Timeline for answer to New site design and philosophy for Stack Overflow: Starting February 24, 2026 at beta.stackoverflow.com by Jon Skeet
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Post Revisions
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| yesterday | comment | added | CherryDT | The new design is missing colors and wasting my screen space with large fonts. I'm sorely disappointed about pretty much everything that was "improved" here in the last few years. I used to be quite active on SO but now I no longer feel any motivation for that. I think I'm leaving the sinking ship. | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Jorge Campos | 100% agree and this: "The site becomes garbage. Finding good questions becomes near impossible because there are so many posts that are either off-topic or so poorly written that they add no value." will then cascade to AI LLMs being trained on the poor content left on the site | |
| Feb 25 at 14:45 | comment | added | Laf | @JonSkeet This is good news then, thanks for letting us know! | |
| Feb 25 at 14:37 | comment | added | Laurie Stearn | By the looks of it hefty insights into planning and design must occur in order to prevent this site from going into a BSOD (Beta Screen of Disappointment) | |
| Feb 25 at 14:14 | comment | added | Jon Skeet | @Laf: I won't go into details (yet), but there has been the start of an interaction outside this post. | |
| Feb 25 at 13:55 | comment | added | Laf | The lack of staff's comments on this answer is concerning. Not that I am surprised per se, but after a week, I would have expected someone to have interacted with Jon, even if it was only to acknowledge his message. | |
| Feb 20 at 2:56 | comment | added | Dan Getz | A lot of closeable questions already get CV+DVs, so the problems of DVs on questions that might be salveagable can already be observed today. (I still think removing DVs, unless replaced with something that has most of their benefits, would be catastrophic.) | |
| Feb 19 at 22:10 | comment | added | user4581301 | If downvotes are gone along with close votes we kinda need to know what happens with the downthumb. If it's completely meaningless, zero curation and the site turns into mud. If the server uses downthumbs in the background somewhere to manage habitually bad posters, you're going to have nasty blow-outs when people get "managed" with even less feedback than a user currently gets. | |
| Feb 19 at 21:12 | comment | added | starball Mod | to clarify my above comment, i’m referring to the “down thumb” vote that one can cast on posts in the “opinion-based content” category- not to votes cast on any meta posts announcing that experiment | |
| Feb 19 at 20:32 | comment | added | user4581301 | Ah, but new experts will rise up and embrace the new, friendly Stack Overflow that they have always wanted. And maybe rediscover the same things the bitter, hateful old guard found. Maybe future SO will find a better balance and make curation seem less brutal to the uninformed. Maybe it will become better at informing the new-or-infrequent user so there is less hurt caused by misunderstanding. Or maybe it will become word salad that truly needs AI, not the LLM poseurs we have today, to navigate and derive any useful knowledge from. | |
| Feb 19 at 19:19 | comment | added | cottontail | More questions posted in itself is not a good thing. Having your question unanswered or somebody giving a completely off-base suggestion that sends you in a wild goose chase is far worse. SO Inc seems to assume that the experts will always be here to give quality answers but I'm not as optimistic. When the experts leave the site, SO will be truly be dead, no matter how many new questions and comments it gets every hour. | |
| Feb 19 at 17:37 | comment | added | Jon Skeet | @blackgreen: I think they're not perceived that way by at least some posters - but I hope that other posters do accept it, and certainly it's the way I perceive it as a voter. And yes, completely agree that this could end up being horrible for mods. | |
| Feb 19 at 17:17 | comment | added | blackgreen Mod | in terms of being confrontational instead of collaborative — close votes aren’t perceived as less confrontational than downvotes, but you still have a point: the other way to express feedback on a post is commenting (now “replying”). As a mod, I don’t have positive vibes about this. If the main channel to express frustration and dissatisfaction with a post is replying, there will be much more nasty work for moderators, and overall more chances to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. | |
| Feb 19 at 10:22 | comment | added | Lundin | "I can see one of two ways this will go" The third most likely way: the remaining 10% of the user base from the peak years around 2015 will simply leave - sooner rather than later - leaving behind a completely inactive site used by none. | |
| Feb 19 at 10:11 | comment | added | Lundin | @starball Every misguided experiment during the past 2 years was massively down-voted and every corresponding feedback thread was ignored. This one will not be any different. It is time to pack up and leave. | |
| Feb 19 at 9:16 | history | edited | Jon Skeet | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 284 characters in body
|
| Feb 19 at 9:02 | comment | added | starball Mod | I mean, the opinion experiment has downvotes that as far as I know, essentially don't do or mean anything. so, it's already happened :/ | |
| Feb 19 at 8:45 | history | answered | Jon Skeet | CC BY-SA 4.0 |