New site design and philosophy for Stack Overflow: Starting February 24, 2026 at beta.stackoverflow.com

As others have expressed, this fills me with dread:

However, please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design.

(Also as others have expressed, burying this fundamental aspect of how the site works half way through a post that claims to be about "new site design" - with an implication that it's mostly cosmetic - feels like you know it's going to be unpopular, and were trying to hide it.)

I can see one of two ways this will go:

• 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.
• The community expresses its view of posts which would have previously been closed in another way - probably downvotes. This is much more harmful, both in terms of being confrontational instead of collaborative, and also losing the value of "closed as duplicate" posts which allow multiple representations of the same basic question to lead to a single place for good answers.

My guess is that it'll be a mixture of the two - and given the company's current track record, I can imagine that the next step to prevent the second outcome would be to remove downvotes, making the first outcome even more severe.

Currently, this is on my profile:

So I've visited every day for over 15 years. Whether I'm on holiday, travelling etc - I've still made a point of visiting, commenting, answering (less often over time, but not for lack of wanting to answer) etc.

If this change happens as described, I strongly suspect that by the end of 2026, I won't be visiting every day.

The opinion of the meta community at least is really clear here. Please, please change course.

please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design

Hoid, I think this needs to be expanded upon. I went through the publicly linked posts and do not see this specific change mentioned in either of them.

We know it can take time to adjust to design changes, especially when the site is so integral to many people’s workflows.

Calling this a design change is a severe understatement... I don't have the proper words for it... This is not a design change. This is the complete destruction of the Stack Overflow core feature: dedicated answers. This is like burning down the library of Alexandria.

For the last few years you (the company) have been shooting yourself in the foot. Now you are aiming for the head. If you don't reverse course the site is as good as dead.

The experiment with opinion based questions gave you a pretty good idea about what you shouldn't do. We gave you plenty of feedback. We explained with arguments that threaded replies are not good format for a knowledge base. But you didn't listen. And here we are.

This is not a new design, it's a complete replacement of Stack Overflow (and I assume the rest of the network afterwards) with a new not-quite-Q&A site.

I'd even agree that with the decline in activity a more radical change might be needed to avert the network becoming irrelevant and financially unsustainable. But I have absolutely no confidence that the company will manage this kind of change. This announcement is a good example, you're burying the biggest change the network has ever seen in a single sentence. You're going into full confrontation with the existing community instead of trying to convince people why changes like this are needed.

The current experiments around new formats are a disaster. They're a half-broken mess of poorly thought-out and incoherent changes. And then you abandoned these experiments, likely because you're trying to finish your new Stack Overflow replacement site. I have no idea what you think you learned from those experiments, but I fear you'll take the wrong lessons from them and finally kill the network for good.

The current network is too rigid and too stuck in it's ways. But you don't fix that by just removing all content curation. You fix that by convincing the community that they went overboard with the application of some rules.

Between this post and No, I do not believe this is the end it’s now clear that:

• the “community” you talk about is not this community. It’s another community that exists in Community Management Land. In my book, a community is a cohesive group of members who work toward a common goal. The only thing site users at large (the community that you’d like to will into existence) have in common is that they sometimes navigate to stackoverflow.com.
• you believe the high-quality repository of Q&A format is no longer a viable business and you are actively working to replace it. Redditification has begun. In this sense, yes, the (actual) community of curators and moderators that has stewarded the site’s original mission is no longer needed, nor are the tools they use the most.

I’m also glad that everybody can now see No, I do not believe this is the end for what it really is.

I do not trust that you have a long term vision for the site. I think you’re going nuclear because you don’t know what else to do. If you remove curation, Stack Overflow will no longer be Stack Overflow. It’ll be something else. I don’t know how it’ll fare, but I know it won’t be unique any more.

We are open to all feedback on the new design for Stack Overflow and hope to hear from you soon. You are welcome to provide feedback here on Meta Stack Overflow.

The only feedback you want to get is about GUI bugs. Do your own testing.

There's a couple of points I want to talk about here. I realise that I'm hyper focused, but they are my greatest concerns

please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design

Closure should not be going, it isn't a bad thing; especially the migration and duplicate features. Honestly, one of my biggest frustrations when searching for a problem that was well answered in the early years of the site is that there are 10's of the same question that come back in my search results, and they all have the same and different answers. I have to end up reading 3-5 (sometimes more) questions to work out what is the best for me. For recent content the close as duplicate feature removes that entirely; I'm directed to the "canonical" duplicate and there exists the vast majority of good answers.

Closure is important for bad questions as well; it's frustrating as an answerer to post an answer to then find out the question was entirely unclear and the ball game has changed. That can happen when the question looks ok; for questions that don't answers these questions shouldn't be entertained; this is how we end up with bad answers to bad questions and these aren't useful to anyone.

Migration too, greatly helps. Yes, there is overlap and there always will be, but migrating a post to a site where you're going to get the real SMEs more focused on the question the author is asking. If we are getting rid of closure, then migration needs to be opened to users for all sites, not just 5. We can, and do, get questions for other sites and they now need to be able to be migrated.

Also, for questions that have no home within the network, what does Stack Inc expect now? I can see users using the RA/Spam flags for such content, and I can agree with them; a question about what type of frying pan to use when making bolognese doesn't behind on Stack, but now users will have no options but to flag. If I were moderating at the time, I would agree with them and binding vote it.

Though I appreciate that Stack Overflow is concerned about closure rates, I do want to point out something; deletion rates. These rates have gone up over the years, however, the rate of increase isn't the insane spike we have seen lately. Way back in 2015 the rate was at about 30%, and over the next decade it managed to hit almost 50% in 2024. In 2025 that rate did initially drop, but it is now fluctuating at around 50% again. This is important as although many questions (and a percentage, see here for numbers) weren't getting closed the path to deletion hasn't changed anywhere near as drastically. This means that many of the questions that were deleted, but weren't closed, likely should have been closed, but the volume of content we had back then didn't make closure of those posts possible; there was too much. With the lower volume, the percentage of answers being closed is higher, yes, because the community is able to review a higher percentage of the content posted.

we expect that questions in the new beta experience will be displayed in a format more similar to that of opinion-based content because it we believe it expands how people engage with Stack Overflow and how content is created and shared.

Threaded conversations does not help with getting answers. As a consumer of answers on Stack Overflow, one of the best things about it is how prominent answers are; they are completely distinct from other content on the post (comments). This means finding the answers easy, and reading them even easier. If something is important to the answer, then also editing into the answer is paramount because that is where it should be. Threaded conversation actively work against this. I hate that when I do have to read a certain website with threaded replies, that I have to scroll through replies asking for clarification, replies of discussion, and other non-answer content, to get to an answer to find out that the answer was changed 4 more threaded replies later based off feedback 3 threaded answers in. ARGH!

Answers do not need a conversation to precede or succeed it; answers are your currency, your north star, your steel thread, your shining light. Taking answers away is (replacing comments and answers with replies is removing answers), with all due respect, is like removing the wheels from a car and wondering why people can't use it any more. It fundamentally breaks the site.

Although, I admit, many have reacted the open-ended content poorly, I do think that this part of the site has legs, and actually should be what you are focusing on. I've heard, from Staff, the work "Broken" be used to refer to the Stack Overflow, and that something with it is broken; I agree, but it's not the entire site. I can say, however, that open-ended content is broken, and that is what you are basing the entire beta version of the site on. Rather than focus on changing the entire site, focus on fixing the feature you introduced and abandoned; better tooling, better question types, better curation. Some of these open-ended psots really aren't suitable for the site, and would be better on a different one in the network, but they don't allow for open-ended questions. Why not? Stack Overflow isn't a Stack Exchange site anymore at the moment; so many features don't exist on other sites, and many of the ones we have (from experiments) are broken. So can't a open-ended question about Linux be asked on Unix.se? There's only one reason; you (Stack Inc) haven't provided a way for your users to do so.

Please, don't push open-ended threaded conversations on to the currency of Stack Overflow, and Stack Exchange; answers being king. This turns the sites into a very well known threaded website, and I'll be honest, if that was the type of site I wanted to contribute to, and moderate, I would do; I don't because that's not the type of site I want to participate in. Stack Overflow's goal of being a repository of knowledge is the site I want to contribute to. Such a complete reinvention of the site, to effectively copy the workflow of a very well known social media site, could (and I admittedly think will) be the death knell for the site, not the reinvigoration Stack Inc wants. Old content will remain, but I am confident in saying that the new content will not be the quality that people expect/need.

we expect that questions in the new beta experience will be displayed in a format more similar to that of opinion-based content

That experiment has been one of the worst and most destructive experiments of the last year. Why would you think this is a good idea?

I hate looking at that design. I see no answers there. Only comments. It reminds me of the problem that we had in the community before Stack Overflow arrived. Two guys have come up with a brilliant idea then to solve that problem: they created a Q&A site with heavy moderation to make this information easy to find. Maybe you could ask them how to design a successful site? Ohh wait, that's the site you are actively destroying.

However, please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design

Imagine you are running a factory which produces widgets, and you realise that you can increase the rate of widget production by simply not discarding the ones which fail QA testing ─ and you can even save money now that there is no need for QA testing. How long is that factory going to stay in business?

I'd like to make a proposal.

Run the 'new' SO as a separate independent site initially. Advertise it as such, as much as you like, and let it live (or die) on its own merits.

I feel like the company keeps making the same mistakes over and over again - alienating the community it has, in the hopes of building a community it doesn't, constantly trying experiments that fail, ignoring feedback given by folks who are in and around the community and sites every day. It's disheartening, and honestly at this point, it feels like the company isn't even pretending that our opinions on these matter.

As such, if you believe in the new SO design so much, maybe it would be good to see it live (and die) on its own merits. How would you handle organic and AI slop with lesser moderation tools? What are the pain points? How do you get folks who're engaged in the current model to accept a new one, other than by fiat?

I believe duplicate closure is one of the fundamental mechanics of the platform that pursues a worthwhile ideal- that information not be scattered (difficult to find and/or piece together) or duplicated (where applicable, difficult to maintain). Thom touches on this in their answer post, but I'd like to just dedicate this answer post to the question-

Given that closure purportedly is going away, what exactly does that mean for this mechanism for preventing scattering and difficult-to-maintain repetition of information? Is something more helpful and effective going to take its place?

Duplicate closures are one of the biggest pain points in external discourse. People often say that the duplicate targets chosen don't answer the "duplicate" question. I do believe that that means there's room for improvement with the feature design and/or how it is used (- exactly in what way, I'm not sure), but not that it should go away entirely.

The "clarification" says a whole lot of nothing; it is a classic corporate "reframing" tactic.

You originally said (and have not retracted):

_{emphasis mine}

we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design

The update now claims:

_{emphasis mine}

Removing all review queues or curation altogether is not the direction we currently plan to go.

This is a strawman. No one said you were removing everything; we know you still want us flagging spam for you. Denying that you're removing "all" curation is a deflection to avoid addressing the tools you are planning to take away.

Furthermore, saying these tools won't go away "for the time being" is a non-answer. It just repeats your original premise: the beta will be curation-free until it graduates, at which point some (unspecified) workflows might be implemented. In the meantime, yes, we still have the "old" site, but that doesn't change the fact that the future you are building is designed to exclude us.

You aren't clearing up "confusion"; you're just using more words to say the same thing while the "Library of Knowledge" is being deprecated by stealth.

We are breaking the release of the new design into three major milestones:

This description is utterly generic. Of course you're doing it like this; that's just what a transition looks like. We don't need three paragraph-long bullet-point list items, all clearly written at least with LLM assistance, to understand the concept. Please stop doing this.

However, please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design.

These are the core components of curation. It's hard to think of anything else that even really qualifies as curation, aside from editing. And there is no point to editing questions if there are no real standards for rejecting questions.

People who want to get a personalized answer to an individual question can already just use any of innumerable existing forums. They've had that option for decades, since well before Stack Overflow. (Stack Overflow exists specifically as a reaction to that model.) And people who look around for forums can find one much more specific to their question. On top of which, nowadays they have a much better chance of finding a live chat environment for assistance; Discord has done a much better job of organizing people than IRC ever managed.

Whatever AI integrations are inevitably coming to this, meanwhile, also aren't adding value. People who want an LLM to try to answer a question for them already have multiple routes to just ask directly.

In light of all of which: if there is no curated library, and the help-desk experience is not even the slightest bit novel, what is supposed to be the competitive advantage of the new beta site?

I'm actually seeing a positive side of this.

If SE really pushes through with this change, then SO will surely die, or worse, become a garbage heap akin to Quora or Yahoo Answers. Most remaining experts will probably flee in horror, which in turn will ensure that most askers will stop coming here for expert answers. Even Jon Skeet says he will end his 15-year-consecutive-visit streak if this happens.

The proposed change would thus accelerate the timeline for the death of SO, which seemed to me to be dying anyways as SE demonstrated repeatedly in the past years that they do not understand important aspects of their core product or their core community for that matter, and don't have any plans that seem likely to improve the situation. Until now SE staff came around now and then to visit SO on its sick bed and kick it to see if that improves things (spoiler: it made it worse), this time they brought a chainsaw to "improve" it and might just finish it off instead.

The good part about that is that the end result of SO turning into Yahoo Answers 2.0 seemed very likely anyways, but until now it looked like the site would die a slow death and I didn't have it being thrown off a cliff in H1 2026 on my bingo card. This faster timeline could serve as a wake-up call for remaining users, and help the various plans and projects for an SO replacement to gain momentum. A quick and ugly death of SO would probably be significantly better for whatever comes after it than yet more slow drawn-out enshittification over multiple years.

However, this announcement also describes that SE plans to make the internet significantly worse once they switch off the old design. They want to make all existing posts look like the hideous "opinion-based" threaded-comments style, which will significantly harm the experience of reading old Q+A posts with multiple answers (e.g. googling problems and skimming SO posts for solutions). So it seems like the first thing that is needed is a (possibly read-only) mirror of the existing Q+A content or at least the good parts, in a decently readable format. Luckily the CC license allows this, and the data dump ensures that the community has a way to create such a site. Getting google etc to prefer a mirror over SO might be more complicated, but there's hope that the new design will also destroy the SE search ranking...

As a side note, when I initially skimmed the announcement I misread "brand image" in the second paragraph as "brand damage". Feels like that would be the more accurate wording.

Another side note, as expressed by multiple users in various places, it feels completely futile to even attempt to discuss this with SE as most of the non-trivial feedback to designs was entirely ignored over the past years. The work on the new design seems to have been in progress for a while (otherwise there probably wouldn't be a beta out next week) and thus I would be extremely surprised if there is a more meaningful reaction or course correction by SE this time. So I see this announcement as yet another indication that it is time to move on from SE and replace it with something better.

...please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues...

I have to come back shortly from retirement for this. It's an interesting experiment and we will learn something from it. My guess is that SO will become a largely chatty place with very low concentration of knowledge. And traffic will be further plummeting because ultimately neither information seekers nor experts will want to read through all the casual chats. Nobody here will support you. In half a year you will be asking yourself why that didn't work and then maybe the reactions here will start making sense. But it will likely be too late to change anything. Everyone will be gone.

Or not. As said above: interesting experiment (but not in a positive, promising sense, more in a, this will likely once and forever prove how bad forums are sense).

And as typical for the last years, no discussion about it before.

What's the difference between the new design and Reddit?

I've always found Reddit's design to be sparse, and difficult to browse through visually. Everything looks the same. No color. Just stark, black and white. It's hard to actually focus on this. It's just a big, hot mess of text that my brain can't make sense of. I have the same complaint about a lot of recent applications too (*cough* Microsoft New Outlook *cough*).

I'm totally fine experimenting with non Q&A content, but can we please look different than Reddit?

And where does the question end and the answer begin?

I mean, after looking at it, I see 1 Answer, but again, it's just a flat surface with text. The question and answer blend together. To be honest, I had to scroll up and down a couple times because I just thought the question was really long and nobody had answered yet.

Now that I scroll up on this post, I'm realizing the author, tags, and auxiliary info used to be at the bottom of the question:

Subconsciously, I've used this information block as a clear separator between the question and answers; it was a visual anchor that I looked for when scrolling down the page. I always knew that section, followed by comments in smaller text, was before the answers. It was a flag to stop scrolling. The new design loses that visual anchor.

About a year ago, Slate (the CM) asked a question on Meta SE: What does the public really need from us? In light of the plan to shift SO's format to those threaded forum "opinion-based" posts, I'd like to remind you of my answer.

I am a moderator on Puzzling SE, the corner of the Internet which I love with all my heart. But before that, I found SO by web-search. Found it over and over and over. Until I trusted this site over all the others. Not that I ever asked a question. But the answer I needed was always just... there. Wonderfully easy to find, in a page laid out consistently, with minimal advertisements (I have never used an ad-blocker), and no sign-up wall. I could just get my answer.

SE sites had quality answers. I could trust an answer on SE, especially the higher-voted ones, to be largely accurate. If there were issues, they'd usually be pointed out in comments. In addition, grammar and spelling were generally at least fine. These baseline standards are not always present on e.g. random blogs.

To which Slate responded:

Correct me if I'm wrong - it's that the public needs us to get information out of experts' heads and into their hands as quickly as possible. Your answer values familiarity, simplicity, speed, and quality. It's actually somewhat more stringent than even a public library - there, you have to do real work to know what you want. We put what you need in your hands at exactly the right time in a way that is familiar and recognizable.

To me, SO is an institution. You were created in 2008? Well, that was the year I started kindergarten. By the time I was learning to code, you'd built up an amazing library, and one that I came to rely on. Questions. With answers. Each clearly marked, sorted by votes, curated by legions of editors. Threaded forums may drive engagement in the moment. But to the kid learning to code by Internet search? That thread is un-navigable. How am I supposed to find the answer I need when it's buried in threads I don't care for?

This is a Q&A site, built not only for askers, but for searchers. Please, please keep it that way.

("You" being the royal You, the company)

The most constructive thing I can say about this is the following:

You are dead set on destroying the site anyway, so why don't you just shut it down already and cut your losses? It sounds hyperbolical but it's logical.

The value of the site and the company always were in the output of the countless volunteers who contributed their intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. For free. Because they found the place useful and/or enjoyable. It's a self-help community.

The value of this place is distributed between the users and the dataset.

The dataset ages, loses value over time. The license on the dataset is permissive in such a way that you can't ask AI companies for money. The dataset is basically worthless to you. I hope you realize that.

The only value you could continue to squeeze money out of is the people. And those are running away from you. I don't mean the askers who used to provide the questions they're now giving to LLMs. I mean those who provide the answers. Those are leaving too. Your treatment of us has already driven many away over the past several years. This latest insult merely accelerates the trend.

With this announcement, and all the lack of responsiveness to community feedback of past "experiments", you have already confessed to not caring for the community that made this site a thing in the first place. I am honestly surprised you still care enough to make announcements. Certainly the feedback won't stop you. Has it ever?

You don't grasp what attracted people nor what kept them here. You really don't. Everyone knows it. Time for you to realize.

For years now, the company has demonstrated a consistent disregard for the community.

You clearly want to start a clone of reddit. The threaded unmoderated experiment clearly is that, a clone of reddit.

Reddit already exists, has for even longer than Stack Overflow (2005 vs 2008), so clearly SO filled a need that reddit couldn't. The world does not need a reddit clone. The world needed Stack Overflow, with its specific structure that focused people on specific problems and technical discussion, towards a technically sound solution. It also served as a place of learning and skill sharpening for many.

You can't expect us to stay put and watch as you dismantle the unique structure of this site and reshape it into a reddit clone. The community will disappear. People have no issue whatsoever simply not logging on anymore. That'll go even quicker than all the users not showing up here anymore as they're taking their technical questions to an AI.

You seem set on that though. So do us a favor, be smart, and start a new site instead of trying to warp this site into something it is not.

You can't just pick us up and set us down on a new site that's a reddit clone, but if you sell it well, maybe some might grow to like it? Eh, who am I kidding. As long as your plan is "let's be reddit", everyone will simply go to reddit instead. You have no idea what differentiates SO from reddit, or what could differentiate your proposed reddit clone from real reddit.

Now that AI has eaten your lunch, there is nothing left to do but to file the paperwork for the tax write-off. Just pack it up. You don't understand the value of this place. It's over. The end of an era. Do the world a favor and donate whatever needs donating to the Internet Archive so they can keep it on display.

Update

We’d like to clarify the announcement that review queues and question closure will not be going away for the time being.

This doesn't help. AFAIK no one has understood that the curation workflows will disappear next week. The concern is that the company have already made their mind to disappear them without explaining why and without giving a plan about how the goals supported with these features will be supported in the "new" thing.

It was obvious from the beginning that this was going to be the likely outcome of the latest discussions "experiment". I'm not buying that this was just a sudden change of heart in the past 30 days, given all signs in the experiment literally pointed to this. The goals were set far broader than the experiment could possibly reach without fully replacing Q&A, and now that's what we're seeing.

I'm not sure why it's even being announced on meta at this point, no one here (outside of people who want to watch the world burn and some staff) wants it and none of our feedback will matter anyway.

However, please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design.

By "certain curation workflows", you mean "almost all of them, for almost all users"? This isn't just a design update - it's a substantial change to how the site works.

The entire point of Stack Overflow was to get away from the broken discussion forum model. I'm old enough to remember having to wade through endless clarifying questions, "me too!" comments, etc. to find the one piece of information I needed. Quite bluntly, if Stack Overflow became just another discussion forum, I would have little interest in continuing to participate. The entire reason I read Stack Overflow is to have easy access to well-organized, curated information, and if that's no longer the case I see little value.

I already actively avoid reading "best practices" and "advice" type questions because they're useless, uninformative slop that distract me from finding real information. You have to wade through piles of garbage to find any information at all. If that's going to be the entire site now, I can't imagine why I'd continue to visit Stack Overflow at all (far less actively participate).

Also, I understand the point about threaded replies. While I think your opinion is valid here, we are still settling on solutions to mitigate this by using accepted answers to change how the content is visually presented, so there is a clear Q&A pair.

Yeah, we used to have that. Then we changed it: Outdated Answers: accepted answer is now unpinned on Stack Overflow. This move was almost-universally praised, with only minor downsides.

Reverting that evidence-based decision, for no other reason than "someone in the company thinks they have a better idea", is ridiculously foolish. That alone should be enough to set off giant flashing warning klaxons, but it's far from the only issue here.

This would also include expanding the ability for certain users to change a question's accepted answer, and possibly add multiple accepted answers down the road. This is, however, still being discussed.

It sounds like you're planning to convert all answers into comments, then re-invent the existing vote curation system for a new kind of "super-answer", functionally equivalent to current answers.

Why not simply allow non-mods to convert answers into comments, and add a feature to promote comments to answers? That's a far less drastic change, which accomplishes all the same things.

However, please note that we plan to retire certain curation workflows, such as close votes and most review queues, in the new design.

Then you will remove the essence of Stack Overflow, and what will be left will be a hollow shell of its former self. People who care about contributing to a knowledge base where you can quickly get answers to questions without sorting through forum-like fluff will leave (if they haven't done so already). I may visit this site occasionally, but only from external search engines. If Stack Overflow goes under, I hope the knowledge base will remain, publicly hosted elsewhere. (Hey, good idea -- Stack Underflow!)

Go ahead and flag this answer as not answering the question! Oops, you can't do that any more!

“No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back.” –Turkish proverb

We’d like to clarify the announcement that review queues and question closure will not be going away for the time being.

That's a bit confusing. You announced that review queues and question closure will be going away. Are you clarifying that statement or reversing it?

Are you trying to say that review queues and question closure will not be going away for the foreseeable future? The phrase "for the time being" does not fill me with confidence.

We do believe that curation is important. It has been central to what makes Stack Overflow valuable. Removing all review queues or curation altogether is not the direction we currently plan to go.

So why did you remove most curation in the opinion-based (etc) question experiment?

The review queues and question closure will not be a part of the initial release, but will be included in the scope of the overall redesign and will be incorporated as the beta graduates to general availability.

In other words, despite the enormous backlash seen in the answers and comments on this page, and your statement that you don't want to remove curation, that you are still going ahead anyway with the new beta test, even though it's not possible to perform reviews or closures on the beta site in its current state. Is that correct?

If you really want to clarify the situation regarding review queues and closures, you should probably make a fresh question. This one is still attracting answers and comments from people who appear to be under the impression that you're killing the Stack Overflow that they know and love.

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.

When I clicked "Try new site BETA", I thought I tabbed over to Reddit. Here is a list of Reddit competitors, all unsuccessful:

• Voat.co, launched 2014, dissolved 2020
• Lemmy.world, launched 2019, stagnated 2023 growing slowly as of 2026
• PieFed competes with Lemmy but has no Wikipedia article
• Imzy, launched 2016, defunct 2017. It tried to be "friendlier", paralleling efforts here to be more welcoming to askers
• Steemit launched 2017, but forked 2020
• Digg, launched 2004, declined 2010 after a "poorly received redesign". Sounds familiar? Edit: Let's see whether the 2025 relaunch can fix things
• Slashdot, launched 1997, declined 2012 after a sale
• Certain non-English clones survived, but didn't spread globally. They carved out their niche because they had a loyal userbase held back from English-speaking websites

We're on the way towards becoming Google+. Google+ couldn't compete with Facebook, despite forcibly onboarding YouTube users. Having a healthy userbase for the Network effect is very important. Making a Reddit clone will only cause all our users to flee to the real Reddit, draining the userbase.

The end is nigh.

This is effectively an announcement of the end of the Stack Overflow we loved, to be replaced by what appears to be Garbage Overflow. It was obvious this was where the company was headed when the curation-free opinion-based question experiment rolled out. So I'm not shocked.

Who should we blame? Of the many 'villains' suggested, it seems clear to me that AI killed the Stack Overflow star. During the period in which the gen AI ban has been in effect, my observation is that these AI tools have gotten dramatically better at programming. I assume that it is to these tools that the great bulk of programming questions are now being asked. Technology always marches forward, mercilessly obsoleting things as it goes. I will not resist being assimilated. Go Borg!

I will hang around to see what the site morphs into, but I doubt I will be interested in contributing to Garbage Overflow. I have tried contributing a few times to the new opinion-based questions, but my heart wasn't in it.

Thanks to everyone who made the original Stack Overflow great. A special shout-out to all the past and present moderators. You folks put in a lot of work to keep the site excellent, and while I didn't always agree with you, I always trusted you. You should all be proud of your efforts.

…we expect that questions in the new beta experience will be displayed in a format more similar to that of opinion-based content because we believe it expands how people engage with Stack Overflow and how content is created and shared…

Opinion-based content dooes not belong on StackOverflow. Questions that can be unambiguously answered is literally the entire point of StackOverflow.

Also, putting this kind of content on StackOverflow undercuts existing communities that touch on them, like codereview.stackexchange.com or softwarengineering.stackexchange.com.

And that is literally the whole point of the Stack Exchange network: focused communities that have rules.

If you try to make StackOverflow everything to everyone, you're not only defeating the purpose of SO, but you're defeating the purpose of the entire Stack Exchange network.

We are seeing positive engagement with this format

Of course you are, opinions are easy. You'd also see positive engagement from showing porn. That doesn't mean either belongs here.

If you lower the bar, then yes, you'll get more "engagement" in the short term. But in exchange, you'll get low quality content.

High expectations for the questions and the answers is what makes these sites work. Programming is hard. It requires careful thought. It's ok to ask people to think.

Your site logo looks more like a menu icon than the menu icon, particularly on mobile where we’re used to hamburger menus

The old design is far more effective at presenting them differently enough on mobile

The review queues and question closure will not be a part of the initial release, but will be included in the scope of the overall redesign and will be incorporated as the beta graduates to general availability.

I'll believe that when I see it. The cynical view on this is it looks like yet another case of pushing half-baked features live, and then not fixing them later. For example we still can't flip questions from the new bad opinion-based format to standard Q&A with answers + comments.

(In the opinion-based format, everything is an answer that bumps the question, even replies that would obviously be comments. But you don't get any notifications for upvotes on your answers so you don't know when it's getting any attention. And of course for long-term it's hard to find real answers in a sea of discussion, for questions that are real questions, not invitations to discussion. But the only selection that results in a normal question is "troubleshooting/debugging", because the people that built it claim they didn't realize that wasn't the only kind of on-topic question on the old SO. And still haven't even changed that part of the ask UI. It's been broken for several months now, making most of the interesting (non-debugging) questions use this bad format that's not good for technical questions which do have real answers. This kind of active hostility to the library of questions and answers is inexcusable. So I have zero trust that any future changes are actually well-intentioned and aren't instead going to be yet another way to degrade the site.)

We are currently in the process of rolling out and troubleshooting certain issues with the beta

Seems like the file containing all the color codes is missing, all I see is black and white