I’m Jody, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Stack Overflow. Let’s talk about the site redesign

Our goal with this redesign is to minimize disruption to what works while modernizing the experience to serve both new users of the platform and the needs of long-standing, tenured members.

OK, but you know, it really seems like the company only focuses on the former and largely ignores the latter. Every time this happens, the long-standing users group gets ignored until the complaints get loud (read: public) enough or your efforts bomb badly enough that you then feel forced to address them or walk them back, like how you are doing right now. What's that apocryphal quote misattributed to Einstein? "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

But we do have to move away from a world where closing questions is essentially the catchall and default option for curation.

I agree as do many curators, but minimizing or doing away with the ability to close questions will not do away with the need to close questions. This has the same bad logic as "if we stop testing for COVID-19, there will be fewer COVID-19 cases!" Sadly, a lot of recent company experiments or site changes on Stack Overflow have followed this same logic instead of actually measuring for useful outcomes.

When we said “no more closing questions,” we failed to take into account that that phrase would mean something very different to you than to us. For instance, we effectively draw a line between closing questions and deleting questions. Deleting questions is definitely still in scope for us.

You talk about doing away with question closure, but not doing away with deletion. So why didn't the announcement discuss how the new site would handle automatic removal of content in place of the lack of closure curation tools. I think we'd all love to discuss ways that the site can automatically handle curation such that we don't need to manually cast close votes, if what you're claiming is true. That would be a very ambitious and interesting technical challenge, the kind of thing programmers love! But why not mention that at all? Personally, I suspect it is because this is a sudden ex post facto justification, not something that was planned from the outset (or did you not run that beta site post by any curator or moderator who has been using Stack Overflow for more than a year or two to see how that bit would go over before posting it?).

Remember the age old adage, "build it, and they will come"? Current top-level company leadership does not seem to understand or remember what was built, or why people came in the first place: that Stack Overflow was built to be a repository for freely accessible, high quality, and eminently reference-able questions & answers about programming languages and tools.

Q: So, why is there such a big disconnect between the company's terminology and the community's terminology?

A: Because the company doesn't use its own product anymore.

Why are your employees not active users on Stack Overflow, asking and answering questions here? Sure, not every role is a programming one, but a lot of them are. Or at least, a lot of them should be, given the industry you're in. And for the non-technical ones, there is no shortage of non-technical network sites. It's important to not just acknowledge that there was a disconnect in language between the staff and the community here, it's critically important to ask why. A company whose staff regularly uses its own product will always be much better positioned to maintain and improve said product for the betterment of all. And with a better product comes happier users and better PR and thus ultimately more customers!

As it happens, we the community also draw a line between closing questions and deleting questions. There's a fair bit of overlap between the two actions, but any seasoned curator will agree that closure does not equate to (even eventual) deletion, and that deletion can/should also happen without closure at times.

Right now, you're hemorrhaging that first group of users you talked about to AI tools because of a perceived accessibility (call it friendliness or elitism or whatever else you want) problem. That makes perfect sense; AI tools always answer your question (except when they can't, or worse, give you a wrong answer and claim it's correct), never present roadblocks to asking a question in the first place (except when you've hit your free quota), and are always polite (except when they encourage or enable abuse, harassment, or death).

The user exodus hasn't been a complete, 100% drop-off because, as it turns out, AI tools are simply not as reliable or trustworthy as real people/experts, and by their nature never will be. But if you get rid of SO's curation tools, or make their usage more difficult, or obfuscate access to them in any way, the latter group you mentioned (experienced, tenured members, or SMEs) will continue to drop and you will have neither incoming new users nor experienced, tenured users.

Specifically, I’d love your thoughts (as answers here) on:

[...]

• The purpose of curation tools: Are they meeting your needs? How could they be improved? - What are we missing?

• The necessity of all current tools: Are there tools you feel are redundant or no longer useful?

• Reconfiguring tools: Are there ways we can adapt existing tools to better serve the needs of the community?

Oh man, today is your lucky day! There are so, so many ways you could address the site's problems. Here are just some of the things often-requested by community, or widely popular with them, that you can do which don't require the Redditification of the site's UI/UX, and that I believe go much further in fixing your core perceived problem of "everything gets closed all the time and new users hate that" (in no particular order):

• Improve the SO Search functions for the first time since, literally ever. Why does SO search still suck massively? Why are there entirely different search functions used for the main search bar vs. the duplicate closure finder?
• Give the new Markdown editor feature parity with the old one. Feature parity should be a hard requirement for any feature overhaul/replacement the company does, FYI.
• Abandon the 2025-era comment redesign and just implement comment threading, even if it's just one-level, under the classic comment design, with a single button to collapse each top-level comment thread. And allow people to @-mention at least two users in a single comment.
• Overhaul site privileges to work more based on related feature usage rather than reputation. This is something Catija was exploring heavily while she was still here. This means not just replacing rep-gated access with usage-gated access, but also increasing the abilities users have with regard to moderation/curation actions based on the number of related feature uses they have which are 'helpful' or 'accepted'.
• Fuzz the displayed score of main/traditional questions once they get below -1; just show "< -1" or something until expanded. That way users with moderation capabilities who might have a use for seeing the actual score can still do so, but the default score displayed is never so off-putting that someone has to read -6 or -15, etc., on their own question, however poor a question for Stack Overflow it might actually be. That's one of the biggest instances of friction for new users: seeing their post get 'downvoted into oblivion'; it's insane to me that this was not addressed like a decade ago when Stack Overflow first started realizing it had an image problem.
• Add higher protection levels to questions, which automatically apply after a question gets more than a certain number of answers and require progressively higher tag scores in the question's tag(s) the more answers there are (if a question has 10+ or 20+ answers, we should not be letting any random user post a new answer anymore).
• Follow through on improving chat with new features/functionality. We got all excited when you said you were improving chat during one of the sprints last year and so far all I can see that changed is now we have a ToS screen nobody reads and 1-rep users can access chat. Oh and they redesigned how chat replies look but rolled half of it back after a few days.
• Update the Roomba to ignore comments on zero-score questions with no answers. After one year, just because there are 2+ comments on a question does not mean it is worth keeping around. At the very least, make it require that it have at least one comment by someone other than OP followed by at least one comment by OP, if you're gonna keep those questions around.
• Reward duplicate closure finders with badges or something. It's only one of the most-requested and upvoted features, given how poorly the search function works.
• Update the Roomba to ignore accepted answers.
• Add parent language tags for SO, make them required and separate from the 5-tag count for questions, and restrict gold-tag closure powers to parent tags only.
• Expand gold-tag closure powers to allow unilateral closure for more than just duplicate reasons. SMEs know when a question needs more details, needs more clarity, or is a subjective matter.
• Allow mods to migrate questions older than 6 months (require 2+ mods if you need some higher threshold for whatever reason), and explicitly encourage that old, off-topic, but well-received questions to be migrated to their appropriate sites. Why should a question with a score in the triple digits with tons of answers and millions of views languish as closed or historically locked on Stack Overflow when it could be migrated and reopened on, say, Superuser or Unix & Linux or Server Fault? Just because it's from 2015 and not 3 weeks ago? What a short-sided restriction! Not all such questions would be good fits for migration, for sure, but many of them would be. It's a great way to grow those other network sites' traffic, too.
• Notify users automatically via site notifications when a question they closed is edited.
• Allow users casting 'Needs details/clarity'/'Needs MRE' close votes (only votes, not close flags) to leave a custom comment posted by the Community user (with mod and staff visibility on who actually authored it) explaining what details are needed, or what is missing to constitute an MRE. A lot of the feedback about SO being unfriendly or 'SO always closes your questions' comes from no direct, clear information (since askers are inherently often lacking understanding in the first place). Sure, people should read the close banners, but those are always generic. Meanwhile curators absolutely don't want to announce that they are the ones during the curating because that often leads to harassment. An anonymous, custom comment option would satisfy both sides' concerns there.
• Add (optional) version tags to answers. Seriously, why the heck don't we have this? It should have been obvious even in 2008 that this would be needed.
• Improve the Ask Question Wizard so it actually moves people and their questions to the appropriate site when they post a question we know is off-topic on Stack Overflow, or tell them straight-up that their question is not suitable for Stack Overflow. Alternatively... just finally do away with all the different sites and instead just have one big site where people can filter questions based on 'topic'. Otherwise those other network sites are never gonna succeed or thrive like Stack Overflow once did.
• Improve the Staging Ground so all new users and a lot more new questions from existing users are sent through that process. This includes applying the Roomba to questions there, and allowing users to edit SG questions that have already been graduated, or overhauling the thing so that it doesn't create a separate question on Main, but rather just 'moves' the SG question itself to Main, and is no longer in the SG.
• AI Assistant might be great for people who want to use it. But a lot of people don't want to use or even see it, and it's insulting that it's given top billing on Stack Overflow, which was founded to be a place for getting answers directly from human experts. You need to let users hide the AI Assistant/turn off all things AI without resorting to user scripts/styles.
• Be more clear to users, especially new users, when posting answers that AI-generated content is not allowed here.
• Make downvotes on Discussions reorder and hide Discussion posts like they do on Main/traditional questions. In other words, Make Discussion Downvotes Matter(TM).
• Bring back Winter Bash, but make sure it has an opt-out option.
• Bring back the original SO Jobs (Joel Test and everything, except add a scoring item: "requires or involves using AI tools" would be an X on the scoring rubric) and the SO Developer Story. The Dev Story especially surely took such little bandwidth and support effort that I can't believe you ever got rid of it, given how popular it was.
• Bring back SO Documentation, just don't award reputation for content contributions there. Do more work to ensure quality (don't make the barrier for entry so low). This means much slower growth/build-out, but it's worth it if the goal is quality and not 'overnight golden performer'. It should have been treated more like Wikipedia and less like gamified Q&A.

If you stop work on UI overhauls that break/remove a bunch of features, and start implementing the things listed above instead, I guarantee you will see people coming back to SO and its reputation in the public start to improve again. You could even still work on native, first-class genAI features, so long as it's alongside and secondary to features like those mentioned the above list.

The list above is just off the top of my head (OK, and maybe the middle of my head, since I started this answer ~2 hours ago)... there are dozens more big ticket changes the community has actively been clamoring for that aren't "yet another site design change", which the community has not been actively clamoring for... ever.

This doesn't directly answer your questions, but...

I am baffled to see the removal of key legacy curation tooling framed as a scaling issue. Aside from SO, you* have a myriad of much smaller SE sites that absolutely rely on toolings such as closure. Justifying the removal of such tools by a now smaller scale** doesn't match at all the reality on the ground.
A similar feeling crops up for a lot of things you* say about curation. There is a serious mismatch in what you* apparently think tools do and are meant to do, and what the community knows these tools actually do.

Before going for another round of – as you admit yourself – exchanging phrases that would mean something very different to you* than to us, it is absolutely essential that you* define what they actually mean to you*.
Seriously, we tried to tell you* again and again. Since you* apparently aren't listening to what we have to say, it's about time you* start talking.

*You, the company probably known as Stack Overflow (Inc?)

**Which ironically should be a scale you are trying to get away from in favour of previous scale.

That said, the platform has also faced challenges in recent years, including a significant decline in user activity. This is something we cannot ignore, and it’s a key driver behind the changes we’re making.

Change is needed, but this isn't it. You are actively destroying the site further, not improving it. If I want Reddit or 4Chan, I can get there without your help. I go to Stack Overflow because I like Stack Overflow.

I'd ask you to consider, broadly, why user activity is declining. It's because users find this site less useful than they did in the past. You can blame this on LLMs, and you might not be totally wrong, but you'd be missing something important. It's not just LLMs. SO and SE were declining before LLMs arrived, and their decline accelerates based on the amount of the anger the community has at company actions. You do have a way to make this better that isn't "let's try random things". You just won't take it.

We know that, broadly speaking (and this is a gross oversimplification), this community is made up of two key groups: new users, who often struggle to find their footing, and experienced contributors, who feel they lack the tools to effectively curate and maintain the site.

There's an important third group, the people who just view the site. That is the main purpose of Stack Overflow, at least it was and should be. We aren't a help desk, we are a library of knowledge. If you've decided to change that, please let us know so I (and probably much of this community) can know to leave.

The primary cause of new user's having a hard time is not the existence of curation, and closing specifically. It's because we don't communicate our policies well, there is a lot of robo-reviewing and just-plain-wrong reviewing. These are problems you could help solve. Instead you burn it all to the ground. If people keep accidentally lighting their homes on fire, would you dismantle the fire department or improve fire safety education?

When we talk about rethinking tooling, I want to be clear: this is not about taking things away just for the sake of change. It’s about asking hard questions: what works, what doesn’t, and how can we make things better?

Then what purpose does this serve, other than "hey maybe if we try 100 random things something will increase engagement". What do you feel doesn't work about this system? How do you feel the beta makes it better? Do you honestly believe you know enough about how curation works to have an informed opinion? I certainly don't think you do.

Many of the tools we have today were designed to address scaling challenges from over a decade ago. These challenges may no longer exist in the same way.

This is fair, but also irrelevant. Closure, deletion, and flagging have been part of the site since pretty much the beginning. There is still good reason to keep them. The only real change made in them due to size is reducing the number of close and reopen votes needed from 5 to 3. I'd be open to rediscussing that, but that's not what you are doing here.

But we do have to move away from a world where closing questions is essentially the catchall and default option for curation. We believe we can create better, more precise, more surgical tools that can be used.

I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of this, but I'd like to know what tools you intend to create? I doubt you will do a good job, but I would agree that curation could certainly be improved. The issue here is that you are not improving curation, you are removing it.

I also need to level set a bit: we’re not trying to do away with the concept of removing unhelpful posts...When we said “no more closing questions,” we failed to take into account that that phrase would mean something very different to you than to us. For instance, we effectively draw a line between closing questions and deleting questions. Deleting questions is definitely still in scope for us.

Nope, it means the same thing to both of us. We are upset you are removing closing because we don't want you to remove closing, not because we think closure = deletion. Actually, you seem to be the one with the misconception of the differences between curation actions.

You have another glaring lack of basic understanding of site function. You seem to be unaware that users (except for moderators) can't vote-to-delete questions that are not closed. So removing closure is removing question deletion, since our 20 or so mods can't realistically get rid of every bad question alone.

The purpose of curation tools: Are they meeting your needs? How could they be improved? - What are we missing?

Curation tools aren't perfect on the non-beta version of the site, but they are worse in every respect on the beta version of the site. Preventing closure is a death sentence for question (and therefore answer) quality. Not allowing us to flag things, even for spam, is just stupid. I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but what you are really missing is a basic understanding of how the site functions. I like to encourage you actually use the curation tools we have for a while. Try asking questions or answering questions. Hang around in moderation chat rooms like Charcoal HQ, SOCVR and SOBotics. Help in the review queues and question closure, once you get enough rep. Actually get an understanding of how the status quo works before you try to change it.

I’m here to listen and gather actionable feedback

A lot of staff members have said that recently. You've already gotten a lot of feedback, you just don't listen to it. If you read meta, as the CEO claims he does, or participate more, as you promised to do a year ago, you should know what we think. It's not hard to find.

The primary reason I'm responding to this post is because it seems at least one piece of my feedback has gotten to someone with some decision-making power, you. I've asked for years to be able to communicate with senior management on meta. What it seems to have taken to get you to make one post (and then ignore the responses) is my days-long campaign of pointing out in every announcement post that the CMs know this is stupid, and have obviously been forced to write what they write by higher management. That's not how it should be.

Reconfiguring tools: Are there ways we can adapt existing tools to better serve the needs of the community?

Yes, absolutely. We've literally given you hundreds if not thousands of proposals all ready. Look at feature-requests for improvements to curation tools on MSO and MSE, and choose some well-received one's you think are doable.

But I want to assure you that this is a conversation, not a one-way announcement. Your input will directly shape how we move forward...My ask is that we have this conversation with a shared goal in mind: to make Stack Overflow the best it can be for everyone who uses it.

This is not a conversation. Our input clearly has almost no effect on the final outcome. I'll grant you that you removing Answer Assistant, but I think that was mostly because of the moderator changes on Raspberry Pi, not the community's opinion at large. This is a one announcement. You did not ask us about this, and no one asked you to this. What you think an announcement is exactly, versus a two-way discussion?

I'd encourage you to look at how Jeff Atwood used to propose/announce changes. You'll notice that the communities feedback actually mattered. Even if he decided against it, at least we had a chance to state our case, and really be heard by the people making decisions.

What you are doing here isn't that. You have decreed on order from up high, communicating through 5 levels of people, in spite of everything the community thinks. You have never used any of the systems you intend to change, and appear to lack basic understanding of them. This is not a conversation of any sort.

Perhaps you want to make Stack Overflow better, more likely you just say that. Regardless, it's clear that you aren't. Look at activity metrics. I'll grant that a lot of the decrease in activity has been AI related, but I'd ask to you to note that decrease in activity is faster whenever there is more tension between company and community. You seem to think you don't need us anymore. Maybe you're right, in which case you might as well just tell us all to leave, rather than engage in this facade. If not, then we need to work together, and that won't work if you are going to burn all quality control to the ground.

I also need to level set a bit: we’re not trying to do away with the concept of removing unhelpful posts.

If that's the case.. why are we allowing content like this, that one is hardly even programming related and is so obviously answered with "yes, duh?" that it should be deleted? This is just one of hundreds (thousands?) of such cases that have been posted since open ended discussions have began. What tools are you envisioning giving us that will somehow get us back to the point where we can remove unhelpful posts?

We're skeptical because time and time again you show us that you aren't providing tools that are useful to the goals of the network.

Just in case it gets deleted due to me bringing attention to it, this was the sample discussion

We know that, broadly speaking (and this is a gross oversimplification), this community is made up of two key groups: new users, who often struggle to find their footing, and experienced contributors, who feel they lack the tools to effectively curate and maintain the site. Our goal with this redesign is to minimize disruption to what works while modernizing the experience to serve both new users of the platform and the needs of long-standing, tenured members.

I believe you are right. Using Stack Overflow is an on-going battle between new users who see SO as a forum to get answers, and experienced users who see SO as a source of curated information where you can find answers to your problems, or ask a question if the answer does not yet exist on this site. So the question that should be asked is: what do you want Stack Overflow to be? A library of knowledge or a programming support hotline.

At the moment, I feel that Stack Overflow (the corporation) have decided that Stack Overflow (the site) should be programming support hotline, and that the site should slowly and gently guide you towards the promise land, a.k.a an answer, notwithstanding that said question is a duplicate of an existing question, or is a bad question altogether. I have nothing against this goal per se, but you do need to realize that it is supported by a premise that is fragile at best: the experienced userbase is fully onboard with taking new users by the hand after each question and spending quality time with them explaining why their question is not really good for this site, and how they can change it.

The many posts you have made to collect the experienced users' feedback show that the people doing all the curation work do this for free, and are tired of having to clean up the thousands of bad questions that are being asked, plus the frustration of the new users who expect Stack Overflow (the site) to be a support resource rather than a repository of knowledge. Because experienced users treat Stack Overflow as a library, not a hotline. And they expect the tools made available to them to be in line with working in a library of knowledge, not a hotline. And thus, making the dual goal of "everyone should be able to ask a question" and "experienced users should be able to curate this site" incompatible.

Say you are looking for information on the Pony Express. You go to the library, and then you:

1. Go to the counter and tell the clerk to buy a book on the Pony Express because this subject is interesting to you. The clerk points you toward a bookshelf at the back of the library saying that the 10 books they already have on the subject are located on the second shelf. You then ask a random person in the library to go fetch the book for you, find the information on what horse breeds was used in February 1861, and read it out to you, only to complain that the books lists the breeds used in January to March 1861, but you are interested in February 1861 only. You tell the clerk to buy a book that lists the horse breeds used in February 1861 only, and complain to management that the random library customer did not help you at all. You leave a 1-star review on Google to complain about the abysmal customer service you received from the random customer, and how the library does not care about their users.

2. Go to the counter, pick up a map of the library, find the section where the books on the Pony Express are more likely to be, go the the bookshelf, find a book that seems to cover the subject of which horse breeds were used to run the PE, sit at a nearby table and read it by yourself to find the information you are looking for. You realize the book does not contain the answer to your question, nor do the other 9 books they have. You go back to the clerk and ask them if they could buy a book that covers the subject of interest.

You see, option 2 makes the most sense to me. That is how I would envision new users using Stack Overflow. That is how it was conceived, and used for its whole existence. You (the corporation) seem to lean toward option 1. Again, both options are valid choices, but if option 1 is the path that Stack Overflow (the corporation) choses, then I want to know so I can check out and stop wasting my time if my expectations are to spend my free time in the context of option 2.

I cannot speak for everyone, but that is what I understand when I read the feedback you get on Meta from said experienced users.

Thanks for approaching the community. I think that I understand where you are coming from, but I would like to hear more details. What do you want to achieve in the end and why do you think that the new design achieves that?

If we still share a common goal, why is quality of content not a focus anymore? Why is knowledge diluted in a threaded, forum-like system? Why is there no way to put questions that do not work on hold? Why can we not move wrongly categorized questions to the right category? Why do comments take up so much space now? Why change everything at once and not simply a few things at a time?

Or in short: how is all that helping newcomers and visitors alike in getting good answers? What is the purpose of a bad, open question? And finally: why are there fake downvote buttons? Who would do such a thing?

I think we might simply have such different views on how a good Q&A should be done, that the only answer to what is wrong currently is simply: all of it.

Sorry if this is not what you would like to hear.

The "new users, who often struggle to find their footing" are going to turn to AI. They already have, hence the drop in traffic.

That's good! (For them.) A personal helpdesk that can walk you through your particular problem, debugging, homework question, etc. That's way better than waiting for humans to try to understand and answer your slapdash question.

So it's really unclear why the company is redesigning the classic Q/A site to be better for those kinds of questions, when AI already exists and is already really good at answering them better and faster than the human volunteers here can.

Stack Overflow Q/A (classic) provides the library of high-quality, curated questions and canonical answers. This will continue to be valuable both for humans and as the training data for AI. Keep it as is. Provide a different path / different website for the helpdesk questions... and you should probably power that with AI.

(N.B. I have a hard time imagining why many people would turn to Stack Overflow's AI agent for help, when ChatGPT or Claude or whatever are probably better for the task and have a brighter future. That sucks for the company; you probably won't have disruptive growth or earn back the $1.8 Billion purchase price. But this redesign isn't going to fight that tide either.)

Of the design changes that we introduced this week, which design changes are hindering the work that you are doing, and how?

Obviously the lack of curation tools on Q&A content (that I'm aware simply aren't implemented yet,) but otherwise the general design feels harder to navigate. There's no comments section under questions to ask the asker clarifying questions, there's no separation between different kinds of content, and the colors seem too dark for some monitors to the point where you can hardly see a lighter dark grey because it just washes out to black. Additionally the navigation keybinds I've grown used to seem to only work a small percentage of the time. (g+h, g+q, g+n, g+m)

The purpose of curation tools: Are they meeting your needs? How could they be improved? - What are we missing?

Since the current beta doesn't have curation tools, I'll approach this based on the tools on the live site. For Q&A, I don't feel like I'm missing anything, and they do meet my needs today. However, I do recognize that they aren't in a great place for serving the needs of users who come here for help and fail to provide the "Ask Questions, Get Answers, No Distractions" tagline the tour provides. Discussions content currently has no form of curation... and that's bad.

The necessity of all current tools: Are there tools you feel are redundant or no longer useful? Reconfiguring tools: Are there ways we can adapt existing tools to better serve the needs of the community?

I feel votes on questions (both up and down) are in a bad place. Upvotes don't indicate anything useful, and downvotes don't provide any useful information to askers or answerers. I'm generally a fan of the overarching strategy of the new curation system outlined here, however I'm still sceptical you'll provide us with the tools to actually remove the unhelpful content we need to given the complete inaction we've seen surrounding discussions, both the original version and the current one now known as open ended questions.

I'm afraid all your questions presuppose that I came here to work at all. The real problem is that StackOverflow is no longer relevant.

As of now, when a user comes to stackoverflow, they're almost certainly there because they had a problem they want to solve. With that in mind, lets look at the new page you presented:

• There's a chatbot, which is basically ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/whatever, but almost certainly worse, since you guys aren't AI researchers, you're a help desk company.
• There's a feed to questions which are pretty much guaranteed not to answer my question.
• There's a list of stuff that's probably distracting and maybe interesting but definitely not helpful.
• And lastly, there are a couple of links to other sites that I may be interested in at some point, but let's be honest, if I really cared about them, I'd have gone to them directly.

So basically you have a chatbot replica, but worse. I'm not quite sure what target audience you're hoping to attract with this. The only thing I can imagine is people who used to use stackoverflow, but aren't aware of their own chatbots, and enjoy random stuff that used to be relevant in the old site. That seems... a diminishing crowd.

I'm not saying it's game over for SE. At a time like this, StackOverflow Corporate — or whatever you called the version of StackOverflow that you sold to individual companies — is a much better value prop, because it gives companies a solid repository for internal knowledge, which makes for stronger internal context setting. However, this makeover really feels like a "hey please keep coming here because we were once awesome" attempt instead of a deep rethinking of how SE can continue to be useful in the future.

I haven't used SE in years, and as the demo is today, I don't see that changing. The value prop simply isn't there.

TLDR; There are 2 main issues with the new sites: UI, and curation. Without addressing the functionality gap, a UI change doesn't get us anywhere. And if the community is heard there won't be such strong negative reaction to changes.

I'll likely be the one with the lowest reputation to respond tho in my own ways I have an attachment to SE. My answer won't be as in depth as others as I'm not not a mod or someone who's familiar with all the work many of the member put in to keep it going, but might provide input looking at the overall picture and not down to details of how the site flow.

There are 2 main issues with the new sites: UI, and curation. With that in mind, let's go over your statements.

We know that, broadly speaking (and this is a gross oversimplification), this community is made up of two key groups: new users, who often struggle to find their footing, and experienced contributors, who feel they lack the tools to effectively curate and maintain the site. Our goal with this redesign is to minimize disruption to what works while modernizing the experience to serve both new users of the platform and the needs of long-standing, tenured members.

Does changing the UI help with either the 2 mentioned groups?

I highly doubt the UI of posts as is, is hindering new users greatly. Sure we should've had threaded comments and rich mark up a decade ago. But does overhauling the site help?

• Moving tags, names of poster and timestamp to the top of the post just adds noise and reduces value. This metadata on the top implies high importance, which in reality isn't the case.
• A new user has to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the answer to see the score, and let's be honest a new user will either go by the answer with the most votes, or the accepted one; and we already made it harder for them.
• The comments have the same visual importance as the answers. Which implies they're just as important. That's not the reality of the site.

These stand out immediately, there are more, but I'll leave them off as beta is a work in progress.

I also don't how this makes the long time user's experience any better.

To us it feels like the UI was changed without any consideration on the user experience and how the site behaves. Unless, this is the intended direction of the company to make the site look more like Reddit and other social platforms. To be blunt, if we wanted to use Reddit as a forum for programming questions, we'd do so. There's a reason the community there is much smaller and less technical. Was there a case study for the UI change? Were the users asked simply which version of the site is better to visit again, or were the selected users looking to actually engage with a question and get a real answer back?

In their post @eykanal breaks down all the issues of the home page. There's lots that can be done on that page's UI alone to improve everyone's experience without restructuring the entire site. Could you have imagined people migrating to Google in its early days if it was as busy as this main page? Sure Google and SO serve different purposes and the same home page won't work for both. But if the front page of the site goes from distraction in one format to another, you've just redefined the same problem!

Specifically, I’d love your thoughts (as answers here) on:

1. Of the design changes that we introduced this week, which design changes are hindering the work that you are doing, and how?
2. The purpose of curation tools: Are they meeting your needs? How could they be improved? - What are we missing?
3. The necessity of all current tools: Are there tools you feel are redundant or no longer useful?
4. Reconfiguring tools: Are there ways we can adapt existing tools to better serve the needs of the community?

Clearly you're thinking of tools and functionality. But the original post barely focuses on the tools and only really addresses them after heavy down vote that's made it, as of posting this, it's the 5th most dowvoted post on meta and there seems to be no change of plans. The tools and functionality felt like an afterthought to the UI change! Any response by the staff there was to minor tangential points and not the mass concern of the users. Why not address the experience users, without whom the site ceases to exist?

At the end of the day we all understand a company with real investment is hosting, maintaining, and running the site and so they're entitled to directing where the site goes. But what make the site (not just SO, all SE sites) "alive" or once "alive" was the community. The company and community need each other. The community feels ignored and not listened to, news is just dropped on us and we feel a spectrum between disappointment to betrayal.

We're all aware the golden days of the site are well behind us, but changing it to what it never was in an attempt to bring more traffic in hopes of revival is not a solution. It won't bring the community back, and goes against the mission of the site.

As the tour outlines:

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.

The changes take us away from "a library of detailed, high quality answers to every questions about programming" aimed to help a person with a question and closer to yet another chat forum aimed for upvotes, ad revenue, and entertainment of the reader.

As a CPO/CTO, what is your vision for the site? Who will use it, and why? What are they looking for? To the extent that the content here is community-written, what motivates the community to participate?

Do you believe the site is successful today? After the redesign, how will you tell if it's more successful? What metrics or other indicators will you use?

From the question

Of the design changes that we introduced this week, which design changes are hindering the work that you are doing, and how?

Assuming that you are referring to the Beta site, none, because we have to go back to Classic to do most of the work. In my case, I'm not going to Beta to do the one or two tasks that can be done there.

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

As we continue to make updates to the beta site, please use the classic site to access these features:

• Viewing comments on a question, or adding a comment on a question
• Editing posts
• General purpose moderation tooling
• Changing your vote on a post (except for the default Troubleshooting / Debugging type questions)
• Viewing most post notices
• Real time notifications without reloading the page (updates on a post, inbox notifications, etc.)
• Changing the list of one's Communities in left navigation menu
• Certain actions on a post like Follow, Save, Start a bounty, etc.
• Staging Ground

Note: Beta allows posting an answer to a closed question ---ref. Duplicate questions shows the answer box and allow to post an answer . This was reported a few days ago. I would like to think that this is unintended.

Short and sweet: the copious screen space allocated to comments, using the same font size, huge "upvote" buttons and more is weird, as it assigns a completely new importance to "just" comments.

Even if that's intended for comments coming in in the future for whatever reason, it misappropriates importance to historic comments.

Perception

Sir, with all due respect, Everything you wrote and the questions you asked are fundamentally flawed, in my opinion.
It almost reads as if we all work for the same company but in different departments. You, as the CTO, stepped in to clear up some miscommunication between the devs on your engineering team and all of us in content management, and we should "work with you to ensure that the future of Stack Overflow is one we can all be proud of."
To help smooth things out, you also asked our team for feedback because, after all, our shared goal is "to make Stack Overflow the best it can be for everyone who uses it."

Translation: SO pays the bills, which should incentivize all of us to work smarter, not harder, and communicate more so both teams can focus on what really matters: the customers. Because if they aren't happy, the company loses money, which triggers budget cuts. And we all really need this job.

Reality

The reality is we do not work for Stack Overflow, nor are we your coworkers, which explains the overwhelming negative sentiment from the so-called and much-maligned "Community."
Now, a handful of us, either out of the kindness of our hearts or because it gives them a sense of purpose, choose to volunteer in our free time to maintain and safeguard this collective knowledge we have amassed. But we all have our own teams to lead, our own code to debug, our own features to ship, and our own paychecks to earn. We also have our own problems to solve, so we visit Stack Overflow to ask questions and search for answers. We are your customers.

I also want to piggyback off an observation Tyler brought up earlier today in his stellar response about how Stack Overflow employees rarely use their own product as a point of reference, much less bother to contribute anything. Why should they? The same could be said of their CTO...

Responses

"This (significant decline in user activity) is something we cannot ignore, and it's a key driver behind the changes we're making."

Actually, I can ignore it indefinitely; this doesn't pay my bills.

"We have to move away from a world where closing questions is essentially the catchall and default option for curation."

Actually, I can find answers elsewhere; I don't have to do anything.

"I want to understand what's most important to you, what you feel makes the site unusable, and how we can improve the tools you rely on."

The UX of the site is most important to me. I, along with many others (feedback here), feel the proposed UX is abysmal and makes the site unusable by design. It should goes without saying that any discussion about improving tools while these fundamental concerns go unaddressed is simply a waste of time.

"With that in mind, our intent is to focus on tools that meet today's needs while taking a hard, analytical look at existing tools to see if they're still the right fit. While we may not have gotten it exactly right, I can assure you a lot of thought went into this redesign and direction."

Sir, with all due respect, In my opinion, considering you have zero firsthand experience on Stack Overflow, you are both ill-equipped and unqualified to meet today's needs. After all, to analyze the worth of a tool, you must both study its functions and learn to operate it with some degree of proficiency. And lastly, I can likewise assure you a lot of thought went into the redesign and direction of Windows 8. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Conclusion

I am not implying you are incompetent in any way, nor do I have anything against you personally. A lack of experience is simply a disadvantage, not a trait. From what I can tell, you seem honest, intelligent, direct and well-intentioned. It is just that, to quote you once more, I feel a good bit of frustration and skepticism.

The ball is in your court now, Sir.

I'm going to start somewhere in the middle

With that said, our attempts to communicate about the necessary change were imprecise and confused the situation. When we said “no more closing questions,” we failed to take into account that that phrase would mean something very different to you than to us. For instance, we effectively draw a line between closing questions and deleting questions. Deleting questions is definitely still in scope for us.

Well, that's a clear example of why the company fails us. We try our best to communicate our needs. We don't have enough people who speak our language, and can translate it to what you speak. Where people have the skills to communicate with the community, they are undervalued and we've lost too many.

If you can't understand the community's needs, and understand why we need closures of questions (to give an opportunity to fix those questions) - you shouldn't be changing those things.

You've already gotten a lot of feedback. Some of it from the most gifted folks on the network. Jon Skeet weighed in - how much of it do you actually understand, and if you don't, how're you going to figure out what you're missing?

If you have no one who can communicate effectively between the community and company - you should be building on and growing those competencies. As a community member, that's lacking across the company.

Hiring for those abilities - across the company would be good, but y'all aren't seen as a good choice by many, or the people who'd give you a shot just can't get hired. And the folks we've had over the years who could communicate invariably end up downsized.

You arn't just dealing with corporate customers. You're dealing with a deeply passionate community of folks who're dealing with the trauma of the company's past actions and are mistrustful. Reactiveness isn't a sign the community is against you, its that the company's actions did and continue to hurt us and the relationship we've had.

In some cases that's personal, in other cases, its common to many of us. We don't have good reasons to think the company will listen to us, or even keep its word.

If we were clients, chances are we'd be dropping you or asking for compensation. As a community, we only really can try to reach out, fight or walk.

You're never going to succeed if you can't get people who can bridge the gap.

Many of the tools we have today were designed to address scaling challenges from over a decade ago. These challenges may no longer exist in the same way. With that in mind, our intent is to focus on tools that meet today’s needs while taking a hard, analytical look at existing tools to see if they’re still the right fit. While we may not have gotten it exactly right, I can assure you a lot of thought went into this redesign and direction.

These challenges partially don't exist because the folks who were active on the network often got alienated by decisions made by the company. This path reinforces the negative feedback loop that causes people to leave. "Not gotten it exactly right" is a very strange way of saying "We know what people on the network need better than folks who are actively doing curation and content creation every day"

In a perfect world - we'd want to scale up again and have the tools to deal with those problem.

experienced contributors, who feel they lack the tools to effectively curate and maintain the site.

Thing is on the short run, we created these tools. Review queues evolved from chatrooms used to review posts. More recently, we got better spam tools - after 2 years of ad-hoc dealing with thousands of spam posts with the help of the community. We don't need perfect, but we're more likely to be able to handle things if we know you understand our needs and are working on it.

We've been complaining about these over a decade, we've lost a LOT of contributors, and as things go, folks who can operate on the site at the level are rare.

This is also, incidentally the group the company seems to alienate the most often.

I also need to level set a bit: we’re not trying to do away with the concept of removing unhelpful posts. We care deeply about curation and have dedicated substantial time and money to building tools for it, and we will continue to invest in this area. But we do have to move away from a world where closing questions is essentially the catchall and default option for curation. We believe we can create better, more precise, more surgical tools that can be used. And we intend to work with all of you to make sure that curators here can take advantage of those tools.

If there's better options for dealing with duplicates and such, people would use them. Taking away tools without better options is a bad idea though. And If you're not listening to the people using the tools - we're less inclined to suggest better tools. I've been floating a idea on better duplicate handling for a while - but in the current environment, I don't see the point of spending the time laying out even an early draft on meta cause it'll likely to be ignored.

Regarding feedback on quality, you are right – there is still significant work to be done. We intentionally chose to launch this in an early state. We are, as Stack Overflow did in the distant past, intentionally relying on you to help us identify issues so we can more quickly address as many as necessary to reach an acceptable level of quality before moving the site to the new design. I’m here to listen and gather actionable feedback. I want to understand what’s most important to you, what you feel makes the site unusable, and how we can improve the tools you rely on. Specifically, I’d love your thoughts (as answers here) on:

An early draft that a little janky, designed to find requirements has value. Something that's clearly designed to be a completely different model is going to get pushback. Thing is there was a lot of early feedback on the redesign that's been ignored.

In many cases, with other initiatives - such as the new data dump, still have promised features (like access to a complete copy) either on hold for years, or quietly killed off.

We have no real reason to believe this isn't going to end up with the vision of folks uninvested in the stack exchange network as it has been, rather than as a evolution of the platform we know and love.

We've consistently given actionable feedback and continue to, even tried to explain where its less than obvious to someone not a network regular and its been ignored. At some point we burn out (and we've lost mods due to company actions... far too many). The mood amongst many mods is 'why bother' cause our feedback hasn't had any impact at all. So - I'd wonder if the company is willing to work towards changing that.

I'm going to quote from a moderator internal post I wrote earlier

A lot of the time, the company lacks direction and communication. There's multiple situations where the company has failed to take community feedback, or pushes through 'features' or bigger projects without taking neither their own employees feedback or the community's (see the rebrand). We've had extended periods over the years with insufficient support. While the company is very focused on changing the platform to attract people from outside, we lose people who have impact within the communities. The public platform, especially smaller sites often end up in a poor state as a result cause they don't have the critical mass to handle a problem.

We need to know our feedback has value. If the feedback is that the new design is currently unserviceable for our needs - and we're rather you iterate and improve our current model, we need you to take that feedback , and show good faith, even if It means killing off a project you've sunk a lot of man hours into .

You'd note most of the feedback has been negative. Its been actionable. We have a return of the new comment design - where we clearly pointed out comments were a 'second class' thing and they distracted from answers for example. You have everything you need already. Its just ignored from our perspective.

And while early action's nice, much like with your AI initiatives, hubris has poisoned the well. This is seen as the first step towards killing off the Q&A platform (and the rest of the redesign kills off the stack exchange network's identity). We see this as a threat to the network, and are reacting accordingly.

So very much my actionable suggestion would be - without the Q&A platform we've built over the last 16 years, this place wouldn't exist. These changes are affecting folks who are the most active the most. If you want to try something new - let it be on its own merits. Build a different model. See if people prefer it - but if you' want to replace what we have now, you're going to lose the community we have.

I sometimes feel the community SO inc wants is different from the one we have. Its also... kinda vaporware. So take the opportunity - look at what we've said, and please do right by us.

I've been using [so] for about 10 years now. Half the time I didn't had an account and just looked up Q&A here to solve my problems or find orientation by reading experts sharing their expertise on this platform. This is also the group of people we (the community) actively aiming for. The metrics of new users or new questions is irrelevant to us, if you wanna talk to us about a decline of SO show us that our products (Q&A) aren't clicked anymore. Because that would indicate that our products lose real value to us.

Making an account and ask a question is a last resort for SO users. We ask questions here when we don't find an answer in advanced and that is how it should continue to work.

After a SO user (visitor) made an account, they don't know nothing about this site besides what they believe to be on-topic. The only tools we have to signal it ain't on-topic to new users are downvotes and close-reasons, which are ambiguous, ask the community about common reasons they downvote and friendly phrase for it.

I welcome that you decide to resolve the ambiguous reasons to provide detailed reasons. Buttons with down-vote-reasons below the question, which result in comments by the community bot would be helpful, for author and curator. Since SO member don't like to engage with authors in general. Because we don't know what lunatic or maybe even a kid is sitting on the other end.

Even so for each close reason there are some common responses. I would suggest you to take each close reasons and ask for them here on meta. After gathering the information implement it like this:

[dublicate] [details] [focus] [opinionated] [format] [custom]

• Belongs to a different site ...

Since the community-bot tells the user what's wrong they can act by editing or ask for further advice in the comments. If a question finally got closed place a link to What does it mean if a question is closed? and What if I disagree with a closure of a question ?

It took me years before I found out about meta and it's not the job of the community to educate the users, nor is it necessarily the new members fault for not knowing how this site works. That's the company's job and you have to do this and I refuse to accept that a new user has to hop through all the rings of immensely searching for guidance, it's like having to reading a manual to this site. Provide them automatically in the situations they are needed.

Resolve ancient issues, put them on the table again and ask for concrete solutions:

• How does a new user get started -> Reputation gain by curating (Reviews/editing/..)
• Outdated-Answers -> Trending answers is nice, where is my Review queue for it?
• Where do I ask my question -> It's all over the place. We need to have a way better question feed.
  -> Below the Search-entry we could have tabs to different but related SE-sites
  -> Below [newest] [active] we should have a selection of [all] [debugging] [advice]..
• Why people don't skip reviews? So.. Let me comment on Reviews
• Visibility of good questions
• No reward for improving

Are the curation tools meeting your needs? How could they be improved? - What are we missing?

You are missing a way to migrate posts between opinion-based discussions and Q/A proper. People get this wrong sometimes, and questions asking for "advice", "recommendations", or "troubleshooting" are actually focused and well-suited to receive a single correct answer, they do not belong into the grey area of "on-topic but no clear correct answer". Same for the other way round, instead of closing Q/A posts as opinion-based, some of them might be kept in the forum part of SO.

I don't have the patience to actually read through all that corporate speak anymore. So in that spirit, I'm going to keep this short and to the point. I wish you would do the same.

We care deeply about curation, and have dedicated substantial time and money to building tools for it; and we will continue to invest in this area.

Then why don't I see any curation tools on the new site? Heck, I don't see a way to flag abusive content!

Why did you de-emphasize the score? Even though they're not perfect, question and answer scores are the first indicator of quality. They aid in deciding what content to give our limited time/attention to first.

Also FYI, the new graphical arrangement actually makes it infinitely more difficult to tell the difference between the question, answers, and the comments. That wastes everyone's time, including the asker's. I say without exaggeration that this is one of the worst designs I've ever seen.

When we said “no more closing questions”, we failed to take into account that that phrase would mean something very different to you than to us.

What I'm hearing is that the people making decisions don't have any idea what made this site succeed in the first place. The entire model was designed from the beginning to eliminate common frustrations of the most active, longstanding participants in forums, such as dealing with endless duplicates and low effort requests. Removing closure brings those frustrations back. De-emphasizing votes makes it difficult to identify the best answers. A community can't survive if the experts don't stick around.

We're not looking for marketers to hand hold our feelings while you wreck everything that made this site worth using. We're looking for people who actually care enough to do something about our problems.