What’s Next for Curation

Why do you conflate downvotes and question closure? These are two different mechanisms with totally different purpose!

Downvotes are a way of ranking content. It is a signal to other viewers whether the question is worth opening and reading.

Question closure is a way of telling the asker that their question cannot or should not be answered on this site. They need to make a significant edit before they can receive good answers.

Last week in the beta announcement, we mentioned that we had a desire to move away from question closure as a primary curation tool.

Yes, you did. You subsequently ignored all feedback, then posted this.

It's clear SE does not care about the community. Curation is seen as a hostile hindrance, to be shoved away into a corner. It's clear SE has made up its mind. It's clear this is only being posted so SE can tell their shareholders that they "communicated" with the community, while trying to keep this sinking ship afloat.

A plan so completely out of touch with how the website actually functions, I wonder if anyone involved has ever asked a question on SO, or touched the review queues.

Needs more focus / low quality

So these closure reasons no longer block answers? Sure, let's open the floodgates. Who cares what the quality of the question is? At least they've got a chance to receive an answer, right? The value of SO isn't in getting a quick answer at all costs. It's repository of knowledge SE seems to be determined to turn into a heap of trash users will have to wade through.

Structured downvote reasons

SO has always been strictly against attaching reasons to downvotes.
How does SE expect this to function? People don't downvote nearly as much as they should already, so don't tell me it's going to be some kind of mandatory option you need to pick if you want to apply a downvote. That's horrendous UX and will kill any incentive to vote.

If that is how it works, do the same for upvotes. If downvotes require a reason, upvotes should be treated the exact same way. Don't just hobble downvotes because they're "unwelcoming".
Low quality content, that is unwelcoming.

Different viewing modes.

What possible incentive would users have to continue curating?

Opinion based

Again, SE seems just to want to open the floodgates. More content does not equal value. It's trash to be sifted through.

Duplicates "We would also offer a curation flow"

Sure. Burden burnt-out curators with more ineffective work. Automatically importing a dupe target's answers is incredibly unreliable. More often than not, dupe targets' answers aren't exact answers to the duplicate question, and require the context of the dupe target's question. Duplicate targets often ask and answer the same concept, but can not be taken out of context.

The problem with duplicate closure is that users just want an exact, tailored answer. They're lazy. They don't want to learn. They want to be served.

Off-topic

SE is way too large to allow any form of automatic migration / linking to other SE sites. These SE sites all require specific domain knowledge, and more often than not, these migrations already do not stick, becasue the question itself is just bad.

Next steps We are early in the development life cycle

Well that's just grand.

SE made a plan to completely upend their website. They pretend to take feedback, but it's painstakingly obvious SE isn't here for feedback.

This is just an announcement that it's going to happen, regardless of what the community thinks.

Frankly, I can't wrap my head around how completely out of touch this whole process is.

• A superfluous redesign that blindly applies the latest design fad.
• Curation being upended in a desperate attempt to hold on to low-value content.
• Meta announcements under the guise of "seeking feedback".

I never imagined I could be this disappointed in this website.

All of your "Curator Experience" bullet points read like a task list to me. If you're setting the expectation that a curator works this way, the curator should also set the expectation of their hourly rate.

Seriously, you expect the average volunteer curator to do

• explain downvotes on their own (something curators have already universally rejected doing)
• hide questions which haven't got any feedback/input (which already happens if a question is downvoted enough)
• take on the burden of classifying questions on their own (and there's already more than enough flak over re-tagging a question, so we're just gonna keep doing that thing that already annoys certain people for whatever reason)
• add context to a duplicate link (which...already exists plenty with the current flow)
• allow an OP to insist that this time, their NullReferenceException is different (and only once in about every 3,000 times have I seen or reopened one of those questions with a gold badge that I've closed because it actually was, so...this flow does exist)
• send questions to other parts of the network when the vast majority have explicitly rejected migrations from Stack Overflow because it's not suitable on their site either

...all for free??

I honestly don't know what to make of this. It's like, avoiding the last decade-plus of Meta because, instead of taking what was discussed there as community perspective, useful context for improvement and the convention on which curators move with, you're saying it's a new dawn and we've gotta do something radical to shake things up, so all the things that made the curators you have now need to be thrown out. (That'll probably scare off the few remaining curators, y'know.)

This sentiment also feels divorced from reality, again:

We want to take each close reason and move it towards a curation workflow that fits in more reasonably with Stack Overflow today. We want to differentiate “this content doesn’t belong on Stack Overflow” from “this isn’t a question I am interested in,” which is different from “this is high-quality content that is worth promoting”. We want tooling that lets those signals exist independently, and we want curator input on what that actually looks like in practice.

If you can find one example of a question which was closed because the curator wasn't interested in the question, then just reopen the dang question and discipline that curator, because that has never, ever, ever been a valid reason for a question to be closed.

Questions can be downvoted simply because it's hard to understand what's being asked, what the problem actually is, or because the question doesn't make contextual sense and wouldn't bring future value, which - I must stress again - is not the same as "I don't like this question".

It's tough to deliver a solution that works if you're not understanding the problem space or domain you're meant to be solving. That's probably why much of the posting here seems to be geared to helping all y'all get back on track, from our perspective, on what we're expecting this to be.

But maybe it's the other way around. Maybe we're the ones in the wrong here. Despite what we've been posting about here on Meta, despite what we've pleaded and recommended, and how we wanted to work together, maybe you have a clear and decisive picture of the domain you need to move toward, and maybe we're the ones who are obstinate.

Either way, I don't think the curators voicing their thoughts here and the company's vision are aligned. No matter how we got here, I think that's what's going on right now.

Feels like this stalemate's been going on for as long as I can remember, and nothing's going to improve if no one does anything to break the stalemate.

This creates a much stronger feedback signal. Rather than wondering if your duplicate suggestion was helpful, you receive a clear data point. If an author does not accept the proposed answer, it signals to curators that the question may have a unique nuance that requests a new distinct answer.

The thing is, we don't care about that. When we close a question as a duplicate, it's because we are 100% sure that the answers in the linked question are the best solution.

There have been situations when users applied too broad criteria for determining if it's a duplicate or not, or used a too generic duplicate target. But that's not the fault of the system.

What happens if the question asker disagrees that their question is a duplicate? Should they vote to reopen? How is that different from what we have now?

This is a giant pile of weasel words, and sounds exactly like yet another company bait-and-switch. Let's keep in mind a few facts:

1. Most closed questions are not going unanswered because we've closed them. It's the other way around, we've closed them because they are unanswerable. While it's true that some opinion-based questions are answerable, those are not the majority of closed questions.

2. Your opinion-based questions experiment has eliminated all closure reasons, and many of those questions are unanswerable. That helps nobody, including the asker, and just pollutes the site. You're going to claim that it's just an experiment, that it's not the company's vision of the final design, that you are looking for input, etc., but from past experiments and the carefully tuned noncommittal language here, I don't believe you. Your opinion-based questions experiment could have simply eliminated the 'opinion-based' and 'asking for off-site resources' closure reasons and kept the rest of the closure reasons and process. In other words, if you really meant to keep curation around, then that's what your experiment would have done. It would have been much easier to implement.

Our long-term vision is smarter backend routing. A system that identifies where a question would be best suited, whether that be adding certain tags or considering other Stack Exchange sites. In the near term, we are consolidating off-topic flags into the existing flag workflow. This reduces the number of clicks and menus you have to navigate and removing the friction and redundancy currently found in the off-topic sub-menus.

This sounds like a good idea on paper, but have you done any research into it? There's a reason why moderators decline most requests for migration.

The network doesn't have a dedicated site for every question. Some questions simply cannot be answered by the community. For example, many cloud questions (Azure, AWS, etc.) have been closed as off-topic, not because they belong on a different site in the network, but because they can only be answered by the cloud provider and that information is fully in their control. Answers provided by community members could be unreliable and cause the information seeker to suffer financial repercussions.

This reason has also been used for posts that cannot be categorized as anything else. Things that aren't questions or requests for knowledge. Posts that do not belong on any Q&A site. Even the most intelligent system could not route it to a place where it belongs. Sure, they could be dealt by asking the mods to delete it straight away, but it's not something that a mod needs to deal with when we have appropriate close reasons.

this isn’t a question I am interested in

That is not a close reason and never has been.

We want tooling that lets those signals exist independently, and we want curator input on what that actually looks like in practice.

There is no need for an “I’m not interested” signal, just don’t look at the question. We already have voting and closure, and you know very well how both work in practice.

We want to decouple quality signaling from the asker’s ability to receive an answer

If no one can understand the question enough to give an answer, it is definitionally low-quality. It’s utterly useless. Additionally, downvotes and close votes are different things!

We want to prevent the “hard lock” failure mode where questions are closed against a “duplicate” that may not actually solve the asker’s specific problem.

The entire point of duplicate closure is that the linked question solves the asker’s problem. If it doesn’t, then whoever closed it was just wrong and it should be reopened. No system changes are necessary.

Hoid, I have to assume you know these things already, and someone told you to put that in. It would be very helpful though if you and other CMs could relay this and other basic information about how curation works to whoever is making these decisions.

Instead of just putting a post notice on a duplicate question, we would also offer a curation flow where one or more of the canonical duplicate’s answers would appear directly on the duplicate question, with added context if needed.

This is a good change and I believe it's something we have been asking for. A way to point to a specific answer with some extra context to help see the OP how it applies to their specific problem. You don't need to overcomplicate this. The provided context could also be visible just to the OP, the people who voted to close and moderators.

Or you know... that extra context could also be provided in the comments after voting to close.

We are looking to adapt the successful feedback mechanisms from the Staging Ground to work at the scale of the main site.

First of all, there is no "scale of the main site" anymore. The number of asked questions is extremely low and there are enough curators who more than capable of handling them all.

Now, to the main point.

You already have Staging Ground. But you never fully made it work, regardless of the feedback you received for it.

Main problem with SG is that not enough experts in the subject are able to see any particular question and give feedback on it.

First you made SG optional, so not all users see those questions at all. Considering that without SG those questions would end up being directly asked on the main site, there is absolutely no reason that SG is optional.

Next, SG question which has been reviewed and not published will vanish from the timeline. this makes those questions even less visible and less likely to be published if the question is sufficiently edited by the author.

For some questions early feedback can be given by many curators, but when question gets edited, only those who did initial review will be notified. But if the reviewer is not SME, it may happen that they are not in a good position to review the question again. Publishing question prematurely can have a negative impact on its reception. On the other hand, not publishing it means it will be stuck in SG without an answer.

If you would show those questions in the timeline, just like any other question, regardless of its review status, then actual experts would be able to see them, give feedback or publish and answer them.

All this would be extremely easy to implement.

Also you could give all users a choice to publish questions through SG, so those that really want feedback could get it.

In the near term, we are consolidating off-topic flags into the existing flag workflow. This reduces the number of clicks and menus you have to navigate and removes the friction and redundancy currently found in the off-topic sub-menus.

Please don't turn "Off topic" into a single opaque category, in case that's what you mean. I think the close reasons help guide curators. I would say in fact the current (non-beta) UI fails to display those reasons enough (Reopen queue).

Needs more focus / low quality

• "Quality" is "the asker's ability to receive an answer". We close questions that need focus, lack details, or lack MREs because we don't have enough information to answer them. When that happens, it is important that the question remains closed so that bad answers that lack context do not flood the question page.
• "Structured downvote reasons" already exist. They're called close reasons. The only reason to switch from close reasons to "downvote reasons" would be to make downvotes less unfriendly, which I don't think will work. The perception of unfriendliness comes from the big negative number; adding text to that probably won't help. (Which we know because "on hold" didn't really work.)

Opinion-based

• This is potentially fine in theory.
• In practice, it will be bad for all the reasons that the experiment is bad. I am not going to rehash them here; there are way too many and (given company track records) I have insufficient faith that they would be addressed.

Duplicate

• Duplicate questions still need to be closed. Otherwise, people will only notice the one transcluded answer from the canonical and inadvertently post duplicates of the canonical answers that weren't transcluded. If that happens, duplicates will stop serving their purpose: reducing duplication by pooling answers in one place.
• Incorrect duplicates are not a "hard lock". There is already a recommended pathway for resolving them: editing the question and voting to reopen.
• "[A]n author does not accept the proposed answer" is a very bad feedback signal. There are too many confounding variables: the author could've lost interest in the problem, solved it independently, lost access to their account, etc.

Off-topic

• There are a lot of off-topic close reasons. How exactly do you plan on expanding them out? It seems like any time gained in clicks will be lost in scrolling.
• Migrations by automated systems or non-moderator users seem like a really bad idea. We try to avoid migrations in general since experienced Stack Overflow users often do not understand the asking guidelines on other sites. In other words, I wouldn't trust the "smarter backend routing" to not. Migrate. Crap.

I'm going to go ahead and answer each of the sections in your heading individually, just to get my thoughts written down:

Needs more focus / low quality

A lack of focus has nothing to do with quality; a question can be very well asked but lack focus. You have confused 2 very different issues here

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.

Quality "signaling_[sic]" (votes?) has only affected a users ability to get answers by the fact that a low quality questions may not be shown to as many people. Being Low Quality, by itself, does not stop something getting answers, however, it might mean people aren't interested in answering.

Idea: We are thinking about structured downvote reasons. Preset categories that provide context beyond a negative score. We are looking to adapt the successful feedback mechanisms from the Staging Ground to work at the scale of the main site.

Downvotes, with reasons, has been a long discussed topic. I don't think we need to cover that here for the nth time. You do, however, need to ensure protections of the voters; responses to providing my reasoning for why a post might be getting downvotes (even when I haven't voted, or might have even upvoted), are some of the most toxic experiences a user can have on Stack Overflow.

Curator Experience: To prevent “review fatigue” we want to think about different viewing modes. Curators could toggle between seeing questions that have not received any feedback or hiding questions that have already been addressed by other curators. This would lead to the question eventually being deleted if no efforts were ever made to improve it by the author.

Users are already limited on how many reviews they can do in each queue, and they can easily bail out if they want to. I don't see "review fatigue" as an issue.

Opinion-based

Goal: We recognize that well-formed, opinion-based questions have value, but we also know that not everyone cares for them. Our goal is to make this content opt-in/out based on individual preference.

Opinion based contact can have value, I don't disagree, however, the implementations Stack has done so far have been bad. If your goal was to make these experiences better, why not actually improve those features, rather than break the entire site?

Idea: There could be a classification layer using categories using question types like “Tooling Recommendation,” “how do I,” or “implementation guidance." These would allow users to ignore, follow, etc., just like other tags, and only see content that they are interested in.

We have this, and it's broken... Posts can't be migrated, and users are tricked into selecting the wrong category. For the 100th time, where is the "How to?" category?! Fix the solution(s) you've tried.

Curator Experience: Rather than voting to close, curators could instead have the ability to reclassify the posts. This could mimic the workflow of changing tags on a post that we already have.

Why not give curators, and moderators, the power to curate/moderate the solution you have? We've been asking for this and you CONTINUE to ignore us; this isn't your idea, it's the community's.

Duplicates

Goal: We want to prevent the “hard lock” failure mode where questions are closed against a “duplicate” that may not actually solve the asker’s specific problem.

This already exists; we have reopen votes. That users don't edit their question, after it is closed, to explain why a question doesn't answer theirs, is the author's fault, not the community's. Those that do, often get met with success; either with an explanation of why in the comments or by reopen votes.

Idea: Instead of just putting a post notice on a duplicate question, we would also offer a curation flow where one or more of the canonical duplicate’s answers would appear directly on the duplicate question, with added context if needed. 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. We would also want to think of a feedback loop for the question author to accept that proposed duplicate answer before the question is locked to new answers.

This is what we expect to happen already, you know that, right?

Curator Experience: This creates a much stronger feedback signal. Rather than wondering if your duplicate suggestion was helpful, you receive a clear data point. If an author does not accept the proposed answer, it signals to curators that the question may have a unique nuance that requests a new distinct answer.

Again, this is what is meant to happen; that authors don't do this isn't the community's fault. Educate your new users; we have also been asking for better onboarding for years.

Off-Topic

Goal: Maintain Stack Overflow’s focus on programming without making “Off-Topic” feel like a shut door for users with legitimate technical questions that may belong elsewhere.

We have a tool for technical questions that belong elsewhere; it's called migration. We can't, however, migrate older posts; maybe you should allow us to do so. Off-topic questions are normally more that they aren't suitable on any site. Also, don't forget, users have a small selection of sites that things can be migrated to; give them more options if you want those questions to go elsewhere.

Idea: Our long-term vision is smarter backend routing. A system that identifies where a question would be best suited, whether that be adding certain tags or considering other Stack Exchange sites. In the near term, we are consolidating off-topic flags into the existing flag workflow. This reduces the number of clicks and menus you have to navigate and removes the friction and redundancy currently found in the off-topic sub-menus.

Making people aware that other sites exist, before they ask, isn't a bad thing, but tags aren't always a good indicator. They are often misused, and there's plenty of cross over. docker is an absolute mine-field and I have no idea what is and isn't on-topic for it.

Curator Experience: Curators would be able to monitor this system and implement mechanisms to better fine-tune the decision-making process. When necessary, they would also be able to intervene in the event of something being routed somewhere incorrectly.

There's not a lot here to really go on, so I can't really comment.

The short here is that several places here you seem to mistake downvote reasons for closure reasons; these are not the same. Often questions that are close further are downvoted, but that doesn't necessarily mean they should be (a high quality question that needs migration shouldn't be downvoted). Likewise a downvote doesn't mean closure; a common reason for closure is due to a lack of research.

Unclear

You also completely miss the unclear closure reason; the question is on-topic, however, what they actually want to ask is completely unapparent. These are problematic, and often result in bad answers if they are answered; the answers guess at what the requirements are, often can completely miss the mark and when (if) the question is clarified it can frequently invalidate the answer(s). This is why closure for these questions is important, because it stops those answers.

Idea: There could be a classification layer using categories using question types like “Tooling Recommendation,” “how do I,” “implementation guidance. These would allow users to ignore, follow, etc., just like other tags, and only see content that they are interested in.

When are we going to get to hash out what these classifications should be and what should happen when they are chosen? Out of the gate we were given classification options that shoved perfectly valid every day Q&A questions into a discussion format that is ill-suited to answering them. Despite this being a known issue, it's still the case today, months later.

We want to take each close reason and move it towards a curation workflow that fits in more reasonably with Stack Overflow today. We want to differentiate “this content doesn’t belong on Stack Overflow” from “this isn’t a question I am interested in,” which is different from “this is high-quality content that is worth promoting”.

This is so far removed from how closure works that I cannot meaningfully address it. Which close reason, exactly, do y'all think means "this isn't a question I am interested in"?

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.

You already have a product for this: https://stackoverflow.com/staging-ground/ If you want fewer questions to be closed, put more questions through that process.

Goal: We recognize that well-formed, opinion-based questions have value, but we also know that not everyone cares for them. Our goal is to make this content opt-in/out based on individual preference.

You already have a product for this: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ That's literally why this site was created; for programming questions that are just a bit too subjective or open-ended for Stack Overflow.

Goal: We want to prevent the “hard lock” failure mode where questions are closed against a “duplicate” that may not actually solve the asker’s specific problem.

You already have a solution for this: question askers can edit and vote to reopen their own questions. Editing it gives them an option to automatically put the question in the reopen vote queue.

Idea: Instead of just putting a post notice on a duplicate question, we would also offer a curation flow where one or more of the canonical duplicate’s answers would appear directly on the duplicate question, with added context if needed. 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. We would also want to think of a feedback loop for the question author to accept that proposed duplicate answer before the question is locked to new answers.

I'm not opposed to this, but 1) how will voting on the copy work? Will it be clear that it's a copy; will you be able to vote on the same answer multiple times; will rep be doubled? and 2) please note that you are using terms incorrectly here. Duplicate questions are closed, not locked. Please do not use the term locked to refer to anything other than an actual lock that prevents interactions by non-mods or non-staff.

Goal: Maintain Stack Overflow’s focus on programming without making “Off-Topic” feel like a shut door for users with legitimate technical questions that may belong elsewhere.

Cool, for the hundredth time, the community has given you a hand-crafted solution for this, myself included: Auto-direct users during the ask wizard step to the appropriate site based on machine learning/generative AI scanning. Y'all love genAI tech now, right? Here is one actually good use for it; making askers (and the company, apparently) aware that Stack Exchange already has lots of other sites besides Stack Overflow.

While closure was an effective tool to manage higher volume in the past

That's besides, well, reality. We never closed question because we've had enough to answer elsewhere. We close questions that simply doesn't target the goal of this site.

We want to take each close reason and move it towards a curation workflow that fits in more reasonably with Stack Overflow today.
...
We want tooling that lets those signals exist independently, and we want curator input on what that actually looks like in practice.

I do agree that the tools provided are sometimes too simple and do not balance the interests of asker and answerer enough.

We are thinking about structured downvote reasons.

If that means a bar of buttons below the question, where answeres can simply click downvotes FOR a reason why this question is bad, I would welcome it. It would be nicer and more effective than downvoting that on the first level is just a vote AGAINST the question (in its current state).

A preset of pre-formulated ones and the ability to add a custom button would be great. Sometimes questions don't receive answers because we look for an interesting title click on the question and find a huge code-block or a huge text you have to work yourself through, even though the question implies a reasonable scope and you get uninterested in the question.

I remember my first question and today I know how silly it must have looked to an expert. However it took awhile before I received an answer, watching the amount of views grow, maintaining a positive score and no other feedback at all. Today I would hesitate to address that question myself, not because I can't answer, but it requires a lot of context for a good answer. I would guess old-timers here would have even closed the question with the asker lacks of a fundamental understanding of the problem. Maybe some would say it lacks of focus, but I would say the question isn't well scoped which you can see on the amount of views it received. No one really cares about it.

So providing feedback without the need of engaging with the user directly which can be time consuming and not in the interest of an answerer is a good compromise in my opinion.

We recognize that well-formed, opinion-based questions have value, but we also know that not everyone cares for them. Our goal is to make this content opt-in/out based on individual preference.

I agree here, additional space for additional content that may not be requested by the SO-community but requested from the outside to attract people to this site is a legit interest of the company, in my opinion. You have to pay for the hosting and have to please others than the community of SO as well. That's fair.

In addition I think there is a fairly big amount of people who wants to exchange their views and grow by it. A bar below [newest] [active]... with a selection of [all] [debugging].. would sort things out.

The thing that annoys me the most about that feature, is that it is just been mixed with my answers. The answers must be sorted out as well. I don't know if we want that to be as comment or a different reputation system or whatever, please go ahead and figure this out. But I'm sure that this thingy is mixed with my answers does not just hold me personally back from using that feature.

We want to prevent the “hard lock” failure mode where questions are closed against a “duplicate” that may not actually solve the asker’s specific problem.

Fair enough.

we would also offer a curation flow where one or more of the canonical duplicate’s answers would appear directly on the duplicate question, with added context if needed.

As a first automatically generated feedback, that's good enough and the ability to write extra context, for people who wanna do the hard work of pointing the finger on it, that's great.

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.

IF that means a veto-right by the asker, thats a really bad idea. While nowadays it's less common, but we also have had trolls here they just want to annoy you by interacting with you.

Besides, we do have the meta-site for it, but many of us don't bother to go here, searching a ton of meta question to find the subject it is discussed. If we automatically generate a meta-post and post a link below, where askers should go anyway if they disagree, I'm in. That just helps people to navigate in the process in which is agreed upon.

This also could make the closing/reopening wars more transparent.

Maintain Stack Overflow’s focus on programming without making “Off-Topic” feel like a shut door for users with legitimate technical questions that may belong elsewhere.

Great one. Even veterans have sometimes issues knowing, where the question belongs. If it's about server, Linux-specific or whatever. This also supports smaller sites and again navigates users through the fairly complex structure of SE.

PS: I still wish I could see the related questions of smaller sites here in one questions feed. But I'm unsure how one would implement it. An orange tag featured by CodeReview or even something in the title, still maintaining to sort it out, would been really cool in my opinion.

Before making major changes to curation, the boundaries of the "things" we are talking about should be clarified. This includes the types of content to be handled and where they will be handled.

The identity of "Stack Overflow" is unclear. The new logo, "open-ended-questions", the "redesign", and the "what next for curation" are worsening this problem. The opening of the chat to everyone is also worsening it.

What could be the guidance to choose where to post an inquiry for information and help? Should it be posted in the chat or on one of the "main sites"? How should we tell the user that there is no place in the Stack Exchange network for their inquiry when that is appropriate?

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.

The entire point of the "too broad" close reason is that some questions can't be reasonably answered as formulated because they require too much guidance or far too long of an answer. I don't understand exactly how allowing answers to questions that can't be reasonably answered in their current form is supposed to help.

If a question can be reasonably answered as formulated, it probably shouldn't have been closed in the first place.

Idea: We are thinking about structured downvote reasons. Preset categories that provide context beyond a negative score. We are looking to adapt the successful feedback mechanisms from the Staging Ground to work at the scale of the main site.

Variants of this have already been proposed and rejected a zillion times. The reasons that this is a bad idea have already been enumerated in Why isn't it required to provide comments/feedback for downvotes, and why are proposals suggesting this so negatively received?

Goal: We recognize that well-formed, opinion-based questions have value, but we also know that not everyone cares for them. Our goal is to make this content opt-in/out based on individual preference.

I think that there's a misalignment on what constitutes a "well-formed, opinion-based" question. Other sites, like Literature Stack Exchange and The Workplace, have proven that questions that are at least somewhat subjective can work in a Q&A format, subject to the constraint that it's possible to reasonably defend answers with evidence. Answers are also expected to be supported by evidence.

Chitchat type discussions that are not expected to answer the question or be supported with evidence may be entertaining for participants but are largely useless to other people.

Idea: There could be a classification layer using categories using question types like “Tooling Recommendation,” “how do I,” or “implementation guidance." These would allow users to ignore, follow, etc., just like other tags, and only see content that they are interested in.

There's already a tool recommendation site, so I don't understand what the point of this proposal is. If people want to ask these questions, we should be more aggressive about directing them there. Also, these questions were banned on Stack Overflow because they simply don't work well on the site and it's not clear to me why they would go better now. See: Q&A is hard, let's go shopping!

Our long-term vision is smarter backend routing. A system that identifies where a question would be best suited, whether that be adding certain tags or considering other Stack Exchange sites.

I would strongly support that. Picking the correct site can be a little overwhelming for new users (especially with more obscure sites like tool recommendations).

We want to differentiate “this content doesn’t belong on Stack Overflow” from “this isn’t a question I am interested in,” which is different from “this is high-quality content that is worth promoting”.

May I propose the following differentiation:

• "Content that does not belong on Stack Overflow": close, and delete if it's unsalvageable.
• "This isn't a question I am interested in": click away, add any uninteresting tags to your ignore list if they aren't there already, possibly edit the question to add those tags if they aren't already present.
• "This is high-quality content that is worth promoting": upvote, copy a short-link to share it off-site, possibly use a bounty to reward an especially good answer.

Estimated cost of implementing these features is zero, since they are the status quo.

If it is your allegation that the community is wrongly using the close/delete features on content simply because we aren't personally interested in it, then that allegation should be substantiated. The solution would be better education for appropriate use of these existing features, or perhaps revocation of privileges (e.g. temporary block to the site) for persistent abuse.

Goal: We want to decouple quality signaling from the asker’s ability to receive an answer

This is a bad goal which will harm the quality of content on the site. If a question is too unclear, vague or open-ended in its current state by our standards, then there is a likelihood that any answers written will not address what the asker actually wants, and that subsequent edits to the question to make it clearer and more focused will obviate the already-written answers. That is why we prevent answers being written on questions while they are in such a state.

Goal: We recognize that well-formed, opinion-based questions have value, but we also know that not everyone cares for them. Our goal is to make this content opt-in/out based on individual preference.

This is not as bad as a goal, but it's still bad and will harm the quality of content on the site. In practice, it is much harder to set clear standards for which opinion-based questions are acceptable and which aren't, and this will lead to more low quality questions being written and not removed.

Moreover, the userbase who currently curate questions and answers are probably not much interested in curating opinion-based questions if there are standards which allow them, so having an opt-in/out section of the site where most curators don't go is a recipe for slop and spam.

Goal: We want to prevent the “hard lock” failure mode where questions are closed against a “duplicate” that may not actually solve the asker’s specific problem.

This is a bad goal because it is based on a false premise. Question closure is not a "hard lock" any more than any other closure reason. If a question is not really a duplicate, this can be resolved in comments or by editing the question, and then the question can be re-opened.

If you think it should be easier to get such questions reopened, that's fine, we can talk about that. Allowing duplicate questions to stay open for answers is not a suitable alternative, and will only result in the 99% of genuine duplicates receiving duplicative answers from rep-chasers.

Goal: Maintain Stack Overflow’s focus on programming without making “Off-Topic” feel like a shut door for users with legitimate technical questions that may belong elsewhere.

I must say I don't really understand what this goal is. If it's really just about making people feel better when their questions are closed as off-topic, I don't see how expanding the set of allowed topics (as your idea suggests) would do anything towards this goal. There will still be topics that aren't allowed, and questions on those topics will still be closed, and the people who wrote those questions will still feel bad about it.

If I understand the goal correctly, it seems the best thing to do is to soften the wording shown to users when their question is closed due to being off-topic, and explain to those users what their alternative options are.

Would it be best to do this more systematically? E.g., for each of these topics, make a list of all theoretically possible solutions (don't worry about whether or not they're "good" at first), and when we have a fairly comprehensive list, run them through the gamut of meta, objectively identfying the pros and cons (and not just automatically assume "status quo = best").

E.g. for "duplicates" alone, there are many plausible mechanisms:

1. no change;
2. label re-posts as duplicate, but don't close them (i.e., allow answers);
3. allow users to both "label as duplicate" (don't close) and "close as duplicate";
4. differentiate between "exact same question" and "in the same ballpark";
5. differentiate between "frequently asked duplicates" and "one-off duplicates";
6. close the older question as the duplicate of the re-post;
7. wholesale allow re-posts (abolish closing as duplicates altogether);
8. add a time delay between "label as duplicate" and "close as duplicate" (temporarily allow answers);
9. don't close duplicates if it's a re-post of something older than [threshold date];
10. allow re-posts at privleged user discretion;
11. maintain a shortlist of repeatedly asked questions and close those.

"We've considered many options, and we chose the best of those" seems like it will result in a more optimized decision.