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Thank you to everyone who engaged in the recent Meta post: A discussion about closed (and potentially useful) posts on Stack Overflow. This post sparked lively debate, you can see it just by looking at the mix of upvotes and downvotes, which showed a little of the tension of even having this conversation at all.

Since the post was about grey-area content, and I obviously asked something that fell into the grey area, I (in an ironic twist) got a taste of what it’s like to try to generate discussion that bumps up not just against the boundaries of what’s allowed, but also against the limits of the tools (long comment chains, edits just to respond) that don’t really support the kind of discussion we were having. I really appreciate everyone’s feedback, especially about the challenge of having these sorts of conversations on Meta itself.

But before getting into the details, we wanted to say a bit more about why we’re posting this.

As many here know, Stack Overflow is at a bit of a crossroads. Participation is shifting. More developers and technologists are relying on AI tools to get answers, raising big questions about the role humans play in sharing knowledge, and what kind of community Stack Overflow should be going forward.

This post is an effort to start a broader conversation about “where to from here?” You may have heard some ideas on future directions already, like the 3-lane highway, while the upcoming initiatives we’ve shared are tackling smaller tweaks. But as one user aptly commented: “Small tweaks to Discussion or to comments are not going to achieve ambitious goals."

This post is not about pitching solutions (yet), and it’s definitely not the last word. Instead, the goal is trying to reflect back what many of you shared in our discussion - and ask: does this ring true to you? Did I miss anything important? Are there places where your experience doesn’t match what’s described here?

The goal is to make sure we understand where things stand before we look ahead together.

General observations

Before getting into points of agreement or disagreement, I want to pause on some broader takeaways.

One thing that came through clearly is that many of you care deeply about Stack Overflow, not just as a tool, but as a shared project. A lot of time, energy, and care has gone into asking great questions, writing thoughtful answers, reviewing edits, curating content, and guiding newer users. That dedication shows, even when there are areas of disagreement.

That said, even when folks agree about what some of the challenges are, they don’t always agree on why they happen, or what to do about them. That tension is part of what makes this a hard conversation, but also an important one.

I also saw a strong recognition that moderation (both official and community-driven) is hard work. There’s not always a clear right answer, especially when questions are stuck in-between. And even when decisions feel abrupt or inconsistent, there’s usually good intent behind them - it’s just that the tools, policies, and site structure don’t always support the nuance needed.

Finally, while the original intention of the original post was to better understand how the community thinks about content that falls into the grey area, as the conversation unfolded, it became clear that this wasn’t just about individual questions. You all helped surface some deeper and fundamental challenges facing Stack Overflow: questions about what kind of community we want to be, and how we define value together in a changing landscape.

So let’s get into it.

Where folks agreed

Across the responses, several points of alignment emerged, even among people who otherwise disagreed. I see these as shared understandings to build from.

Many described asking questions on Stack Overflow as a kind of gamble. Even experienced contributors are sometimes hesitant to post, unsure whether their question will land well or be swiftly shut down. The rules can be hard to follow, not just because they’re strict, but because they keep shifting (or feel like it for some), and it’s hard to tell what’s allowed right now.

Many noted that low-quality questions often flood the site, which can drain and burn out our curation resources and risking quality.

There’s also a lot of confusion about where certain kinds of questions belong. Should they go on Stack Overflow? On another Stack Exchange site? In Discussions? Sometimes it feels like there’s no right place, especially for topics that sit at the edge between technical and architectural, or between concrete and experience-based.

Many of you noted that good, interesting questions are sometimes getting closed, not because they are low quality, but they don't fit neatly into any existing categories. One recent example, a recent post was closed despite tackling a real-world challenge others might face.

There’s also agreement that things can’t stay frozen. But there’s worry, too,  that changing too much, too quickly could dilute what makes the site reliable and focused. That worry is shaped by past experiences: some decisions by the company haven’t always felt aligned with what the community needed, and that’s left scars. It’s not just fear of change; it’s the fear of change that misses what’s most important.

Where folks (perhaps) disagreed

While many concerns were widely shared, folks didn’t always agree on why these problems happen or what to do about them. In the next section, we’ll look at where opinions diverged, and ask whether these are true disagreements, or simply different takes on shared goals.

On the site’s scope: (what questions are allowed) Some see Stack Overflow as a technical Q&A site first and foremost, where precision, strict rules, and reliability are what make it valuable. Others believe it must adapt to stay relevant by embracing a broader scope, including questions that reflect real-world developer work, such as architecture trade-offs, tooling choices, or experience-based insights, even if they stretch beyond “just code.”

On the site’s purpose: (what the goal is) Some believe the site should only aim to capture permanent, reusable knowledge, and that content outside of that creates noise and should be removed. Others want space where people can explore, test ideas, or work through situational challenges, not just get quick help (which chat might already offer), even if those moments don’t translate into timeless posts.

On policies and flexibility: Everyone wants moderation to feel predictable, fair and understandable, but there is a difference in how folks think that is best achieved. Some want policies that are strict, with little room for interpretation. Others argue for more flexibility, trusting human judgment in edge cases and allowing some grey area to stay open, letting the community vote and sort things out rather than defaulting to closure to preserve quality. Some believe flexibility can also create fairness by handling nuance, though they also recognize the risk of added noise.

On boundaries between spaces and sub-communities: Some value the clear separation between Stack Overflow, its specialized sites, and newer spaces like Discussions, seeing this as essential for keeping domain experts and topics focused. Others point out that these added spaces and boundaries between communities create more complexity in knowing where to post and may not reflect how real-world technical work flow, and they wonder if more fluidity or overlap could help people engage across topics without losing the benefit of having the right eyes on each question.

On “High Quality”: What does it mean? There’s broad agreement that clearly low-quality posts (vague, no effort, or off-topic) need to be handled quickly, as too many can overwhelm the site. But there's less agreement on what counts as high quality, especially when it comes to questions based on personal experience or exploration. While technical accuracy is important, some posts might not be perfect but can still be useful. We don't have a clear, consistent way to assess these types of posts.

So, did I capture the key points? Did I miss anything major? Are there things you see very differently? I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on these insights, especially if you think something’s missing or want to challenge any of the points above.

Before we jump to solutions, we need to make sure we agree on the right problems. Here are the hard but important questions I think we need to work through together:

  • How can we maintain high standards of quality and reliability, addressing the flood of low-quality questions, and can we also make the site approachable for experts and non-experts alike? (Building off of l4mpi’s quality-first framing)

  • How can we accommodate real-world, messy questions, potentially evolving them into Q&A as some suggest, without losing Stack Overflow’s clarity? (Revised to add NoDataDumpNoContribution’s content evolution idea)

  • What does “quality” mean for content that doesn’t neatly fit today’s Q&A model, and how can we broaden that definition to include meaningful, but not yet fully polished, contributions, without opening the door to low-effort posts? (Addition inspired by discussions about quality below)

  • How should we think about the boundaries between different spaces and sub-communities on the network? How can we preserve the benefits of focused, specialized communities and a strong sense of belonging, while also making it easier to collaborate and share knowledge across the broader Stack Exchange network?

  • How can Stack Overflow maintain a high-quality, impersonal knowledge base for users who prioritize clear, objective answers, while still accommodating the community dynamics that some feel are necessary for the platform’s success? (Based on discussion between ColleenV, l4mpi, Ian Kemp)

For now, I'd like to keep the focus on whether these are the right questions to be asking. Please add your thoughts as an answer. If we can agree on these key challenges, the next step will be to think together about possible solutions.

We’ll be publishing another post in a few days inviting you to share your ideas and proposals.

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    We seriously need to have a discussion on what is considered an MVP, even in the context of experiments. Discussions was a great opportunity to address or at least get us closer to have a place for these kinda questions. Sub-optimal features killed Discussions (not asking for much, we don't even have search in Discussions!!). On top of that, forcing broken features/experiments on it (taking away downvotes, while it could've been something like capped at -1; Or the comment experiment and its buggy UI) got us here. Not too late yet. We can take a break and launch a better Discussions 2.0. Commented May 5, 2025 at 19:50
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    In addition to "broken"/insufficient MVPs being sn issue, it might also be better to decide on what to work on with the Community (or communities). Don't just build something and then stop working on it. Commented May 5, 2025 at 20:09
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    Please don't also "just build something" without it being a clear solution to a defined problem or community need. Commented May 5, 2025 at 20:13
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    @M-- I love that you brought this up! The internal processes are definitely part of the broader pain points we’ll need to look at. It’s not just about what we deliver on the front stage (what users see), but how the backstage processes shape delivery. I’m not fully aware of all the challenges around MVPs and experiments, or the tension of product teams learning and the impact these experiments can have - this is likely something we’ll want to explore more. Edit: just seeing folks chatting about this in chat (the meta room). Please share pain points with the process and I'll stop in later! Commented May 5, 2025 at 20:29
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    A lot of these problems can be solved by healthy community doing what it does. The problem with SO has always been scale. There is no such thing as a community with a million members. We need a federation of communities that have the tools to recruit like-minded users into them, like guilds. I'd join the Quixotic Taggers in a heartbeat lol Commented May 5, 2025 at 20:42
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    @EmmaBee The problem of subjective and cultural onboarding. How do you bring someone new into understanding what is and isn't socially acceptable within a group to assimilate within it. The grey areas and expectations, and forming trust. Most groups that are too big tend to end up replacing these with formal rules and/or authorities, because they don't know each other. I'm not sure its possible to know everyone within a group beyond a hundred members. Commented May 5, 2025 at 21:47
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    @EmmaBee SO isn’t a community though, that’s my whole point. Too many people are faceless (which is different from anonymous)There are pockets of community, but the user base is too large for those small pockets to handle. You need to find a way for more people to join communities, and more communities to form. How do people find out about Charcoal or other ‘special interest’ chats? How do people find our SEDE experts to ask them a question if they don’t already know they exist? Where do the SEDE experts hang out? How do they find more people interested in learning SEDE? Commented May 5, 2025 at 21:51
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    In MMOs, when guilds advertise for new members they explain their community and their rules. They focus on PVP, or they like trading, or they’re casual/newbie-friendly. Members have to show up at 2 events a month or they are booted to make room for more active members. They all play the same game, but they focus on the aspects they’re most interested in and the amount of structure they like. They help each other learn the game. Commented May 5, 2025 at 22:04
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    An example of this I'm aware of: When I see Thomas Owens Mod posts, I've read enough of his content to think this is worth reading because Thomas Owens wrote it, when I see a mod post by blackgreen, I tend to respect the Mod diamond rather than the person. Its a very different relationship. Historically stackoverflow has tried to downplay this with focus on the content not the user, but that has lead to very strict rules. Commented May 5, 2025 at 22:10
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    @user1937198 The focus on the content and not the author is very important when judging it though. But other things, like getting someone to help you write your question need us not to be faceless. It’s kind of cool when someone well-known in the community interacts with your post. Maybe one of the Quixotic Taggers drops by and gives you some flair for your post because you tagged it perfectly. We can’t even leave a “good job!” comment without breaking the rules right now. Commented May 5, 2025 at 22:24
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    Note: M-- has started this meta SE discussion about the criteria for a reasonable MVP. Commented May 6, 2025 at 5:10
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    @l4mpi I’m not proposing that we encourage people to clutter up comments. I’m suggesting that we need constructive ways for people to be friendly and make connections. It’s annoying to me that I can’t discuss adding some accommodations for social connections without getting lectured on how we don’t need it by people who already have their social clique on SO. When we engaged with the network a decade ago it was a much different experience than someone new coming in today. SE was never as ‘just the facts’ as y’all perceive it to be. Commented May 7, 2025 at 11:30
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    @l4mpi And yet you do have a social clique. You have a group of people who recognize you and your contributions and you recognize theirs. Social connections aren't engagement farming. Those of us who've been here a long time are the boomers of the network. We have all the rep we want, our posts don't get ignored, we chat with staff, we had Winter Bash and swag. Your version of a completely impersonal SO never actually existed. The new wave coming in are the millennials who would like the same experience we had but the environment has changed & the system has not, so it's harder for them. Commented May 7, 2025 at 16:46
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    Yes, I understand that everyone gets nervous about changing things because of the relationship issues between the company and the community, but either the system adapts to changes in its environment or it goes extinct. Commented May 7, 2025 at 16:48
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    @ColleenV "I don’t see anyone with the same level of engagement replacing them" - agree, and IMO the lapse in quality standards is to blame. When I joined SO was like a jazz bar with jam sessions frequented by studied/seasoned musicians who had high standards - maybe intimidating for newer musicians who want to join the jam, but an awesome place to be both as a performer and as a listener. Now it's more like a karaoke bar where too many of the singers have bad pitch or are too drunk to sing the right lyrics. Not many self-respecting good musicians want to actively be involved in such a place. Commented May 9, 2025 at 12:58

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So, did I capture the key points? Did I miss anything major? Are there things you see very differently?

Yes, you seem to have a blind spot (maybe directed by management?) and somehow entirely omitted the fact that SO has a severe problem with low question quality. Let me just quote two parts from the top voted answer of the original post:

There has been a shift to allow unregistered users at day 1 of their programming studies to post their "hello world" questions, in order to maximize site traffic. If you tell them "the answer is actually mentioned on page 1 of your programming book" you are being rude and should be slapped in the face with a welcome wagon. Whereas it is apparently not rude to repeatedly ask unpaid volunteers inane questions that anyone, programmer or not, can answer with a minimum of research.

Overall I feel that the community has always been pushing for quality and the company has always been pushing for quantity.

And a similar sentiment is expressed in various other answers and comments.

You have an explicit point under "where folks agreed" that says

Many of you noted that good, interesting questions are sometimes getting closed

along with similar points that focus on friction while asking questions. But I don't see a single point that says anything about the mountains of trash flowing onto the front page every single day. For lots of folks the major issue is NOT that "sometimes" a good question is closed and perhaps shouldn't have been, or that it's too hard to know where a question belongs, it's that they see a hundred trash questions before they come across a decent one that warrants more interaction than a downvote and potentially closevote.

You're listing the following as a "hard but important" question

How can we make asking questions feel more approachable and predictable for users, while still maintaining high standards of quality and reliability in the content?

But from my pov that is the wrong way around, the question should instead be "How can we maintain high standards of quality and reliability, and is it possible to do so without making the site less approachable?".

With your question, the focus is "approachability", with quality being a secondary criterium. But SE has been pushing for this approachability for more than a decade now, has not presented any decent answers to your variant of the question, and has thrown curators and quality under the bus repeatedly during this time. I do not expect anything useful from your exploration of the same old "welcoming" path either because I don't see anything that's substantially different this time around, and thus I would be very surprised if you come up with something useful that was overlooked by OGs like Shog and John or even by failed initiatives like "Team DAG".

Thus I would suggest a shift of perspective, and have quality as the main focus, with approachability as a secondary criterium. Otherwise this site will turn further into "Yahoo answers, script kiddy edition", bleed more and more experts, and then lose most new coders to autocomplete-on-crack (aka LLMs). But as Lundin says at the beginning of the answer I quoted above, this is beating a dead horse as we've been having this debate since a decade, however SE seems insistent to ride this dead horse all the way to irrelevancy.

Updates to address EmmaBees comments:

the CEO shared a vision where “the high-quality Q&A lane” was a top priority, which suggests quality is important to the company.

The same CEO also had "visions" of AI enshittification and various other nonsensical things, and in general produced a lot of hot air and nothing of value from my PoV. Regardless of that, the actions of the company have mostly either shown a disregard for quality, or simply ignored the topic or handwaved it away, all in the name of improving engagement. So I would agree there's a disconnect "between what the company says are priorities vs how those priorities are being carried out in practice". And to put it more bluntly, I don't care what your CEO says and nowadays I don't even read the CEO blog posts because time and time again they turned out not to be worth my time (either it was just hot air from the outset or it turned out to be empty promises).

It seems to me that posting on Stack Overflow can feel daunting for both new users and experienced ones, and some people go out of their way to avoid posting at all. It makes me wonder how a knowledge base can best handle that kind of challenge

I do see that mostly as a feature, not a bug. As you say, SO is a knowledge base. It already contains a LOT of knowledge, and people asking questions which have no place in a high quality knowledge base is the biggest problem in terms of quality.

Some extremely basic questions can have a place here but many of the questions being asked in practice will never be relevant to anyone but the OP, and even OP might not care about the answer anymore tomorrow (think x/y problems, localized debugging questions, other brainfarts). Other questions have been asked literally thousands of times already in some variation and asking a new variant just shows that the person asking has neither a clue nor a willingness to google and no respect for other people's time either, e.g. Java NPE questions (almost all of them can be answered with "some object in your code is null and you try to do something with it, make sure the object is not-null before using it").

All that is to say, having friction for asking questions can be a good thing. IMO for basic questions, we need MORE friction, not less, because most new basic questions that hit the front page are not fit for inclusion in a knowledge repository.

I absolutely agree that “catering” by lowering standards isn’t the goal, and quality must remain priority.

That's great! Sadly you seem to have missed the last decade or so of SO history because throwing quality under the bus already happened, repeatedly, and was doubled down on. Looking at your account it seems you've only been here for a bit over two years so it's expected that you don't know the history, but that means you're missing 10+ years of context which I won't (and can't reasonably) summarize here. The company burned lots of goodwill and various other things such as the two most-respected CMs (Shog and John Ericson) in this time, and changed from a development and governance process that put community input front and center to a process that mostly treats the meta community as an afterthought and sometimes even as a hostile entity.

I guess overall this all boils down to different goals from the company and the community. Prosus bought SE for 1.8 billion dollars and of course they primarily care about getting a return on their investment, so they want more engagement, more ad impressions, change the ad policy to allow more obnoxious ads, push half-baked ideas like AI assistants or sponsored collectives, restrict the data dump to try to secure an "AI training data" revenue stream, and so on. Most of the community wants none of those things and at best tolerates them to some degree because they recognize the company needs to make money somewhere. So from that pov it's entirely expected that content quality is nowhere near the top of the priority list of upper management, even though that is probably short-sighted.

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    I appreciate you calling this out! I think my post alluded to this dynamic, but I agree that I didn’t call it out explicitly enough. I'm going to ponder your answer for a bit to think it through, but to clarify something, did you mean to say "without" in your suggestion of what the question should be? "How can we maintain high standards of quality and reliability, and is it possible to do so without making the site less approachable?" Commented May 7, 2025 at 17:33
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    Okay, back. One thing I’m trying to understand is whether you see the company’s goals and the community’s goals as fundamentally different, or if there might be something else at play. Example, the CEO shared a vision where “the high-quality Q&A lane” was a top priority, which suggests quality is important to the company. At the same time, the community often feels like quantity takes precedence over quality. I'm wondering if part the disconnect might be between what the company says are priorities vs how those priorities are being carried out in practice. I could be wrong, what do you think? Commented May 8, 2025 at 1:11
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    I’m also curious, when you think about approachability, do you see it mainly in terms of catering to day 1 questions (like beginner-friendly or homework help)? Or do you think the concept of approachability could be broader, potentially including a wider range of users (experts and newcomers alike)? It seems to me that posting on Stack Overflow can feel daunting for both new users and experienced ones, and some people go out of their way to avoid posting at all. It makes me wonder how a knowledge base can best handle that kind of challenge, curious what you think. Commented May 8, 2025 at 1:32
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    @EmmaBee If I may interject - when I think about approachability, it's usually in the context of onboarding. The language of "catering to day 1 questions" is worrisome; the point isn't to lower our standards so much as teach new users how to meet them successfully. A lot of the how-tos are locked behind Help Center articles or Meta FAQs, where new users will never even see them. Better onboarding - something like what Codidact has, maybe - might help new users write better-received posts without compromising quality. Commented May 8, 2025 at 2:24
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    Of course, thanks for jumping in @Anerdw! The language of "catering to day 1 questions" is me quoting from l4mpi’s answer above, who is quoting another Stack Overflow user. I’m trying to unpack what’s meant by "the focus on approachability." I think the tensions I raised, like experienced or skilled users feeling hesitant to post, unsure whether their question will get closed, are part of what I mean by "approachability." Onboarding can help new users, but there may be an inherent question about how welcoming or approachable the platform feels across experience levels, not just new users. Commented May 8, 2025 at 2:58
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    @EmmaBee It's not so much the "day 1" part that makes me worried; it's the "catering." One of the big reasons why this site is "unapproachable" is because we try not to cater; we downvote, close, and edit low-quality questions regardless of how new the user is because quality is the number one priority on this site. I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing; the unapproachability comes in great part from communication about the quality-first model (as well as what "quality" even means). When the problem is communication, onboarding pops out as a great way to promote approachability. Commented May 8, 2025 at 3:22
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    @Anerdw Thanks for clarifying. I absolutely agree that “catering” by lowering standards isn’t the goal, and quality must remain priority. Your point about unapproachability stemming from poor communication of the quality-first model is important, AND I hesitate to say "better onboarding" is the complete solution to unapproachability. It IS 100% PART of it. But it also seemed clear from the discussion that systemic factors, like closure policies, rigid rules around what's allowed also contribute to hesitancy for all users, even those who may know how to write questions. A little of this & that. Commented May 8, 2025 at 5:13
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    I've updated the post to fold in your framing question, @l4mpi. Commented May 8, 2025 at 5:14
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    @EmmaBee I added a section addressing various points from your comments. Commented May 8, 2025 at 13:15
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    Appreciate the added thoughts! On friction: it's a good reminder that not all friction is bad, sometimes it’s protective and valuable. The challenge, though, is finding the right kind of friction, enough to ensure questions are well thought out, but not so much that it discourages participation altogether. It's a delicate balance, but ultimately, I do see the shared goal of keeping Stack Overflow a valuable space for high-quality content while still encouraging the right types of contributions. Commented May 8, 2025 at 21:04
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    @l4mpi another musing for today, after reading Colleen's answer, that I would like to pose back to you: I wonder if we really have a shared definition of what “quality” means here (company < > community and community member < > community member), or if part of the challenge is that we might need to start by clarifying that together. Do you mind sharing your definition of high and low quality above? Commented May 9, 2025 at 14:32
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    @EmmaBee the comments by user1937198 below Colleen's answer are a good starting point. Defining what is HQ enough is not always easy, but for many LQ questions it's simple and often boils down to OP being out of their depth. E.g. Qs answered in chapter 1 of any coding book, errors solveable by reading and understanding the error message, questions missing critical parts of the code or error message, "please do my (home)work" requirement dumps, etc. Often those posts at best help one person and are then obsolete and thus not fit for a knowledge repo (but may do harm by muddling search results). Commented May 12, 2025 at 14:44
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    @EmmaBee also my personal pet peeve, editor questions, specifically, visual studio code questions. Way too many of them boil down to a bug in VSC or some plugin which means the best answer SO can give is "open a bug report" or "don't use that plugin"; not useful and obsolete once patched. I've recently seen one which was asking about a minor visual issue in a repl, like, the prompt had two sets of square brackets around it instead of one. That felt more like a social media post than a real question, OP didn't have an actual problem but wanted to ask about that weird thing they saw... Commented May 12, 2025 at 14:51
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The problem in a nutshell is how a volunteer community can keep quality high without driving new users away, while still attracting new volunteers and not burning out active users.

  • How do you stop interesting questions from being closed? Someone who knows how to bring a question on-topic and has some knowledge of the topic collaborates with the author salvage it.

    • When a site is getting hundreds of questions a day, making sure that a person with an interest in the topic that also has the knowledge and ability to help the author bring it on-topic is a challenge.
    • Tags aren't cutting it because askers have too many tag choices. There should be labels that group content for finding related posts and they should be added by experts (maybe with the help of some sort of automation).
    • There should be a way other than tags to bring a question to the attention of people who have an interest in that topic. Something where users subscribe to topics and askers "publish" their question on that topic. New topics are created with intention and advertised. (Yes, like RabbitMQ :))
    • People who are not experts in the topic get to decide whether the question is interesting even though it is not for them. Maybe better targeting of questions will help, or maybe we need to sort review queues by topic instead of relying on people to choose to use tag filters.

  • How do you stop the flood of low-quality questions? Give the community the tools to gate-keep. Not everyone is entitled to an answer. A question is a contribution to the site. If it doesn't meet standards, it doesn't belong on the site.

    • If an author doesn't care about meeting the standard for what we're doing here, the people who do care are harmed by losing the resources they're taking up and we should drive them away. The people who come to Stack Exchange to look for answers seem to me to be a much bigger group than the gimme-the-codez group if we're worried about ad revenue. Questions per day isn't the only KPI we should care about.

  • But if we gate-keep we might not have enough volunteers! Give people multiple reasons to want to engage with the site and care about quality standards, and disincentivize engaging with the site in ways that detract from the mission.

    • Too many people get their questions answered without meeting quality standards. Low quality questions aren't closed fast enough, and people who answer low quality questions with a good quality answer have no downside because punishing good quality contributions is counter-productive. I don't have a better answer for this other than highly engaged curation and some sort of speed bump like the Staging Grounds.
    • There is not enough reward/recognition for curating, and the curators are not correlated enough so the task can be very frustrating. We need more feedback on how aligned our perception of the quality threshold is with other users. Meta discussions are not timely enough. Private statistics on how what we do relates to other people may help. How many questions did I vote to close got closed? How many were reopened? How many questions did I upvote that got closed? etc. Badges are fine but not very visible achievements.
    • Reputation as an incentive to participate loses effectiveness after a certain privilege level is earned. We should make reputation a currency users can spend separate from earning privileges or transferring it to someone else through bounties so there is incentive to keep earning it. It could be profile flair, cosmetic awards for posts we appreciate, chat emoji, or similar things that don't impact privilege levels on the network.
    • Many people get satisfaction from grouping together to accomplish a shared goal until the group gets too large and they start to feel more like a cog than a team member. We already have some cross-network groups that formed for specific purposes, like Charcoal did for spam fighting. Give people the ability to form groups on the network that have leadership, rosters, dedicated chat rooms and some way to be identified as part of the group. And give the Charcoal folks some sort of badge for their profile so they can be appreciated :)

  • Asking a well-scoped question is hard. The person with the least amount of information is trying to get their question scoped down to something relevant before it is closed and disappears from people's attention. There's a point where the amount of work to get someone's question into the space between requiring an extended discussion among experts about the trade-offs and just needing a pointer to the correct documentation is prohibitive.

    • The Staging Ground is a good step, but it doesn't really reduce the amount of work or keep people from getting frustrated (Can you just answer my damn question instead of getting it in shape for it to get answered by someone else weeks from now?)
    • Sometimes I wonder if we should just answer their question in the staging ground and write up the question and answer in a way that fits the "build a library" mission once it's resolved. Maybe some of these questions are actually multiple SO style questions.

OK this is long enough, and I'm out of time again. Maybe more later.

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    Thanks so much for taking the time! Something I have been pondering this week, reading @l4mpi's answer, and now yours is what do we TRULY mean when we say "low quality"? My original question on Meta was about the kinds of questions that get closed today but might still be valuable, the content is interesting, it could spark useful discussion, could be useful in other ways. I’m curious: when you talk about “low quality,” are you including those types of questions? Or are you mainly thinking of things like super low-effort questions? What exactly goes in your “low quality” bucket? Commented May 9, 2025 at 14:29
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    I wonder if we really have a shared definition of what “quality” means here (company < > community and community member < > community member), or if part of the challenge is that we might need to start by clarifying that together. Commented May 9, 2025 at 14:31
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    @EmmaBee There's a non-controversial bucket, and then theres grey area. Looking at the recently closed questions, we have requirements dumps where there has been zero attempt to refine the problem or understand it, and are asking for what is potentially weeks of work. Then we have debugging questions where its clear the OP has no idea whats going on, and really needs personal teaching, not a question answered, A few IT support questions. Commented May 9, 2025 at 14:36
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    At a bare minimum to pass the bar of quality, we expect question askers to understand their own question, and what the topic of the site is. A significant proportion of questions asked do not meet at least one of those two requirements. Commented May 9, 2025 at 14:40
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    Yes, I think the people who need of basic teaching are to me perhaps the clearer case and yes, let's solve the "questions should aim to be minimally answerable at least". Its really the gray area that I want to poke at, because"quality" there is less clear cut. I feel we are bit of a library and a book publisher in one: so do we reject a draft outright because it doesn’t meet the polished standard, or do we have a process for helping it evolve into something valuable or maybe fade away if it turns out not to be great? And are we even aligned on what counts as a “good book”? Commented May 9, 2025 at 14:46
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    A recent example I came across: richardcocks.github.io/2025-05-08-CoreWCF.html - to me this is an example of maybe a a scrappy first draft of a new book showing up in our library/book publishing house, it started rough, maybe messy, but it covers a topic people may want to read about or that may be useful to others facing similar challenges. But we have no place for this book to evolve into something fit for the library, and that seems.... maybe not great? Or how do you see it? Commented May 9, 2025 at 14:51
  • Theoretically, that is what staging ground is supposed to be, and I don't know if you've seen the proposal recently about offering a path for closed questions back to staging ground. But on the other hand the staging ground really doesn't scale due to the amount of time/effort required and its a luck of the draw as to whether your question will be given a chance there. Commented May 9, 2025 at 15:07
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    @EmmaBee It is a combination of people not being correlated on what the standards are, people who are expert programmers but not in that topic trying to judge relevancy (hold on, let me exhume and kick my dead SO-is-too-big horse), and the question "it's not therefore clear what to do in this scenario when WCF appears to not be suitable" not being refined down to something that has an answer that fits within the SO mission. To me, it looks like he's asking for someone to give him design advice, not for the answer to a specific question. I get paid a lot by my employer for that. Commented May 9, 2025 at 15:07
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    @user1937198 which proposal is this? "if you've seen the proposal recently about offering a path for closed questions back to staging ground" Commented May 9, 2025 at 17:50
  • @EmmaBee meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433784/… Commented May 9, 2025 at 17:52
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    @EmmaBee "But we have no place for this book to evolve into something fit for the library..." We have reopening of closed questions. Everyone can edit everything. Although as editor it always feels like a second class author even if you make the difference actually. Of course one could also take the content, create a derivative and publish as new question, but few people follow this path. We are just not good at merging content together or evolving content like Wikipedia for example. We create artifacts associated with a few people only. Maybe if question and answers weren't so separated... Commented May 11, 2025 at 14:58
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    @EmmaBee Duplicate merging is another place that could be very powerful towards making larger more dynamic knowledge pools, but askers almost always see duplicate flags as criticism rather than pointers to relevant discussion of their problems. Also currently duplicate targets don't link back to questions closed as duplicate which is a shame since some of the closed-as-duplicates do have good additions to the discussion but get left in the cold. Commented May 14, 2025 at 22:54
  • @pilchard The biggest problem with duplicate closures is that they link to other questions, not to the answer that addresses the question being closed. I found myself having to leave comments to the author to explain which part of the duplicate question I thought would help them. Commented May 14, 2025 at 23:00
  • @ColleenV I've had similar issues and often share the answer link as well as the duplicate flag. That being said I think certain posters don't have the patience to read/research before asking (the reason they asked a duplicate in the first place) but just read the accepted or top answer which on canonical duplicates is just the tip of the iceberg. But this can also the issue with discussion models... Commented May 14, 2025 at 23:45
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How can we make room for real-world, sometimes messy questions, without losing the focus and clarity that make Stack Overflow valuable?

Label them accordingly. Is the question asking for opinions? We will want to know that in advance at least.

And give them time to polish their content a bit. There is such a thing as more messy than needed. Often enough messy can also be translated to lazy. If this is the case we shouldn't make too much space for lazy questions.

How can we make it feel safer and more predictable to ask questions, without lowering the overall quality or reliability of the content?

The staging ground should make people feel safer. In the end it's just a period without votes or closures (but also without answers) and could be integrated more.

The name of the question asker doesn't need to be printed so prominent next to the question. Who cares who asked it except for the question asker him/herself?

We could also as a sort of convention add a bit more friendliness on top of critical comments, kind of acknowledge that we are all humans and all make mistakes.

And instead of closing, items could just be moved to another lane (discussions or whatever) if they don't fit Q&A.

And nobody ever said that discussions cannot look more like Q&A in the end.

What balance of structure and flexibility best supports problem solvers, helpers, and curators, across both narrow and broad technical questions?

I like the two approaches of comments where many things work and questions/answers where really every word counts (more or less). One gives structure, the other flexibility.

How can we balance the need for specialized spaces with the benefits of a more unified, cross-cutting developer community?

Sorry, didn't understand that completely. You mean why do we need different content formats (Q&A, comments, ...)? Because they are more efficient, the right format for the right topic. If developers don't understand this, then they are selfish and forget that others want to profit from that knowledge too. We don't want to go back to just a forum.

It could all be more integrated and more flexible at the same time but would require people to be able to filter and have their own views on the content.

Example: Person X applies for creating a new content node, marks it as knowledge type instead of discussionary type and submits it to the staging ground. There other people might ask for additional information, check for duplicated comment or advice to use a different comment type. After graduation, the content node is officially part of the network.

Another example: Everything is a discussion at the beginning and people can vote to promote a discussion to Q&A if it fits the criteria.

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    Thanks for the answer! Can you say more about this? "And nobody ever said that discussions cannot look more like Q&A in the end." Curious what you mean by "look like Q&A" - is this about look and feel of Q&A and Discussions being the same? Or are you saying Q&A and Discussions don't need to be separate spaces? Or something else? Commented May 6, 2025 at 20:59
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    "Sorry, didn't understand that completely." -- I rephrased the question above. Hope that is more clear now! Commented May 6, 2025 at 21:00
  • "Or are you saying Q&A and Discussions don't need to be separate spaces?" Thanks for the comment. What I mean is that they could in principle have the same UI and still serve different purposes. Currently they look different and they are used different. However, they could have the same elements (questions, answers, comments) like the main Q&A and still allow different contents, that wouldn't be allowed in normal Q&A. I understand that discussions have a different purpose than Q&A, but I don't really understand that discussions have to look exactly like they look now. Maybe the ... Commented May 6, 2025 at 21:28
  • ... the elements can be more unified across the different content lanes and I don't mean their visual impression but how they work. As an analogy: there are cookbooks, comic books, tabloids, ... but it's all only letters on paper. Still, it's easy to realize what kind of content you see in front of you. @EmmaBee Commented May 6, 2025 at 21:30
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    @EmmaBee "Or are you saying Q&A and Discussions don't need to be separate spaces?" I thought about it and yes, that's what I wanted to say (depending on the meaning of spaces). Maybe everything gets easier if we have only one content type (that is configurable) and that can be promoted (to Q&A) or demoted (to discussion content) on the fly. Commented May 6, 2025 at 21:35
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    "In the end it's just a period without votes or closures (but also without answers) and could be integrated more." Just saying it again: Staging Ground questions are implicitly already closed - blocking answers is what closure is about. Commented May 7, 2025 at 20:46
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution it's interesting that you bring up "Everything is a discussion at the beginning and people can vote to promote a discussion to Q&A if it fits the criteria." that is an idea I have been thinking about, where we move from a place where knowledge grows into the library, rather than a place where it must arrive ready for the library. Do you see this idea as a controversial take or one many in the community would be curious to explore? Karl, I am also curious about your take on this idea. Commented May 8, 2025 at 18:45
  • @EmmaBee Unfortunately I don't know what others are thinking. I think it would be worth a try. Best would be if there is a very clear path from discussion to Q&A and if the expectation is that the maximum of possible Q&As is created in the end. Closing would then just mean demoting to discussion and that might be a release for everyone. I can imagine that people would grow to like it but I'm not sure. Commented May 8, 2025 at 19:06
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    I see the value in the idea of Discussion -> Q&A (and perhaps the Staging Ground should already be doing this somewhat), but I also see most vague/low-quality questions that would benefit from this being asked by users that don't follow up once they either have an answer or feel snubbed by the comments on their question. I often vote to close for clarity, but never see the asker edit the question to improve clarity, so the close is permanent instead of being a moment to refine/further understand the problem. I guess I wonder how many come to learn and how many just come for a one-time solution Commented May 14, 2025 at 13:03
  • @pilchard That existed right from the beginning. Starting as a discussion and only when the question is clear, promote to Q&A reduces the need to cycle between closed/open... It might just be the more agreeable workflow. Commented May 14, 2025 at 16:13
  • @NoDataDumpNoContribution I agree in theory, but wonder if askers will have the requisite engagement to follow through, or will just move on once they have a 'working' solution in discussion. I think invariably it will come down to rep/incentive-model which is a tired discussion even though it's been stuck in an unbalanced place for a long time now, largely because of "approachability". But I would be happy for non-closure tools to prompt question refinement (outside of endless comment threads) Commented May 14, 2025 at 22:46
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    @pilchard I think it comes down to resist the temptation to answer questions in comments and focus on making them answerable first instead. A bit like staying ground only more integrated. And if askers don't want to go with this, Q&A as we know it will be dead anyway. No clear question, no value. I'm not here to chat with single persons. Polishing content though once it's clear that it's answerable, that I could do. Commented May 15, 2025 at 4:41
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    Ah, I missed it earlier. "that is an idea I have been thinking about, where we move from a place where knowledge grows into the library, rather than a place where it must arrive ready for the library." This is an idea with fantastic potential, and something I have even explicitly designed around in my own ideas for a new ground-up Q&A-adjacent site. But for this to work, it must have explicit technical support, the content must be explicitly moved into the library (whether by some form of direct "promotion" or by editing etc.) and new prompts must not start on the library side. Commented May 17, 2025 at 21:03
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    Which is to say, the site UI would have to be designed around people starting in the non-library area unless they have already proven themselves to know better (and be able to write a self-answered question that meets standards). Even a properly asked question that actually needs answering, should start in a place where answers can be filtered through first; the way other people initially try to answer may highlight faults in the question's scope or organization. Commented May 17, 2025 at 21:04

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