My general impression of the "opinion/advice" questions is that they're mainly bots talking to bots, with occasional "organic" marketing paragraphs promoting some tool slipped in. They're also often a particularly tedious form of AI answer since the nature of the question means they end up waffling around the subject in vague platitudes with nothing really concrete to say.

I'm not sure if that's the inherent nature of the subject matter, or just the fact they're much less heavily moderated.

(Ironically, Reddit -- which I think is the discussion-type model that you're trying to go for -- does actually seem to have more human-written content in a lot of the programming sub-reddits, and people are often fairly good at calling out the more egregious AI slop.)

Either way, my immediate impression whenever I open one of the discussion-type questions on Stack Overflow is usually "there's nothing that's worth my time reading".

My general impression of the "opinion/advice" questions is that they're mainly bots talking to bots, with occasional "organic" marketing paragraphs promoting some tool slipped in. They're also often a particularly tedious form of AI answer since the nature of the question means they end up waffling around the subject in vague platitudes with nothing really concrete to say.

I'm not sure if that's the inherent nature of the subject matter, or just the fact they're much less heavily moderated.

(Ironically, Reddit -- which I think is the discussion-type model that you're trying to go for -- does actually seem to have more human-written content in a lot of the programming sub-reddits, and people are often fairly good at calling out the more egregious AI slop.)

Either way, my immediate impression whenever I open one of the discussion-type questions on Stack Overflow is usually "there's nothing that's worth my time reading".

Edit with some additional thoughts on the subject:

• I agree that the demand for the kind of technical question that was the core of Stack Overflow has greatly reduced so even with no barriers to asking, I understand the shift to more opinion-based question.
• There's always some tension between ease of participation and keeping a quality of content that makes it worth reading and participating. And of course not all moderation actually leads to increased quality.

If you look at the "free-discussion" alternatives (e.g. Reddit, topic-specific Discord channels) they're usually actually quite heavily moderated. Both in terms of removing low-quality content and in feedback signals like down-voting or just being rude to users that don't meet the standards.

I think their success is partly that they have variable levels of moderation. So if you find that one sub-reddit is too heavily moderated or too lightly moderated then you can trivially move to another without leaving the platform as a whole. That lets them resolve the quality-participation tension pretty naturally.

Currently I find the discussion questions here some way short of my personal quality threshold so don't really want to participate then in their current form.