answers, when their separation is a big part of the network's USP, and at a time when your new big competitor (LLM chatbots) are popular because they serve straight-up answer-like content literally modelled on SO answers, with all the comments removed? 

Maybe I should ask that as a question.

...because it's a follow-up question, and as we all know, follow-up questions are best asked as new, linked questions so they aren't lost halfway down some other thread and get eyeballs from more people with interests more directly relevant to the follow-up question (we do all know that here, don't we, staff?).

And there's a bigger, more fundamental question here - why is it that in recent months, the company keep blurring the line between comments and answers, when their separation is a big part of the network's USP, and at a time when your new big competitor (LLM chatbots) are popular because they serve straight-up answer-like content literally modelled on SO answers, with all the comments removed? Maybe I should ask that as a question...

And there's a bigger, more fundamental question here - why is it that in recent months, the company keep blurring the line between comments and answers, when their separation is a big part of the network's USP, and at a time when your new big competitor (LLM chatbots) are popular because they serve straight-up answer-like content literally modelled on SO answers, with all the comments removed? 

Maybe I should ask that as a question.

...because it's a follow-up question, and as we all know, follow-up questions are best asked as new, linked questions so they aren't lost halfway down some other thread and get eyeballs from more people with interests more directly relevant to the follow-up question (we do all know that here, don't we, staff?).

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user56reinstatemonica8
user56reinstatemonica8
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  • if they know the answer to the question, they'll use the "Reply" button to post it instead of looking for the answers box (i.e. answers in comments, which is bad because it further breaks the "beat answer floats to the top" USP)
  • they'll get bogged down reading question comments (whereas we typically skim over the clearly-secondary comments to the clearly-primary answers, unless a particular comment stands out). While important, question comments are usually not very useful to people in problem-solving mode who landed here from search (e.g. "is this on topic" debates, clarifications of minor details of the asker's scenario, jokes, opinions, asides, etc)
  • many will never scroll down far enough to see that there even are another type of "replies" called answers. They'll see the replies end, then there's a break, another big vote chip that looks like the question at the top of the page, and it looks like a change in topic

Why would a first-time user keep scrolling down, once they've read all the "replies"?

And there's a bigger, more fundamental question here - why is it that in recent months, the company keep blurring the line between comments and answers, when their separation is a big part of the network's USP, and at a time when your new big competitor (LLM chatbots) are popular because they serve straight-up answer-like content literally modelled on SO answers, with all the comments removed? Maybe I should ask that as a question...

  • if they know the answer to the question, they'll use the "Reply" button to post it instead of looking for the answers box (i.e. answers in comments)
  • they'll get bogged down reading question comments (whereas we typically skim over the clearly-secondary comments to the clearly-primary answers, unless a particular comment stands out). While important, question comments are usually not very useful to people in problem-solving mode who landed here from search (e.g. "is this on topic" debates, clarifications of minor details of the asker's scenario, jokes, opinions, asides, etc)
  • many will never scroll down far enough to see that there even are another type of "replies" called answers. They'll see the replies end, then there's a break, another big vote chip that looks like the question at the top of the page, and it looks like a change in topic

Why would a first-time user keep scrolling down, once they've read all the "replies"?

  • if they know the answer to the question, they'll use the "Reply" button to post it instead of looking for the answers box (i.e. answers in comments, which is bad because it further breaks the "beat answer floats to the top" USP)
  • they'll get bogged down reading question comments (whereas we typically skim over the clearly-secondary comments to the clearly-primary answers, unless a particular comment stands out). While important, question comments are usually not very useful to people in problem-solving mode who landed here from search (e.g. "is this on topic" debates, clarifications of minor details of the asker's scenario, jokes, opinions, asides, etc)
  • many will never scroll down far enough to see that there even are another type of "replies" called answers. They'll see the replies end, then there's a break, another big vote chip that looks like the question at the top of the page, and it looks like a change in topic

Why would a first-time user keep scrolling down, once they've read all the "replies"?

And there's a bigger, more fundamental question here - why is it that in recent months, the company keep blurring the line between comments and answers, when their separation is a big part of the network's USP, and at a time when your new big competitor (LLM chatbots) are popular because they serve straight-up answer-like content literally modelled on SO answers, with all the comments removed? Maybe I should ask that as a question...

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user56reinstatemonica8
user56reinstatemonica8
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Have you done much user-testing of wireframes yet with first time users? Even just some quick and dirty "guerrilla testing" with 2-3 random people like your partner / relative / friendly shop or canteen worker, etc?

Because while there's a lot of nice stuff aesthetically (e.g. I like the neatly contained voting pills), looking at this has me worried:

enter image description here

First of all, I have no idea if the "Reply" button under the question would create a comment or an answer (I guess it's a comment, because I don't see another way to comment?).

But more importantly, I'd bet that most new users seeing this would understand that the "Reply" button is the way to reply to a question (why would there be some other, better form of reply hidden further down the page?), and so of course, these "replies" under the Reply button must be the only type of content answering the question; so:

  • if they know the answer to the question, they'll use the "Reply" button to post it instead of looking for the answers box (i.e. answers in comments)
  • they'll get bogged down reading question comments (whereas we typically skim over the clearly-secondary comments to the clearly-primary answers, unless a particular comment stands out). While important, question comments are usually not very useful to people in problem-solving mode who landed here from search (e.g. "is this on topic" debates, clarifications of minor details of the asker's scenario, jokes, opinions, asides, etc)
  • many will never scroll down far enough to see that there even are another type of "replies" called answers. They'll see the replies end, then there's a break, another big vote chip that looks like the question at the top of the page, and it looks like a change in topic

The distinction between small, disposable, easy-to-ignore comments and big, detailed, quality-controlled answers was a huge factor in Stack Overflow replacing forums as the place to solve coding problems, and is a major part of the appeal of the wider network for those of us who use it. Being able to skim past pages of the "Why are you even using that, bro" nonsense that plagued forums and get straight to an on-topic, well-structured couple of paragraphs that actually solves the problem was an absolute revelation. I'm worried this will be a big step in the wrong direction and in future, the quality answers (if there are any) will be buried in a nested comment thread, smothered by the kind of fluff we thought we got rid of.

Also, while I've never formally UX-tested SO or SE, I have watched first-time-user colleagues try to figure out the less-famous technical SE sites, and you'd be surprised how many people don't even make it to the answers section in the current designs. I've seen people click onto an SE page that I know has the answer to their problem, start reading the question, and give up around paragraph 3 or after skimming the question comments because they wrongly assumed they'd landed on a personal blog or Medium-like site, where one person was venting about their problem into the void. This makes it look even more like that.

Why would a first-time user keep scrolling down, once they've read all the "replies"?