Timeline for When will the opinion-based question experiment finish?
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| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 20, 2025 at 16:03 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | @NoDataDumpNoContribution I am pretty sure it's just questions, answers, comments, replies. But don't have confirmation. I don't think length is a good metric at all, we don't really use that as a measure today, so introducing it now seems arbitrary. There are 958 questions from the start of the experiment until now, which doesn't exclude deleted questions. | |
| Nov 20, 2025 at 11:21 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | @Hoid "...~10% of all content since the experiment started...." starball probably also wanted to know how you count content? Are comments included? Is it question + answers? Are replies counted as answers or as comments? Does length of pieces play a role? Should it? And one could maybe want to know different measures like comparing only number of questions not number of contents. When SEDE allows identifying opinion-based content, we can answer all these questions. | |
| Nov 19, 2025 at 19:22 | vote | accept | John Bollinger | ||
| Nov 18, 2025 at 14:52 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | Not sure what you are referring to with that 70% number, but the opinion-based questions is ~10% of all content since the experiment started. I don't believe its including deleted content, but I am waiting to hear back from the data analyst that put those dashboards together. I don't believe chat is included either. | |
| Nov 18, 2025 at 7:59 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | @Hoid Thanks for the numbers. If the majority of the 795 posted opinion-based question weren't really intended to be opinion-based it means we lost a couple of hundred good questions that cannot be answered (or closed) in the typical high quality way. It's bad, but not too bad for now. Also if only 10% of questions are posted in these new question types and most of them are even posted there wrongly, what about the 25% closed as opinion based questions (you mentioned that somewhere before)? Do people also still post opinion-based questions as normal Q&A? And are they still closed? | |
| Nov 17, 2025 at 23:15 | comment | added | Security Hound | @Hoid - My statement is still accurate. I am submitting less answers then I do 10 years ago. As for the reason I didn't submit answers in the leading 10 years, that's for very personal reasons, that the moderators and the staff are well made aware of which still has never been fully addressed through backend improvements. Of course perhaps I was forced to create a new profile because of those reasons, to avoid the harassment, that I suffered? The world might never know. I certainly won't confirm that happened. | |
| Nov 17, 2025 at 21:57 | answer | added | HoidStaffMod | timeline score: -20 | |
| Nov 17, 2025 at 20:51 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | @SecurityHound I'm starting to think this experiment is causing ripples in space-time . For you to be submitting less answers than you have in the past 10 years... you knew to stop answering a full decade earlier! Jokes aside, I hear your point about this experiment being less than attractive to engage with the content it's bringing to the site. | |
| Nov 17, 2025 at 19:08 | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | @NoDataDumpNoContribution Since the experiment began, opinion-based questions have accounted for 10.7% of all content on Stack Overflow. There is a 24-hour lag on that number, and I think that includes answers, according to one of our dashboards. 795 questions fall under opinion-based questions in total as of this writing. | |
| Nov 17, 2025 at 13:30 | comment | added | John Bollinger | @CraigEstey, some opinion-based questions are just bad questions, but I would agree that if Discussions v3 continues to operate then a means to redirect traditional Q&A questions there as an alternative to closing them would make sense. | |
| Nov 16, 2025 at 23:21 | comment | added | Craig Estey | despite the fact that it is actively causing harm by misdirecting questions that ought to be traditional Q&A into the opinion-based stream, without even a way to redirect. Yes. And, the reverse should be true. For a traditional Q&A, instead of closing the question as "opinion-based", should that automatically be converted to an "opinion based question" (or an option under the "close reason" dialog)? | |
| Nov 16, 2025 at 11:28 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | I wanted to count how many normal Q&A have been posted since the beginning of this experiment and how many new-experimental Qs have been posted to see how much damage has been done potentially (especially if the number of normal Q&As would go down for the amount that new-experimental Qs go up). Is there a way to differentiate between them in SEDE? | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 19:36 | answer | added | user400654 | timeline score: 21 | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 17:31 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | Past experiments this year were let run something like 2-3 months. However, no deadlines were given before or if they were given, they were often disregarded anyway. My best guess is that they don't know themselves how long it will to run. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 15:25 | comment | added | Marsroverr | Somehow it's even worse than discussions which I didn't think was possible. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 15:24 | comment | added | user400654 | i mean... this is just discussions v3, was discussions really revoked? | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 15:05 | comment | added | Sinatr | @ThomA, ok ok. That gives me a hope what if we create more "noise" (posts like this one), then "experiment" might be shut down. May take years though.. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 13:55 | comment | added | Martin Brown | Is there any way to filter against them? I notice that upvotes on a good reply do not add to reputation so why should anyone bother to engage with this "experiment". | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 11:35 | comment | added | Thom A Mod | The only ones I can think of were Discussions and Expert pairing, @Sinatr . I would, however, suspect that opinion-based questions are going to be here to stay. The real question is when they will be in a better position for both new community members and (long term) existing ones. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 11:31 | comment | added | Sinatr | I think it's not an experiment as "a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried". It's beta test of upcoming feature. Remind me of any experiment-called thing that was revoked please? | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 11:15 | comment | added | user4157124 | @Gimby That's what it looks like yes. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 11:09 | comment | added | l4mpi | My expectation based on other recent experiments is that it will not "finish" as much as simply graduate at some point. If we're lucky we'll get some fixes for the worst issues before then. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 9:26 | comment | added | Weijun Zhou | If you mean the stated goal is the definition for the endpoint, then I have to say it is not very well defined. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 8:36 | comment | added | Gimby | Consider that you hating it is not a problem. My pessimistic tail is banking on this becoming the replacement question format, if it sufficiently helps to bring new blood in. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 5:38 | comment | added | Drew Reese | Yeah, it needs to be done with as soon as possible. I think maybe 90% of the opinion-based questions I've seen come up in tags I watch have absolutely no interactions, the rest get comments basically suggesting the OP delete should the post and create an actual post that can be answered. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 2:56 | comment | added | user400654 | @SecurityHound but but but the number of answers per week increased by 500 if you count the replies as answers! | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 2:47 | comment | added | Security Hound | It's decrease my engagement. I mean I still "thumbs down" garbage when I come across it. Which is 90% of these questions seeking my opinion. I can't post an actual answer to the 10% since, it will just be what is essentially a comment, which does not help the community. I can tell you that I have submitted less answers since this experiment started. | |
| Nov 14, 2025 at 0:13 | comment | added | President James K. Polk | I think that what you and I call "active harm" is called "increasing engagement" to the company. I don't know if this has actually increased engagement, but this sorry state of affairs does not seem to be considered a problem by staff. | |
| Nov 13, 2025 at 23:39 | history | edited | Dale K | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 4 characters in body
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| Nov 13, 2025 at 23:12 | history | became hot meta post | |||
| Nov 13, 2025 at 22:51 | comment | added | user400654 | yea, 2 years: Discussions experiment launching on NLP Collective | |
| Nov 13, 2025 at 22:45 | comment | added | user400654 | i mean... how long did the discussions experiment last? 2 years? | |
| Nov 13, 2025 at 22:38 | history | asked | John Bollinger | CC BY-SA 4.0 |