Timeline for What’s Next for Curation
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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60 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 hours ago | answer | added | kaya3 | timeline score: 7 | |
| yesterday | answer | added | TylerH | timeline score: 15 | |
| yesterday | comment | added | Starship | @Sinatr It obvious someone else wrote at least part of this. Hoid actually has participated in review queues and likely closure and deletion as well. | |
| yesterday | comment | added | Starship | @talex Don't worry. In this case, Hoid actually understands how the site works. It's the manager who doesn't. | |
| yesterday | comment | added | Sinatr | @talex, my first though "did this guy even uses SO?". Maybe someone else wrote what he has to post? Hmm.. I am a simple man, when someone post on meta bunch of statements and I disegree with one of them - I downvote. Suggestion: post each of statement as separate meta-post, discuss one "goal" at time and maybe it will be better received? | |
| yesterday | answer | added | EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine | timeline score: 9 | |
| yesterday | answer | added | peterh | timeline score: -14 | |
| yesterday | answer | added | Thom AMod | timeline score: 18 | |
| yesterday | answer | added | Wicket | timeline score: 10 | |
| yesterday | comment | added | talex | "this isn’t a question I am interested in" this raise a question: does SO have anyone who understand how this site works? I don't want to sound like Karen, but can we speak with your manager? | |
| yesterday | comment | added | Greedo | If duplicate questions get a copy of an answer from another question, where is the source of truth? Closing duplicates and pointing them to an FAQ means you put your votes and comments on that post and the quality can get better, copy pasting a good answer on many different questions will make it harder to improve and clarify that answer in all places. Also sometime 3 or 4 answers build on one another, would you copy all of them or just one? | |
| yesterday | comment | added | CherryDT | "Goal: We want to decouple quality signaling from the asker’s ability to receive an answer. We want to create more space to ask questions that may not be perfectly formed on their first attempt." - I.e. you want to rid Stack Overflow of its defining feature that set it apart from forums and made it one of the most valuable online resources for many years - that the primary goal of any question should be to contribute to a high-quality knowledge base and that getting your personal problem solved is a secondary goal. I'm beyond frustrated. | |
| yesterday | comment | added | Weijun Zhou | Please show me concrete proofs that you understand how curation currently works, or even how SO works. Then, and only then, can we start talking about revising or revamping curation. I'll just be blunt: Is anyone in your team (I mean the team responsible for these "proposals") an active community curator on any SE site? | |
| yesterday | comment | added | Lundin | I can't even be arsed to post a reply. Just some advice: what makes you think you will pull off this much harder project when literally every other project started in the past 2 years has become a complete fiasco and left abandoned unfinished? Discussions/opinion-based, threaded comments, AI prompt, the godawful editor, the graphic destruction project and so on and so on. Non-profit abandonware that nobody will ever use isn't a viable business model so you will be forced to stop doing these projects eventually. Coming up with new ideas how to change the site was never the problem. | |
| yesterday | answer | added | Stephen OstermillerMod | timeline score: -11 | |
| yesterday | comment | added | l4mpi | @Hoid "These are just starting points for people to think about. Feedback is welcome" - as expressed implicitly throught the question score and explicitly in multiple highly upvoted answers, the overwhelming community feedback is that whoever wrote this failed to understand how SO works (e.g. because it conflates downvotes, closevotes, and "interest"). The only reasonable way to act upon that feedback would be to retract the post, apologize to the community, pledge to properly educate the responsible staff, and come up with a better proposal afterwards. I won't be holding my breath... | |
| yesterday | comment | added | starball Mod | I don't agree that this is a duplicate of the discussion at Why isn't it required to provide comments/feedback for downvotes, and why are proposals suggesting this so negatively received?. for one thing, this relates to intentions for the company to actually change things as part of the 2026 redesign. by closing it as a duplicate, we'd just be preventing ourselves from discussing that. and there's more to what's raised here for discussion than is in the scope of /q/357436. | |
| yesterday | review | Close votes | |||
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| yesterday | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | Given the ideas outlined here I'd say that there is not much next for curation. It's not the curation I would have in mind and I would happily leave it to the company to define and implement whatever is or isn't next for curation. | |
| yesterday | comment | added | M-- | You have your plans and our feedback won't change anything meaningful. At this point, I can only hope you at least create some revenue for Prosus and won't end up killing the site altogether (you WILL kill the library of knowledge, that's given). | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | Thingamabobs | timeline score: 13 | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | Makoto | timeline score: 46 | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | President James K. Polk | timeline score: 40 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Security Hound | @Stevoisiak - How you approach a programming question is not a programmer’s opinion. Of you ask me how to determine the color of the sky, using code, there are many approaches to that problem set. If you ask me why the sky is blue that will become my opinion, not a perfect analogy, since there is a scientific explanation for the color of the sky. | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Stevoisiak | @SecurityHound A lot of questions asking how to accomplish a task are somewhat opinion based, so long as there's more than one way to accomplish the task. Hence why a question can have more than one answer. | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Security Hound | @Stevoisiak - Is it tough? I personally vote to close a question seeking my opinion, when I know the answer to the question, is going to be my opinion. | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | George Stocker | This post reminds me a lot of the Chesterton's Fence parable. It's not your fault, but you have a community full of people that are here that were around when this whole thing started, and can explain (rather well) why things are the way they are. At the very least this post conflates the reasons for downvotes vs. close votes, and there's no indication from the writing that you or the folks that currently work at SO understand that you've conflated these things. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | Rebecca J. Stones | timeline score: 0 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | pilchard | @Hoid you did present an argument for this in your previous post, and it received 27 considered answers that countered it from numerous angles (and sits at a negative total score). Making an argument and winning an argument are two different things, just as asking for feedback and then actually integrating that feedback into the work undertaken are. | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | user4581301 | I'm in favour of keeping the reasons fairly rigid and easy to explain. If you're not sure if a post meets the definition, don't vote. If it turns out that there is a persistent hole, fill it. Maybe with a rewording and maybe with a new canned reason. If there is persistent misuse or misunderstanding reword the reason. Invite the community to help rewording the reason because they're usually closer to the ground and try to reach outside the meta community because the new wording is probably going to affect the casual users more than it will the hardcore denizens. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | Cerbrus | timeline score: 70 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Cerbrus | "curation (work)flow"... So you're rewriting the tools we do have to be infinitely less effective, basically ignoring all historical requests to improve those, and instead, you're building more curation work for a community that has clearly expressed they do not want this. SE is beyond out of touch. This is absolutely ridiculous. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | Starship | timeline score: 35 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Stevoisiak | I agree that the definition of opinion-based can be murky, and I appreciate the goal of trying to address that. I worry that this approach may be heavy-handed though. I am also skeptical of such an overhaul considering how much community trust has been eroded over the past several years. | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | user4581301 | My biggest problem is probably with omnibus canonicals being used as a duplicate closure. Which of the 50+ answers will be useful to the asker? Point it out to the asker. If the question is too unclear to point it out, vote to close as unclear. It's <expletive deleted>ing stupid to tell someone with an unclear question that "Your answer is in here. Somewhere. Go dig." | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | user4581301 | Structured downvote reasons will be just as hard to get right as close reasons were. And I'd say that the canned close reasons never made it past "OK" simply because they can't. Some canned reasons are going to apply to a question reasonably well, but, maybe even most of the time it's a best fit that needs a comment or two from the voters to explain that the question really needs to the asker. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | Anerdw | timeline score: 18 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Dharman Mod | "this isn’t a question I am interested in" If a user is not interested in a question they won't open it, or simply close the page after reading it. They may also downvote it after reading, but they definitely should not vote to close. Using that as a reason to close a question is an abuse of their close voting privileges and could result in a warning from the mods. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | Dan Getz | timeline score: 20 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Richard | @SecurityHound - I'm reasonably certain that the goal is to simply maximise the number of words typed by users, since that's what the company is banking on being able to sell in future. Once you see volume as the goal, everything else makes sense; More engagement, more comments, more answers = more words | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | Dalija PrasnikarMod | timeline score: 26 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Security Hound | @Hoid - My fear, and I have been proven right in the past with nearly every change in 2025, is that instead of just improving the community's tools to moderate, the plan is to remove them. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | DharmanMod | timeline score: 26 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | John Montgomery | "We want to decouple quality signaling from the asker’s ability to receive an answer." Except when a question is unclear, it can't be answered reliably by definition, which is the whole point of closing those questions. Unless your goal is to encourage guessing? That's more engagement I guess, so it fits with everything else <s>Prosus</s>Stack Exchange has been doing lately. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | DharmanMod | timeline score: 45 | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | DharmanMod | timeline score: 36 | |
| 2 days ago | history | edited | HoidStaffMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| 2 days ago | comment | added | MisterMiyagi | I am shocked how this muddles together close votes and down votes and completely unrelated things. And somehow seems to miss why we close questions. And somehow seems to completely forget that we have edit and reopen workflows to recover closed questions. Well, no, actually I am not shocked, considering recent events... | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Thom A Mod | "Needs more focus / low quality" theses are completely different things; the former is a reason to close while the latter a reason to downvote. We don't close because it's low quality content. Sure many questions that are low quality are closed, but the reason isn't "low quality".Perhaps you've confused "low quality" with "unclear"? | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | @SecurityHound That is one of the things we would like to improve on with duplicates. It may not be able to be 100% solved, but I think we can do better than where we are today with that experience. | |
| 2 days ago | history | edited | HoidStaffMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| 2 days ago | comment | added | Dalija Prasnikar Mod | "this isn’t a question I am interested in" - Closure was never about not being interested in some particular questions. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | user400654 | timeline score: 15 | |
| 2 days ago | history | edited | Dalija PrasnikarMod |
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| 2 days ago | comment | added | Hoid StaffMod | @Dharman No, as I stated here, "Treat the below ideas as thought exercises rather than what we are married to and plan to implement." These are just starting points for people to think about. Feedback is welcome, whether you want to participate in a workshop or not. | |
| 2 days ago | answer | added | DharmanMod | timeline score: 103 | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Security Hound | “Then the asker would still have the opportunity to accept the proposed duplicate answer or leave context explaining why it doesn’t answer their question.” - Most authors don’t know enough about the subject they are asking to determine if an existing an answer actually answers their question, and it rarely will, because their question is about “red licorice” instead of “black licorice” even if you eat both one bite at a time. | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Dharman Mod | "We are early in the development life cycle with these changes" So once again, you don't care what we have to say and you are going to do what you want anyway. Why should we bother giving you any feedback? | |
| 2 days ago | comment | added | aynber | I like the idea of Off-Topic being able to route it to another site. That feature has been woefully lacking, especially since the suggestions are only available short-term and only have a few options. Would we be able to reclassify an Opinion-based question as a Discussion instead of a Question? | |
| 2 days ago | history | asked | HoidStaffMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |