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Update October 27th, 2025

We have officially launched this experiment to ten percent of all users on Stack Overflow who have not opted out of experiments. Couple of things to note:

  • We have moved the staff chat mentioned at the bottom of the post to November 4th at 9 AM EST. Again, please check back before that date and time for the link. We wanted to give the community at least a week from when the experiment launched before having the chat.
  • For any examples of opinion-based questions that you might come across and believe to be good or bad candidates for the site, please leave those examples and your rationale on this separate meta post.
  • All other feedback, bug reports, and long-form suggestions on the feature's design and concept can be left on this post. Please use the bug or feature-request tag in your answer for these specific purposes.

Today, we are following up on our announcement regarding the topic of including opinion-based questions on Stack Overflow. The Community Enablement team would like to share some details about our design perspective, what we hope to measure, and the specifics of our upcoming experiment, which will soon be launching on Stack Overflow to a small number of users in the coming days.

This project aims to create a designated space for technical discussions, best practices, tooling recommendations, and architectural questions or advice that are vital to a developer’s workflow but often are closed under our existing, highly structured Q&A model. Of all the questions asked since the beginning of the year, 24% got closed as opinion-based or off-topic. These questions aren't necessarily bad; they simply don't fit the definitive-answer format of traditional Stack Overflow. By allowing these questions, we aim to unlock valuable, previously unresolved questions.

Designing for the New User: A Softer Entry Point

The goal of this new approach is to add more quality information to the knowledge base. While also providing a softer on ramp for community members who can’t confidently engage in traditional Q&A.

We recognize that the strict, objective standards of traditional Stack Overflow can feel like a high barrier, and those barriers are there for good reason. New users often struggle to phrase their questions in a way that meets the minimal reproducible example or troubleshooting standards, especially when they are still in the planning or decision-making phase of their current project.

Visibility and Opt-Out

The new question types will be integrated into the question feeds, clearly marked with their category (Advice, Tooling, Best Practices). We are bringing this subjective content directly into the Stack Overflow experience because better visibility is one of the key lessons we took from Discussions.

Users who prefer the traditional experience will be able to opt out of this experiment to avoid seeing the new content entirely. If this experiment is successful, the next set of features to be prioritized will focus on user content filtering, allowing users to filter out specific content or selectively choose which types they want to see.

Screenshot of a logged-in user's personalized Stack Overflow home page, showing a welcome message, reputation, badge progress, watched tags, and a feed of questions including opinion based questions signaled by the following labels:Advice, Tooling, Best Practices.

Screenshot of the Stack Overflow operating-system tag page, showing a list of recent questions related to operating system development with some holding the new labels to signal they are opinion based.

Asking Experience

As you can see in the mockups, the key change is a simple ”type” selector on the Ask Question form. We ran some research with users to confirm if they could successfully and consistently label these questions based on the question labels we offered them. Based on our research questions, questions were labeled correctly about 90% of the time. We landed on these question types based on suggestions made during Discussion experiments.

  • Default: The experience remains Troubleshooting / Debugging for classic Q&A.
  • New Options: Users can now select categories such as Tooling Recommendations, Best Practices, or General Advice/Other.

When a user selects one of these new types, the guidelines on the right adjust to provide more specific guidance for consideration while writing their question. Such as:

  • Questions that invite more in-depth explanations
  • Questions that invite community members to share relevant personal insights, direction, or solutions that have worked for them in a similar situation.

Differences from traditional questions:

  • The UI for these new question types is intentionally simpler (see mockups below)
  • We're replacing the voting model with thumbs up and down
  • We're removing reputation
  • We're removing the ability to accept one of the answers

This shift is designed to encourage nuanced, conversational answers by signaling that there is no single “correct” response, allowing multiple solutions to coexist and be valued.

Screenshot of the Stack Overflow "Ask a question" form, with the question Type set to "Best practices" and a Guidelines sidebar explaining that this question type is for open-ended discussions about topics like best practices, recommended tools, or architecture.

Opinion-based question UI

Once posted, these questions look a little different. We have replaced the vote buttons with thumbs-up/down buttons at the bottom, and moved the user avatar and tags to the top of the question header. This is because the research group responded most positively to thumbs for the “score” behavior, instead of the other options that were presented to them. For this experiment, we will only ever show the thumbs-up count, both on the question post and in the question feed. Eventually, we intend to use this for filtering purposes in the feed, should the feature continue to demonstrate success. Given the opinion-based nature of these question types, we determined that showing a thumbs-down score may not be beneficial to the user experience and how welcome they can feel as a result. After initial testing, we may further improve the thumbs down action by incorporating a feedback mechanism that nudges the asker to improve their question based on feedback collected from users who give the question a thumbs-down.

We have also replaced the answers header with a “replies” header, and functionally made the replies look more like comments; ideally these will eventually support threading, and continue the design style of using thumbs up/down. Again, we will only show the up counter, and in the future, we will consider adding logic here to highlight better replies.

Options for flagging will be Spam, Abusive, and Other. For spam and abuse, four votes will result in the deletion of the content, while content that doesn’t meet that threshold will be directed to the moderator queue. For items flagged as “other,” the Community Enablement team will be monitoring them, as well as taking moderation actions on them when necessary, to gain a deeper understanding of the tools needed to support this content and to understand the moderator experience. Current moderators are welcome to participate if they like, but there is no expectation that they have to help. The Community Enablement team will stay in touch with Stack Overflow moderators through the process to take advantage of their expertise and collect whatever moderator specific feedback that comes up during this experiment.

Screenshot of an example Stack Overflow opinion based question titled "Good patterns or strategies for long term maintenance of mid/big sized apps," which is an open-ended question tagged as Best practices and includes a few example replies. The user avatar, and tags have been moved to the top of the quesiton instead of the bottom

Question Closure Options

While we won’t rule out some form of question closure in the future, we want to focus on improving the current process here to something more constructive that encourages the asker to refine their question in a different way, rather than the current closing process. Once we have determined whether this initial experiment has been successful, we will reassess the closing of these types of questions and how that is communicated to the asker.

Moderation, Community Guidance, and Staff Proactivity

Opening the door to subjective questions requires a commitment to quality control. We will not be leaving this content unmoderated. It took Stack Overflow a few years to establish its current standard of content quality; we don’t expect to reach that today, and should this team find success with these experiments, we plan to refine those standards over time. This team only asks that you keep an open mind while we work through the premise that opinion-based questions can be high-quality.

In that vein, we will be approaching this in a few different ways:

  • Proactive Staff Response: Rather than simply closing vague or low-quality questions, staff will proactively engage with users. Asking for more details and attempting to engage with those users to encourage them to improve their post and bring it to a better state.

  • Active Feedback: We will open a chat room and maintain a designated MSO post, where community members can provide examples of opinion-based questions they believe are of suitable or poor quality and explain their reasoning. The chat room will be monitored by members of the Community Enablement team and we will have scheduled time for staff to be present there to answer questions. More details at the bottom of the post in the, “We want your feedback” section.

  • Experiment Exposure: We will be releasing the experiment to ten percent of users to start. That ten percent will be able to use the new ask form, and everyone else who opted into the experiment will be able to view, reply, etc. The Community Enablement team will be monitoring questions that are asked, spam and moderation flags. We will continue to increase the exposure of the experiment for the next few weeks as we monitor activity.

The Alpha Test: Measurement and Success

We want to be crystal clear: what we are releasing here is an alpha test to validate the core concept, not a beta or general release. This initial implementation is bare-bones and lacks many features (like comprehensive tooling for comparing different variations of the UI to determine what the best experience is) that we would build out later. We are purely looking at this in terms of the concept's survivability:

  • Plainly, are we seeing opinion-based question closures going down, and a consistent stream of the opinion-based questions being asked?
  • Are we seeing responses? We want to see these new question types getting at least one reply, ideally within seven days.
  • Rate of flagged questions - We know that spam was an issue with Discussions. We’ll be monitoring this rate and prioritizing additional spam mitigation tools should we see related concerns.

Spam Prevention

We know that spam will show up in some form or another, so we have implemented the following to help mitigate that as much as possible:

We Want Your Feedback

As an alpha experiment, we want to be open about the fact that if this experiment continues to progress, it could change a little bit or quite a bit from what you see today. So if you have feedback on anything we have presented or changes on how you would like to see this presented on Stack Overflow, please let us know. We have set up two channels to capture your thoughts:

  • Designated Meta Post for content quality feedback: Please use this different meta post for feedback on opinion-based questions you see that you believe are good or not good candidates for the site. All other feedback, bug reports, and long-form suggestions on the feature's design and concept can be left on this post. Please use the or tag in your answer for these specific purposes.
  • Chat Room: We will be opening a dedicated chat room, once the experiment has been launched, where staff will be there at scheduled intervals to talk through the experiment. The first will be held on October 29th, 2025 9 AM EST. Please check this post to confirm the time, as it might change.

We will be monitoring this post til November 5th, 2025 for feedback.

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    Calling something "best practices" is problematic in itself, as it surely will lead to "which programming language is best for x" type of questions, without anyone bothering to define "best". And it will quickly become very tiresome to point that out, over and over and over. Probably one of the main reasons why such questions aren't allowed on SO these days. Commented Oct 22 at 15:08
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    "Proactive Staff Response" We were promised that for the n most recent new features too and in practice it meant "some staff will check it out for 5 minutes upon the day of release then forget all about it and then leave it to rot". Notable examples being Discussions and the chat overhaul. Commented Oct 22 at 15:12
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    You don't need to wait to see. Discussions were full of awful "best language" type of questions, we already know that this will happen based on previous experience. Not only from Discussions but also from early days SO. Commented Oct 22 at 15:16
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    Surely the default should be to opt OUT. Let those who really want the pain opt IN. Commented Oct 22 at 15:20
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    @Paulie_D making it opt-out is far more effective at "proving" it's a feature that should exist. Remember the sticky header option that got removed because "almost no-one used it"? If the default is on, we're relying on positive feedback to determine success but have no means for negative feedback, and marketing it to the masses as some "anything goes" kind of feature, it's going to get (ab)used and there's no real reason to call this an experiment because the outcomes are known. Commented Oct 22 at 15:55
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    @KarlKnechtel I definitely use an LLM to write alt text for images, but I do edit them when I think they miss the point. But nope, otherwise all of this weirdness is all me. Commented Oct 22 at 16:19
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    So the purpose is to divert opinion-based questions & your measure of a successful diversion is it gets a response? What about the quality of the response? Shouldn't you test the reason this experiment is being done, user engagement? I don't mean that to sound hostile. I appreciate that y'all have put some thought into how to get the content some visibility without impacting Q&A. I think English Language Learners could benefit from something similar, because there is a divide in the community over where "opinion-based" starts and some of those closed questions are useful to learners. Commented Oct 22 at 16:36
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    A lot of discussions in the previous "experiment" had meta replies, such as "this is off topic", would similar replies be considered a positive metric in aggregate? Commented Oct 22 at 16:41
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    @Hoid Seems you have a severe communications problem internally if you can't even interview those who participated in Discussions. I mean what's even the point of launching experimental features then.... Commented Oct 22 at 16:51
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    @Hoid The short story is that staff support was promised, a few brave diamond mods volunteered, only the diamond mods did actual moderation - they were essentially thrown under the bus. In the new chat lobbies staff support was also promised but staff didn't do jack, so those are also handled by a few diamond mods from underneath the bus. To launch a new system without even having a clue how it is going to be moderated is to set everything up to fail. Which we also learned from previous experience. Commented Oct 22 at 16:51
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    "We recognize that the strict, objective standards of traditional Stack Overflow can feel like a high barrier, and those barriers are there for good reason" Can't wait for you the company to break down those barriers anyway when this "experiment" is graduated after overwhelming success. Commented Oct 22 at 16:56
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    @Lundin I've been in and around the SO Lobby since I was hired to ensure that I can take care of what happens there when I'm available. The ROs can also attest that I've been available for them in their Lobby Moderation backroom. There could've been more staff support for these chatrooms, yes, but please don't throw the whole thing out as us "not doing jack." Commented Oct 22 at 17:20
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    @Spevacus Umm... the lobbies were launched in May. You were hired late September. Concerns such as Is Stack Exchange pretty much finished with the two Lobbies? were completely ignored. As were the immediate concerns about consistent moderation outside US office hours here: meta.stackexchange.com/a/409038/170024 Apart from the initial 24 hours, what exactly did the staff do in these chat rooms from May to September. "Jack" seems quite fitting afaik but please prove me wrong. Commented Oct 22 at 17:28
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    Euh...!? Misconception...: "Default: The experience remains Troubleshooting / Debugging for classic Q&A." This is not correct, 'Troubleshooting' and 'Debugging' are more or less the same thing, "classic Q&A" means How to? + Why? Questions. (And 'Debugging' = Why? Questions...) // Opinion-based Questions would then be Which? Questions... Commented Oct 22 at 19:19
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    I also wonder what the purpose is of having a button (thumb-down) that has no effect. How will people react once they find out? Will they feel cheated on or just shrug it off? I know I wouldn't really like it and I think that only buttons with functions should be present and everything else is just bad UX. Or am I completely wrong? If you decide you need the button later on, you can still add it or not? Commented Oct 22 at 19:45

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You claim that you've learned your lessons from Discussions (or maybe you just want the visibility), yet proceeded to remove/ignore (potato/potahto) downvotes (or thumbs-down) from these posts.

This has been a point of disagreement between community and the company forever and ever. And your only solution (to a problem that its existence is up for debate to begin with) is to remove downvotes; you've tried it multiple times, why not consider one of the other (maybe not perfect, but different) options laid out in the posts that have discussed downvotes (both here and on MSE)?!

You seem to prioritize reducing visible friction (thinking that encourages new users and product adoption) over refining the system that the established community values for quality control (which ends up being one of the reasons those products/experiments fail).

Updates to address Hoid's response in the comments:

First, let me say that I appreciate the discussion. I subscribe to this Cody's quote (fact) that Progress cannot happen without confrontation.

We are not saying the downvote has no value, just that we want to take this experiment as an opportunity to rethink that approach. Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece of content, but its less so for the author of a piece of content because it doesn't signal the actual problem and what might be causing it.

I understand that this is an important topic for you and you'd want to use every opportunity to revisit it. But I don't see any rethinking here. Just doing the same thing. I have previously suggested capping the score at -1 or 0 for the original author. I am not saying that's the best method, just something that I remember cause I suggested it (there are probably better suggestions across the network).

I don't see any value in testing something (with minor adjustments or not) that has been tried multiple times and has been proven to not work again and again.

When you do not show the score, you are ignoring that "Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece".

However, at this stage of experimentation, we are simply testing overall interest in this content type and potential spam exposure, before investing in answering that particular question.

I have already talked about these kinds of experiments/implementations and also pointed out what could've been done to save Discussions. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as I don't want to see any efforts go to waste, but I think this approach of we'll do barely the bare-minimum and we'd circle back later is just akin to setting yourself up for failure.

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    As a nuanced argument: voting in itself as means of doing moderation is problematic. A much better system is to have a well-defined scope of what questions should look like and then quickly just remove everything not fitting that bill, with as little drama as possible. Instead of the SO system of removing problematic posts as slowly as possible, down votes, close votes, comments, reviews, really rub it in how much we seem to like their post. -> Commented Oct 22 at 15:26
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    Nobody likes criticism in public no matter how well-founded so maybe don't build a system based on public humiliation as means of moderation. Tech nerds tend to not get this, or empathy in general, and SO was built by tech nerds. Commented Oct 22 at 15:26
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    The two big takeaways from Discussions were as follows: exposure and lack of spam support. So, for this initial experiment, we prioritized making sure we were set up to resolve those. You are right about the disagreement and its history, the team is aware of that. We are not saying the downvote has no value, just that we want to take this experiment as an opportunity to rethink that approach. Downvotes are most helpful for the audience of any given piece of content, but its less so for the author of a piece of content because it doesn't signal the actual problem and what might be causing it. Commented Oct 22 at 16:05
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    So we opted to keep it light in this case and then experiment with different feedback loops to the author to help improve their content. Of course, that then leaves us with a question of how to signal bad opinion-based content(OBC) to the rest of the audience. I personally think that just might mean some form of hiding till edits are improved or something like that. However, at this stage of experimentation, we are simply testing overall interest in this content type and potential spam exposure, before investing in answering that particular question. Commented Oct 22 at 16:08
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    @Hoid Please see my response posted as an edit. Thank you again. Commented Oct 22 at 17:01
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    I agree with Cody on that point, too, but I would argue that it goes both ways. If someone is asking for an opinion on a question they need help with, what kind of value does a downvote actually offer them? In most cases, it does nothing. I know that this particular topic has been circled a few times. I have two thoughts that I hold. One being that, for better or worse, we need more askers/answerers than we have today. The 2nd, given the first, we might need to start thinking about how to give more specific signals to people than a downvote offers. Commented Oct 22 at 21:50
  • my understanding is they didn't remove thumbs down- it's basically just not shown. did I misunderstand? @Hoid I do have a question about thumbs down- is there any affect of question/reply "score" on sorting? and are there sorting controls? (I don't see any in the ockup, but maybe I just missed it) Commented Oct 22 at 21:52
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    I read your Discussions post, as I have worked with the enablement team to talk through feedback. That is why the first two points have been addressed, and for the third, I believe we can find a middle ground that works specifically for opinion-based questions that signal quality or something of interest to the community, while also helping an asker or an answer understand why it might not land with some people. Which I think is a core piece of allowing this type of content, not every single question or answer will be helpful to every person, and that's okay. Commented Oct 22 at 21:56
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    @Hoid "The two big takeaways from Discussions were as follows: exposure and lack of spam support." ????? Discussions learnings and potential next steps: "there was never a clear definition of what Discussions is for" "A key learning was that, while there is something to be explored in that realm ["Discussions as a way to start those conversations adjacent to (or spinning off from) a question"], sending users from one somewhat ambiguous space (comments) to another (Discussions) was not offering many users the clarity they needed." Commented Oct 22 at 21:57
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    @starball I am assuming you are referring to replies on an opinion question. If so, not for this initial experiment, but it's on the radar to add, we have reply threading as a fast follow to address first, so determining the best way to sort a set of replies or by score is something we have to keep in mind for that. There are questions if you should sort by the first reply's score or by the sum of all replies in that thread. Commented Oct 22 at 22:00
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    @philipxy I think you're trying to make a point about my two key takeaways. The first part of that quote explains that the lack of a clear definition was by design. We have designed opinion-based questions to be much clearer; that's why the type drop-down is there on the ask form that I shared. So users can signal what kind of question they want to ask. Thus, the two most considerable takeaways we had to resolve were exposure and spam prevention. Could you please clarify if you were trying to make a different point? Commented Oct 22 at 22:11
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    @Hoid I wasn't quoting Cody to argue for the importance of downvotes, just that I am criticizing your approach in the hopes that we can improve it through direct conversation. But I see what you did there :) When Bert first mentioned removing downvotes, I gave my two-cents on SOfT instance and posted a version of it here. Again, I think capping the (down)votes at 0 or -1 for OP is far better solution than capping it for everyone (what you're doing). Why don't you test that for a change? Commented Oct 23 at 1:29
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    The problem here is that we don't see a composite score. That's what I call illusion of choice. You give us the downvote (thumbs down) button, but it doesn't do anything. Similar to what was done with Discussions, taking away downvotes, or not counting them, does not "encourage users to express concerns about a post via flagging, and to provide constructive feedback". I would (and had) argue that it's forcing us to either flag/leave comments or simply leave the problematic posts alone. Commented Oct 23 at 1:40
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This experiment as you have envisioned it, will fail. I hope that you can take feedback given here and make improvements before you launch this.

Good

  • Spam measures
  • Wizard asking users to choose the type of questions
  • No accepted answer
  • No reputation
    • In long term there might be some value in giving reputation for good answers on such posts, but that is not relevant at this moment.

Bad

  • No community based moderation for questions and answers
  • Discussion style format
    • This format emphasizes the question, and answers look more like comments. We don't want casual chit-chat, we want full fledged quality answers even for such content. There is absolutely no reason why this new content wouldn't follow the UI style of existing Q/A (without the ability to accept answers).

Missing

  • Warning that AI generated or assisted (formatting, rephrasing, or similar) content is not allowed on Stack Overflow.

  • Rate limiting

    • Some users will post high amounts of low quality junk and there needs to be a system which will prevent that. Also users who are question banned should be prevented to post new types of questions, otherwise this will be used as a venue for asking questions by those users.

  • Moving posts between regular Q/A and new content type

    • This is critical for newly posted content as there will definitely be newly posted questions which are categorized in a wrong way and community and moderators need a way to correct that. Keeping same format between regular Q/A and new content type would make that possible. In long term this would also allow us to move old, currently not acceptable, but otherwise good content and give it a permanent home under a new content type.

  • Review queue

    • First posts by users (questions and answers) need to go through review queue

  • Sorting by votes

    • Good answers need to be on the top. We need the same sorting options like we have for regular Q/A pairs.

  • Community driven editing

If there is a room for such content on the site(s), and I believe that there is some room for additional content, then such content needs to be of high quality. We don't need a place where anything goes, and this requires community moderation and ability to prevent users who have proven that they are not capable of providing good content to post as they please.

We have content rating system for reason. Hiding downvotes (thumb-downs) is not going to accomplish anything. If someone posts something that is not good they need to know that. Yes, criticism hurts, but that is the only way to have and get something of value.

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    Rather than implementing down-votes, bad posts should just get removed. Optionally to some sort of backstage area where those interested in attempting to fix the post can do so. But the key is to remove bad posts from view and the person who posted it can get the feedback about why it was removed in private, rather than broadcasting how bad their post is to the whole Internet, which is one of the core design flaws of SO. Commented Oct 23 at 12:04
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    @Lundin That idea works, but based on what metric should removing be implemented? Also reducing visibility, reduces useful feedback because only higher rep users would be able to give some. I was giving useful feedback long before I had sufficient reputation to perform other kinds of moderation. Commented Oct 23 at 12:27
  • Ideally there would be some sort of scope and category system or otherwise it will be impossible to moderate it in the first place. Like for example making a rule that questions asking about "best practices" must define "best". Commented Oct 23 at 13:05
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    @Lundin Yes, but I am thinking more about the process of deciding that post needs improvement or it is fine. Right now we have queues and we have downvotes and we have close votes. Also downvotes from lower reputation users can leave signal to high rep users who can close vote that something needs attention. If we remove downvotes, we lose a lot. So the question is based on what would you remove LQ post to the "background" if there are no downvotes and there is no closure process. Or you think there can be closure process, but without downvotes? Commented Oct 23 at 13:38
  • Let users with a certain rep cast delete votes. And maybe "looks fine" votes. Votes aren't visible. If deleted then optionally the post can be taken "back stage" somewhere for feedback and fixing. The important part is that it is removed from the site as quick as possible, with as little drama and public shaming as possible. Give this voting privilege the same level of trust as close votes, so 3k rep. A similar system would work much better than the current close vote fiasco system on the main Q&A too. Commented Oct 23 at 14:26
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    This idea is coming from some old Codidact brainstorming btw, how to make something much better than SO. Didn't quite get implemented. The full proposal can be found at Codidact: Giving question feedback in private - a moderating system to reduce conflicts Commented Oct 23 at 14:29
  • @Lundin thanks. That sounds interesting. It is kind of reverse Staging Ground, where everything is posted in public first, but then moved if needs improvement. I just wonder how much friction would this cause here considering that single person would be able to move posts. I mean ideally, such system should work, but I am always thinking about possible abuse and borderline cases. Commented Oct 23 at 14:59
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    A couple of things I wanted to clarify. Editing is still here; any user with editing privileges can edit a question or reply. You mention review queues above that point, so it's not clear to me if your community editing comment is referring to the suggested edits queue or just editing in general. Commented Oct 23 at 20:44
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    On review queues, we actually can expose them to the first question/answers queue pretty easily, granted we have not checked if we break any of the UI there with this, but opinion questions are 98% regular Q&A code, so it's not hard to just turn that on. Though I am not sure we have actually written the code for turning it off just yet. Commented Oct 23 at 20:44
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    All existing rate limits for regular Q&A are also in effect for this. We did tweak a few of them on opinion-based questions, specifically, like you can post more than once every 30 minutes. I don't have the details handy, but I think we dropped it down to like 2 minutes. I will find out and clarify. There are a few others we identified that needed tweaking for opinion questions, but none to my knowledge were turned off. Commented Oct 23 at 20:55
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    On your point about being able to move questions back and forth, yes, I agree. That being said, we did look at moving questions between the two, and it's a bit more complex than we had assumed, given what we do with the original. But we wanted to validate our base assumption, that enough people wanted to ask and reply to these question types, before building that feature. We absolutely want to visit old, closed opinion-based questions and move them as well, but want to be delicate about doing so as it's an opportunity to reactivate users who have abandoned the platform in the past. Commented Oct 23 at 20:59
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    I also want to challenge your assumption that a discussion-style format is bad. If I were only viewing this through the lens of opinion-based questions being identical to objective Q&A, then yes, I would agree. But based on my reading of old conversations about opinion-based stuff, that is what we tried. So I think we need to divorce ourselves from that a bit and instead consider how these can coexist and eventually form meaningful connections. I think leaning a little away from the typical Q&A structure actually allows us to be more creative in creating space for high-quality opinion content. Commented Oct 23 at 21:10
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    @Hoid Correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK Discussions could not be easily edited by other users meta.stackoverflow.com/q/431222 Commented Oct 24 at 6:17
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    The problem you have with moving questions back and forth is because you opted for completely new format. If you would follow existing Q/A format and only add a marker which will define type of question, then you can easily move content back and forth without having to do anything to the original, because original would be merely categorized in different way. This would allow you to dig up and preserve old questions which were closed and many even deleted because they didn't fit into Q/A at that time. Even if you never allow that, you are tying your hands by choosing a different format. Commented Oct 24 at 6:26
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    Problem with opinion based questions and their answers within Q/A was huge number of low quality "me too" answers (and I don' think you want that in new format either), and the fact that all those could earn reputation which could then alter the balance between reputation and privileges on the site. Just like you significantly altered that balance by raising rep for questions from 5 to 10 points. Commented Oct 24 at 6:31
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What makes a good opinion question?

This was obliquely called out in the main question comments, but I think it deserves to be bubbled up. With the removal of closures for content (besides spam/abuse), and the removal of the downvote to indicate "not useful for future audiences", it makes it seem like this is "anything goes".

... Especially since you're forcing moderation activities onto actual humans who have real work to do for a real site, and without the guardrails and community moderation that are built into the main Q&A.

So, preferably before this goes live, it's really important to figure out -- what makes a good opinion question? What makes it on-topic, appropriately focused, and answerable? What makes a good opinion answer? What does an upvote (or a thumbs up, I don't care what you call it) mean? What does a downvote (hidden or otherwise) mean?

Forget about users and friction and what not -- at the end of the day StackOverflow is a Q&A site ... what content do we want to see with these types of questions?

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    Exactly this. Will opinion questions on best soup recipes be allowed? Or questions asking for database administration best practices? Neither of those are on-topic, but how will that be moderated? Commented Oct 22 at 16:28
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    "What makes a good opinion question?" well, I still think Good Subjective, Bad Subjective is relevant even 15 years later. It somehow feels like the company is trying to re-discover this but via an entirely new question type. Commented Oct 22 at 17:18
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    Yes, it does appear to be an anything-goes type of situation. Practically, it's more of an "almost anything goes" situation. We offer some guidance in the sidebar, which serves as our baseline suggestion. That may not be good enough over the long term, but that's okay, that's the point of experimenting. Commented Oct 22 at 21:22
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    What would an interesting opinion-based question that is worth answering look like to you? Is there such a thing? If you went looking for an opinion on something you needed help with? What would you be expecting in the form of an answer? Maybe you brought an issue up with a colleague in the recent past, you could test run here to see what kind of response you got? Commented Oct 22 at 21:22
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    On voting, my favorite projects I have worked on in my time at SO was this one on the reputation system.. Most people don't vote for the same reasons, and what people receive from them think about them are not the same as the intention of the voter. They are a bright signal, but not always a very precise one. We could probably do better, but adjusting that tradition, if we should at all, is very difficult. But maybe this is the right space for it, or maybe not? Commented Oct 22 at 21:27
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    @VLAZ I am pretty sure everyone on the enablment team has read that post, and I think it's the right guide to fine-tune this alongside community feedback. Commented Oct 22 at 21:28
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    @devlincarnate No soup recipes, still a technical site for technical questions on software engineering. It is fall in my hemisphere, so if you have some good recipes that you are itching to share, please ping me in chat somewhere. Commented Oct 22 at 21:29
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    What would an interesting opinion-based question that is worth answering look like to you? Honestly, I don't care what a random shmuck on the internet's opinion is. I care about an expert's opinion. If Linus Torvalds or Uncle Bob showed up and gave their opinion on something in their wheelhouse, that's useful regardless of whether I agree with their opinion or not. Some random user12345 on StackOverflow who watched a Youtube tutorial last week and thinks that makes them an expert? Nope. @Hoid Commented Oct 22 at 22:01
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    programmers / software-engineering [sic] .SE all over again. "Programmers - Stack Exchange is for expert programmers who are interested in subjective discussions on software development."--Atwood "doomed"--Santayana Commented Oct 22 at 22:11
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    One that attracts lots of traffic. I mean come on, can we stop beating around the bush. Stack Overflow needs more traffic. Sacrifices will have to be made. Commented Oct 23 at 9:06
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    @RoddyoftheFrozenPeas, what if you could ask your question and limit answers only to community members who hold a gold badge in one of the tags you used on your question? I am speculating; this has not been discussed at all. But what if? Commented Oct 23 at 14:17
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    @Gimby I mean, I did try to make that clear in the first section, I think, but yeah, we are aiming to capture more traffic/users/content, etc. Commented Oct 23 at 14:21
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    @Hoid - Most users don’t choose relevant tags, and why happens when a user chooses a tag, which has no user with a good badge or the user who does hasn’t been seen in 3 years. As much as I hate the idea of this experiment, if I read a question I know the answer to, I would probably answer the question and it would be very upsetting to be unable to submit an answer because I didn’t have a useless badge. Commented Oct 24 at 2:04
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    Also there are small low-traffic tags which don't have any gold badge holders, and the actual experts who do participate there have no more than bronze. The gold badge process favors large, broad language tags (eg html, python), users who were around 15 years ago and answered the fundamental questions in those tags, and those users who've figured out how to "profit" in a fastest-gun situation. Commented Oct 24 at 16:15
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    @V2Blast Our regular systems handle that, because the level of self-promotion is limited by the requirement to justify your answer. If we allow opinions, 'its great because in our opinion as the product maker its great' is a valid answer. Commented Oct 26 at 16:06
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Seems like the only options for saying "this post should not be here" are flagging as Spam or Abusive, or "Other". Downvotes don't really exist either (you can "Thumbs down" but as I understand it has no effect). So all curation outside of editing is supposed to be done via a custom mod flag? You did not even think of adding an "Off Topic" flag for the inevitable posts asking about cooking recipes, or opinions on a TV show ("it had a l33t h4x0r in a hoodie so it's on topic"), or other things that have absolutely no relation to programming?

What kind of "Other" flags are you envisioning here? Without clear guidelines that spell out what kind of posts are definitely NOT welcome on SO, even in these new categories, I can only see this becoming a huge mess.

You claim to have learned lessons from discussions, but frankly nothing you've written gives me confidence that you learned something about content quality (not just spam; also useless and low quality content). You say

By allowing these questions, we aim to unlock valuable, previously unresolved questions.

But the "alpha" you describe sounds like simply opening the floodgates without adequate tooling, yet again.

Also,

The goal of this new approach is to add more quality information to the knowledge base. While also providing a softer on ramp for community members who can’t confidently engage in traditional Q&A.

These two sentences seem mutually exclusive. And weird as well, because help vampires and other users that get their questions closed don't usually lack in "confidence" to "engage in traditional Q&A", they just contribute bottom tier questions which are then not well received by the community. I suppose you envision the not-confident members asking questions which will lead to "quality information" provided by someone else... but that does need a quality question as the starting point, otherwise answerers cannot provide good information and content discoverability via search engines will be lacking as well (which is important for the "knowledge base" part).

I wrote a few meta answers about various projects over the years, and in some I referenced Yahoo Answers as an example of a service not to strive for. With these changes which as written now allow basically any content that is not spam or abusive, SO turning into Yahoo Answers might actually become a reality.

Also, I'm not a fan of your measures of success:

  • Will opinion-based closure go down and are questions asked in the new categories? - if the users asking questions understand your UI that seems like a self fulfilling prophecy; some will probably simply choose the new categories to prevent their question from being closed as closure is simply not a thing there.
  • Will opinion based questions get a response? - Yes absolutely, but that measure seems useless without also evaluating if the response has any value at all. I doubt you can adequately measure that with limited staff who are also probably not subject matter experts; and if you're thinking of using an LLM to find out then this is invalid from the start.
  • How much content will be flagged? - As above, it's not specified what kind of flag the company would even consider acting upon outside of spam and abuse. Without specifying that, this metric is useless as a) the community is not adequately informed how to flag and b) staff can tweak this statistic however they like by simply declining flags.
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    If I read the "Moderation, Community Guidance, and Staff Proactivity" section, which I personally do with a huge bias towards thinking these changes are to make Stack Overflow more Reddit, it comes over to me as that old style curation and moderation is going to be a little less of a thing for these kind of posts. At least for now while the experiment is ongoing. But that's what you get when you say "keep an open mind" - it's ambiguous what that means. Just come out and say "Let us do our thing and back off". Commented Oct 23 at 9:04
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Will there be a process in place, on day one, for dealing with the inevitable situation where someone asks a Q&A as a discussion or a discussion as a Q&A?

On that same vein... how are we expected to handle discussions that would be better as a Q&A, like best practices questions that should be how to questions?

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    We could maybe close them as "not opinion based" if that reason existed. Commented Oct 22 at 17:38
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    No, strictly because we want to see how much that still happens. Does our type indicator catch most or all of them? If not, what are we missing, and how do we signal to people asking opinion-based questions to select the right type to ask an opinion-based question? In the future, there definitely will be a way to move them back and forth. Whether that is just a simple move and delete feature or we just "copy" the suitable question or question and answer pair over to traditional Q&A with a link. Its an interesting thing to think about. Commented Oct 22 at 21:33
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    Specifically, with the types, I was a little hesitant to only launch with four, and only having one that marks it as a traditional Q&A. This is something we can tweak pretty easily as we progress if we need to, but I do also wonder if maybe the filtering mechanism isn't the type, but rather some way to ask what kind of answer the asker is looking for to determine if its opinion based or not. Commented Oct 22 at 21:35
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    @Hoid I’m not sure how you expect to determine whether the wrong question type was used with no method to change the question type, particularly if the core community largely refuses to even participate in this project. Your alpha is likely to have negative impacts on people with real questions who get confused by clicking buttons in an untested UI and inadvertently end up posting in the wrong category because they assume the different categories are like tags or post type on Reddit - everything is identical once posted, so it doesn’t really matter what you use. Commented Oct 22 at 23:36
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    @Catija, Less trying to determine if the wrong question type was being used, and more seeing if questions are still being closed as opinion-based. In theory, these types should capture most of them, hopefully. But to start, we are trying to make sure we are appropriately capturing almost everything at the top of the funnel. Commented Oct 23 at 14:22
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    @Catija The UI hasn't been specifically tested, but the concept of labeling questions by type has. In our research, and doing some quick math rather than waiting on others, only 7% of the users mislabeled questions or couldn't decide on one. It probably won't be that low in this experiment. But even if we launched this and it's gone as high as 30% mislabeled or not labeled at all, it's a pretty good outcome. That is a net positive: decreasing curation workloads, fewer correctly labeled questions being closed, and maybe getting a helpful reply. Commented Oct 23 at 14:27
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    I didn't talk about the possible curation benefit in this post at all. Mainly because its not the intention, but this potentially lightens the load on curators who want to focus on curating solid Q&A knowledge. That does leave curation of this content up in the air, but I am optimistic about figuring that out. Commented Oct 23 at 14:28
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    ... I mean, the concern is that you do actually "Capture everything at the start of the tunnel", though... and I mean everything, @Hoid My literal concern is that people who should have posted a classic Q&A either accidentally or intentionally - to avoid the judgement and oversight of SO's fabled, mean Q&A - stop asking Q&A questions entirely. But you have no way to gauge or correct for that. Just because only 7% in whatever test you're citing picked wrong, doesn't mean the people actually using this tool on their own will use it correctly. Commented Oct 23 at 16:28
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    Hiding a bunch of questions in a dump isn't reducing curation loads. It's sweeping it under a rug and someone will eventually need to address that under-rug space. Moving a bunch of "questions" to a category that doesn't use curation tools doesn't reduce the load on curators - it starves the actual platform of potentially-valuable content with no way to actually put it where it's supposed to be. In reality, it means you're just creating a curation-free way of posting on this platform, which means there's no reason for anyone to ever ask a curated question again. Commented Oct 23 at 16:31
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    @Catija i have a feeling "[people] stop asking Q&A questions entirely" is kinda the goal. It's a process they see as failing that they don't seem willing to improve... so a new reddit style question is introduced to push it aside. Commented Oct 24 at 14:33
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    @KevinB Not remotely the case, but unfortunately, there's a perception among many devs that the existing community doesn't want them to use Q&A at all. We very much do, but the barriers to participating successfully there are tricky. I think with opinion-based questions, we might be able to offer an easier on-ramp so they feel a bit more confident and willing to learn the network's norms and approach Q&A more sincerely. Commented Oct 24 at 14:54
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    @Hoid There's a reason purely-opinionated questions stopped being allowed on SO, though - I'm sure you understand that they were here when the site first started and it was through experience that it was determined that they weren't a good fit? While factually supportable questions can end up with different answers due to technology changing, that's less common than with purely subjective questions. The best _____ for something or the best practice frequently becomes obsolete over time as trends and tools change. The questions frequently must be re-asked over time for that reason... Commented Oct 24 at 15:21
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    ... but the questions/answers here have no expiration date. When you add in a type of question like subjective questions, you have to understand what the end of life for that question will be and, if you fail to do so, you only make the struggle of curation harder. This is precisely why the platform is in the hell-hole it is currently. The company forgot to pivot to ensuring curation of aging content was facilitated and rewarded. Now you're building these new questions - which will be popular - with no apparent thought on what to do with them in 10 years. Commented Oct 24 at 15:23
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    At least with the new question asking experience, people were given the option to use the old format. Y'all are neither acknowledging that it's different nor are you giving them a chance to use the standard question asking page. "We're testing a new way of asking questions on Stack Overflow - would you like to try the new format or stick with the classic Q&A experience?" Some people just need to actually get work done - not be used as lab rats. Commented Oct 24 at 15:34
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    @Hoid "Whether X still happens" is completely separate from "if X happens, how can we fix it?" From our experience, X is definitely gonna still happen, and without a way to do something about it, people who do X are gonna have a bad time and it will color the outcome of the experiment. This is why we keep asking for adequate tooling. Commented Oct 24 at 21:14
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It seems like you're expanding the scope of Stack Overflow and stepping on the toes of other communities. "Best practices" (which don't exist in the complex domain of software development) and architectural questions are already on-topic on Software Engineering. Software Recommendations serves for tool recommendation questions, assuming enough focus. Other technical questions exist on other sites, too. How are you ensuring that you aren't taking traffic from these other communities, especially when engagement in these other communities is also dropping?

You've taken some lessons on subjective content from Discussions. Did you take any lessons from Not Programming Related? The site that is today known as Software Engineering was specifically proposed and launched for questions closed on Stack Overflow as "Not Programming Related" and was full of these questions. It would probably be good to talk to people involved in that community to understand why the original proposal for highly subjective questions failed. You do have one such person on staff. Another person is a 3x moderator.

On a broader perspective, I'm worried about the excessive focus on Stack Overflow at the expense of the rest of the public network. dan1st brings up a good point about interactions with Staging Ground. There are also other Stack Overflow features that could be useful across the network - not only Staging Ground, but Collectives and the things that come with those (like Articles, Bulletins, and Collections) and a number of other improvements. I don't disagree with finding new ways to unlock knowledge and share experiences, but it seems like things are being thrown at the wall (where the wall is Stack Overflow), left half-baked, and not rolled out to the rest of us in the network.

From a cultural perspective, I'd also echo Kevin B's point that this is forcing a new type of content onto a community without buy-in. Again, I do think that expanding the type of content hosted on the platform can be a good thing. But it's being done very ad-hoc, without community buy-in, and experiments come and go.

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    The community moderator tools for Staging Ground is non-existent, it’s not ready for Stack Overflow, let alone other communities. Commented Oct 22 at 23:35
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    @SecurityHound That's my point about ideas being thrown at the wall and left half-baked. Staging Ground solves a real problem that exists elsewhere on the network. Why not invest in fixing problems there and rolling it out. I'm sure that Collectives has similar issues to fix, but it could also be useful elsewhere. But instead of fixing these things, there's yet another new thing that will probably be only on SO or go the way of Discussions and get ripped out. Commented Oct 22 at 23:38
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    Half baked is being generous, more like the box of uncooked noodles, is being throw at the wall and the resulting chaos of the box breaking and the noddles falling out of the box proceeds. Commented Oct 23 at 0:11
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    I don't think anyone making these decisions/plans really remembers/cares about NPR, and folks seem.. unfamiliar with the reasoning behind the best practices we had. Where the key metric is trying to bump up new user numbers over... the things we're good at, strange things are tried. Commented Oct 23 at 0:23
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    @JourneymanGeek That's also my point. These things have been tried before. I think there are some good ideas, but it doesn't seem like they are talking to people who have experience that can inform an implementation of those ideas. Commented Oct 23 at 1:56
  • ""Best practices" (which don't exist in the complex domain of software development) and architectural questions are already on-topic on Software Engineering." Maybe they were meant to be, but they close such questions as off-topic, making that site useless. So we shouldn't worry about their toes, because nobody even knows where those toes are at. Commented Oct 23 at 13:09
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    @Lundin - Outside of spaces over tabs, your right there is no universal best practices in software development, just don’t tell Richard that (Silicon Valley) Commented Oct 23 at 13:19
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    @SecurityHound There are plenty of non-subjective best practices if you just narrow down the topic sufficiently. Commented Oct 23 at 13:21
  • @Lundin - The spaces over tabs was a joke. It also is an example, where best practices, are very subjective Commented Oct 23 at 13:32
  • "The site that is today known as Software Engineering was specifically proposed and launched for questions closed on Stack Overflow as "Not Programming Related" and was full of these questions." Actually it was specifically launched for opinion-based programming questions. At least according to Jeff's blog post announcing it. Commented Oct 24 at 21:16
  • @TylerH Yes. It has to do with the original definition of "Not Programming Related" on Stack Overflow, which was a pretty poor title for what the reason was used for. Commented Oct 24 at 23:39
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Given the opinion-based nature of these question types, we determined that showing a thumbs-down score may not be beneficial to the user experience and how welcome they can feel as a result.

This modification renders the current experiment a complete failure in my opinion. If the question author is unaware that the community is rejecting their question due to its quality, they are unable to edit their question to enhance its quality.

Question seeking an opinion on a topic can still be bad quality, due to any number of reasons, primarily linked to the amount of effort the author has shown to understand the topic they are asking about.

Sadly it appears that not showing the reception of a question, is now considered to be welcoming. Perhaps said in another way, providing that reception, is now considered unwelcoming by SE staff is extremely worrisome.

Options for flagging will be Spam, Abusive, and Other.

So there won’t be a way to flag one of these questions seeking our opinion as out of scope, when the topic, isn’t within our target audience?

This is because the research group responded most positively to thumbs for the “score” behavior, instead of the other options that were presented to them. For this experiment, we will only ever show both the thumbs-up count on the question post and in the question feed.

Please show your work. I absolutely hated when YouTube took away the thumbs down counter, you cannot actually tell if something is poorly received, if all you show are the upvotes. If your not going to show the downvotes to the author you shouldn’t show the upvotes either.

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I recognize that you have to try something. I'm not going to try to provide comprehensive feedback. Rather, I'd like to offer some narrow feedback on one specific issue:

I do not like that the label for the classic experience is Troubleshooting / Debugging. That sends the wrong signal. From my perspective, the primary purpose of Stack Overflow is an archive of knowledge that will be useful to others. That primarily means questions about how to solve practical problems. Stack Overflow also accepts troubleshooting/debugging questions, but a bit reluctantly, and that is arguably a bit of a compromise, because those questions are less frequently useful to anyone other than the original poster. Spotlighting troubleshooting and debugging as if they are the central focus or purpose of the classical experience seems harmful to the site.

I ask that you replace "Troubleshooting / Debugging" with something else, e.g., "Programming problem" or "How-to" or "Knowledge" or "Knowledge Library".

Please, as a baseline, do no harm to the classical experience.

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    I fear "Knowledge" or "Knowledge Library" would not be very clear labels, and I suspect "How-to" would be equally as ambiguous. But I'm sure there is room for improvement in those labels/options. (To be clear, I'm not currently working on this project, just sharing my personal thoughts.) Commented Oct 23 at 16:08
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    @V2Blast, Sure. Those suggestions have some issues. Feel free to suggest something better. But please don't let the perfect get in the way of the good enough. In my opinion, something imperfect would be better than Troubleshooting/Debugging. I see "Troubleshooting/Debugging" as actively harmful to the site. Commented Oct 23 at 19:25
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    Interesting thoughts. I do feel pretty confident that most askers that stop by don't ask in the spirit of "I really want to add this question to the knowledge archive. That seems like language specific to power user types. Most people come here looking to get unblocked. I do, however, agree that these labels are not complete and are certainly worth thinking about more or different ones. The tricky part is that we can only realistically get away with maybe 5-6 of them? Commented Oct 27 at 18:36
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    @Hoid, For purposes of your experiment, perhaps "Programming Problem" could be an acceptable replacement for "Troubleshooting/Debugging", for now (and people could keep thinking to see if they can come up with something better if they like). That doesn't increase the number of labels. Commented Oct 27 at 18:51
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Regarding flags:

  • Will you show us the fate of our flags or will it be deferred like it was for Discussions?

  • Why don't you include "Should be a (normal) question" flag option? It was the most received type of flag in Discussions (for a good reason).

  • I don't think you have enough resources to accomplish this:

    For items flagged as “other,” the Community Enablement team will be monitoring them, as well as taking moderation actions on them when necessary, to gain a deeper understanding of the tools needed to support this content and to understand the moderator experience.

    This didn't work for Discussions, Challenges, and Lobby Chatroom and you had to turn to community for help. What makes this different?

    Do you have any plans for when the rate of opinion-based posts coming in ramps up?

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    To your first question, yes! Practically speaking, under the hood, this is reskinned Q&A proper, not a whole new thing. So you will be able to see how flags are handled. To your second point, that's a good question. Ultimately, we decided, yes, we need that, but only if this experiment shows enough to continue justifying its own existence. I would rather just trust the community more and allow curators/mods to just move things over when it warrants it. To that end, if/when we build that functionality, we probably will enable some users to just take that action and make it happen. Commented Oct 23 at 19:16
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    To your third point, yes. But to begin, we are not scaling to all users immediately, and I think this is the best way to make the team intimately familiar with which tools are needed in the most obvious way. It might look a little rough, but I also think it helps determine the right guidelines sooner. There have been numerous requests or critiques from the community stating that we don't understand the platform, norms or problems, etc. I don't want to argue with that, but if we believe this is true, isn't this a great way to get a better understanding faster? Commented Oct 23 at 19:19
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    @Hoid thanks Hoid. These are all valid responses/points. Speaking of gaining more knowledge of the platform, I wasn't actually suggesting sidelining CMs, but rather having them work side-by-side of the community (working with Sasha and Bert on Collectives and then Discussions, I can attest that their general understandings have probably surpassed mine a good while ago, so yes, that's a great way). However, as you siad this will be a temporary approach. It's good to know that you've thought about these all. Thanks again for the response. Commented Oct 23 at 20:28
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This is more or less a form of forcing a change in what kind of content the community is accepting... which is typically something that should come from within the community with community support given it is the community that will be creating, curating, and reading this content... but instead you're approaching this in a way that eliminates the discussion of what the community wants to promote and support. Every iteration of this thus far has come from the same position: the company is trying this to expand the type of content the community accepts whether the community wants to support it or not.

It first happened with collectives, when articles and discussions was first put in, and when collectives were created for topics that were mostly off topic on stack overflow other than a few niche ideas surrounding them, then again when discussions was more broadly opened to everyone, and now despite that receiving little to no support from the community we're expanding it again and even further integrating it into the Q&A process in a way that will more or less make it indistinguishable from just no longer having standards.

The question of what makes a good, useful opinion-based question is a good discussion that we should have that very well may lead to allowing new types of subjective content, but that's a discussion that hasn't honestly happened in recent time here and doesn't necessitate an entirely new way of asking questions until we've decided such topics even belong here.

The Q&A product, as it stands, has problems that need to be resolved to help deal with the difficulty that comes with asking questions and integrating into the community. Creating a question type where quality and usefulness simply doesn't matter and placing it at the same level as regular questions only makes this worse while not doing anything to solve any of the existing problems.

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Unfortunately it looks like this post has not resolved the outstanding (major) concerns raised in the first announcement.

This project aims to create a designated space for technical discussions, best practices, tooling recommendations, and architectural questions or advice that are vital to a developer’s workflow but often are closed under our existing, highly structured Q&A model.

You already have designated sites for most or all of those things:

Why aren't you trying to grow those sites, instead? Or automatically send users to them when they try to ask one of these types of questions on Stack Overflow? Why cannibalize those sites and slowly drown Stack Overflow in the process?

Of all the questions asked since the beginning of the year, 24% got closed as opinion-based or off-topic. These questions aren't necessarily bad; they simply don't fit the definitive-answer format of traditional Stack Overflow.

Yes, agreed! So why are you trying to bring them here?

Should we take this direction as the company stating it officially no longer cares about other sites on the network that are programming-related/programming-adjacent?

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    The other communities you've linked should have never been created. They have like a dozen of active users or even less. Their topics would be more appropriate on the main SO page as tags etc, where everyone is. Commented Oct 24 at 21:27
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    @t3chb0t That's... objectively incorrect. I guess you didn't bother checking those sites. Commented Oct 24 at 21:28
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    I have accounts on two of them and I know how dead and declining they are. Commented Oct 24 at 21:38
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    @t3chb0t Then I'm surprised how you could get that simple fact completely wrong. Commented Oct 24 at 21:41
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    "Why cannibalize those sites and slowly drown Stack Overflow in the process?" From the blog: "... a radical simplification of our brand architecture was in order. Our public platform, including the Stack Exchange network, will now be known simply as Stack Overflow ..." and "... we’re also actively experimenting with ... to reflect our new mission: to support ALL the builders of the future in an AI world ..." Meet everyone's needs, fail to serve anyone (including yourself). Exemplary for leadership without vision. Commented Oct 28 at 23:56
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When you hover on the "(?) Advice" /button, the question mark is only confusing. I clicked on it, nothing happened. Hovered, nothing happened. Please don't include a question mark unless you can get some info about it there, otherwise it is only a symbol of how confusing itself is.

why no tooltip

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Users are mislead to post what should be regular questions as the catchall Advice opinion-based questions because of the lack of correct question type options for what makes for the best questions on the site:

"How to" questions.

Instead only debugging questions have a straight forward path to a regular questions. That is very suboptimal and should immediately be rectified. In my opinion the experiment should be paused until it's fixed.

Examples:

As far as I can tell none of them are opinion based in principle. And that applies for pretty much any Advice question I've seen so far.

Maybe as a the catchall should allow for the community to decide which kind of question it should become through something like the staging ground or a similar process.

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    Yup. See also meta.stackoverflow.com/a/435312/781723. Commented yesterday
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    Yep, exactly what I had meant in a Comment (to the Announcement/Question) about Why? and How to? questions, but Staff didn't notice/react..., and never rectified their wrong "assumption" or misconception about how the Site was built for... Commented yesterday
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To me this looks mostly like integrating the previous Discussions into the main Q&A list (or a second go at Programmers Stack Exchange). I think you unfortunately do not put enough emphasis on quality of the content and more emphasis on no obstacles, no pain, anything goes instead.

This might work in that it generates traffic but it also might not work in contributing significantly to the knowledge library. People might ask themselves why they should visit these new discussions and what one can learn from them if anything?

Fortunately you plan to include a switch to turn them off if I understood it correctly. That's a great idea. The feature might simply not be for everyone.

Even though these questions will be opinion-based I could still want to decide if they are useful or not useful. Taking away downvotes might make people feel more welcome but would also lose the quality signal. Losing this information will make the whole feature less useful.

Overall, but this is only my personal opinion, I would have preferred a stronger focus on quality of produced content. Opinion based questions already have a problem in that they do not contain much knowledge if done wrong and that their content ages faster. As it is, I doubt that it will be worth reading there much.

I think that you need a strategy for coping with low effort, low quality questions in this new category to avoid people quickly losing interest in the feature.

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  • I don't think they necessarily need a strategy for coping with low effort low quality questions when that is literally the point of the feature existing. If these questions provided value we would have made room for them ages ago. Commented Oct 22 at 19:14
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    @KevinB Maybe you are right. Risk of failure is extremely high here. Still I want to argue as if there was something of value here and we wanted to lift it. I don't believe that we were infallible. We might have overlooked something along the way. However, this is not the way to find it. Commented Oct 22 at 19:19
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    I do believe there is value in good subjective content and that it's a discussion that should happen, but i don't think creating a feature and releasing it to the wild is the way to have that discussion. Commented Oct 22 at 19:40
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    "or a second go at programmers" – I'm assuming this is referring to "Programmers Stack Exchange" / "Not Programming Related" -> Software Engineering Stack Exchange? Just checking since it wasn't clear to me. Commented Oct 23 at 16:13
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    @V2Blast Yes, Programmers Stack Exchange. Have see you seen some of the questions from that time? Something like "What is the worst interview question that you got?" and this was regarded as a good highly upvoted question. Commented Oct 23 at 17:54
  • "but it also might not work in contributing significantly to the knowledge library." Frankly I think it's pretty clear they don't care about SO's original ethos of being a knowledge library. They have a product, and want the monthly and daily active users of that product to go up so they can make money selling data and ads, no matter how they get there. Commented Oct 24 at 21:26
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    @TylerH But (fortunately) reality doesn't work that way. We try to tell them that again and again, partly to preserve our mission but partly also to spare them the wasted effort but they simply fail... and fail again. I'm getting tired of trying to argue how it could done better. This is not productive enough for me and I don't want to sound like a broken record all the time. I will try to cut myself lose. It's surprisingly difficult for me. Commented Oct 24 at 21:43
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Please make a more rigorous commitment about who has responsibility for the "Other" flags. I think it's important to know who has responsibility and that they commit to reviewing and handling all such flags.

Saying that CMs will be "monitoring" these flags is not sufficient and not encouraging. That stops short of promising that CMs will act on them or take responsibility for reviewing and handling all such flags (acting on them or dismissing them, as is appropriate) within a reasonable timeline. I am concerned that CMs are going to be inconsistent about reviewing them, and after a few weeks handling flags will cease to be a priority for CMs (through no fault of CMs themselves, but due to structural incentives and priorities within the company). Trust has been broken, with similar promises made in the past and not followed through, so I ask for you to make more explicit statements about what you are and aren't committing to. And if you're not committing to review and act on all "Other" flags, please say so forthrightly, and I'm concerned about the implications of that.

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How does this interact with the Staging Ground?

You created a new sort of question flow but you didn't mention how interactions with the Staging Ground would work.
Can these questions get in the Staging Ground?
If so, what happens?
Are the reviewers informed about the "type" of the question?
Would it affect off-topic reasons/comment templates?
Can they be approved normally?
Can the question type be changed while a question is in the Staging Ground?
Is it possible to change a normal question to an opinionated question in the Staging Ground?
Does the Staging Ground workflow change in any way?

I can understand the Staging Ground not being considered to be important for this alpha test and these questions being excluded from the Staging Ground for now (as long as there are no internal server errors or unreviewable questions) but if it goes well according to your definitions/metrics, you'll have to make a decision at some point.

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    Staging Ground is just full of spam and unanswerable questions that cannot be moderated by the community. I don’t have high hopes for this new question flow. I suspect it will just be full of AI generated opinions and questions that don’t need to be answered Commented Oct 22 at 23:26
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    Do you have any evidence for the Staging Ground being full of spam? While there is some spam there (just like on the main site), it is handled by Charcoal and others. And it containing unanswerable questions is intentional - questions are supposed to be improved (or not published) and not answered in the SG. But to be honest, I'd say it isn't 'full' of anything. I also don't get why you think the SG couldn't be moderated by the Community. Could you expand on that? Commented Oct 23 at 5:14
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    To start, these won't be exposed to Staging Ground. Not saying its a forever no, but probably something we would add much later once we have a stable feature and a lot of the finer details of it are resolved. But their good points, and I don't disagree, but like you mentioned in some of your questions. SG was designed for objective Q&A, so it would need some tweaks to support these question types. Commented Oct 24 at 15:08
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I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I see the value in providing a venue for questions seeking the opinions of human experts who actually understand what they're talking about, in contrast to GenAI bots that merely appear to understand anything.

However, I'm concerned that it's intrinsically difficult to apply useful quality control (QC) to such content. I don't believe that your QC plan involving special mod flags and staff oversight will scale well. Also, it's not just the questions that need QC. These questions will invariably attract low-quality replies, and they also need QC. But how do you fairly evaluate the quality of subjective, opinion-based replies?

One of the core reasons that we don't currently permit opinion questions is that it's hard to rate the answers they attract, and we want to avoid the ensuing "my opinion vs your opinion" battles. What mechanism do you have to prevent such battles?

Also, the answers to "best practice" questions can have a short useful lifetime, especially in fast-moving languages like JavaScript, and in new languages and libraries that are still in the early phase of rapid evolution. We already have a huge problem with outdated answers in main Q&A (which the recent change to comment timestamps has made even worse). Explicitly permitting "best practice" questions will just add to this pile of obsolete information, IMHO.

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    for the "short term/lifetime" stuff, I wonder if chat could be a good avenue for it. not many people are in active in programming-language/technology-specific chatrooms though, and most don't have the privilege to talk in them. Commented Oct 22 at 23:03
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    @starball Yes, chat is good for that sort of discussion, IMHO. We certainly allow best practices and resource recommendation questions in the Python chat room. That room is fairly quiet these days compared to a few years ago, but there are still several regulars lurking who check the room frequently, although you may not get quick replies to your questions. Commented Oct 22 at 23:11
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    You're right, it won't scale well long term. That is not the long-term plan though. Instead, it's intended to bring the team closer to the workflow to think about what is needed to make it scalable. You are also right that it's difficult, but difficult doesn't mean impossible. While I know this is a bit of a hot take, I am not sure we should be aiming for 100% QC coverage in opinion questions; we should aim for around 80% and signal that mileage can vary and that consumers of that content should be understanding that whether it works for them will depend on their unique circumstances. Commented Oct 24 at 15:20
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    I think opinion-based questions are less likely to yield an absolute answer and instead offer helpful guidance to help some progress through their specific circumstances. That's a big departure from where we have been the last 16 years, but I think it can be done well, and if enough people are interested in figuring it out, this is the right group to make it happen in a way that works for today's community and the tech landscape we are all dealing with. Things are a bit different than when Stack Overflow started. I think we would be to approach some of these questions with a new perspective. Commented Oct 24 at 15:24
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    To your last point. Absolutely, wish I could go back in time to the early days and beg for versioning to be added to every Q&A. Commented Oct 24 at 15:25
  • Probably they should implement a system for POB discussions like this so that they just automatically get deleted after a year or two. Opinions or facts on the ground will probably shift completely on the topic after a couple of years anyway. Commented Oct 24 at 21:24
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The new answer UI looks so much like the regular comments that people confuse them for comments and recommend to post an answer instead.

Screenshot for <10k

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    I suppose that's the natural follow-up to their last "experiment" of making comments look more like answers. Commented Oct 28 at 18:45
  • also, where can I comment a question I don't want to answer? Commented Oct 29 at 13:05
  • @BendingRodriguez there is no differentiation between answers and comments, just start discussing away that's the way it's intended anyways. Commented 2 days ago
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We have officially launched this experiment to ten percent of all users on Stack Overflow who have not opted out of experiments

I have opted out of experiments; so why am I still seeing this?

New contributor
ChrisMM is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct.
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    Seems related to comments in this answer Commented Oct 28 at 12:28
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    Where are you seeing these opinion-based question posts? On the home page of the site, or somewhere else? Commented Oct 28 at 22:10
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    @V2Blast, I just checked the home page, and yes, I see them there, but also when viewing tags, which is what I always use: stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c%2b%2b Commented Oct 28 at 22:20
  • I am seeing "advices" everywhere (using this link as landing page). I have experiments disabled. Can you please remove me from experiments? Commented 2 days ago
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    Sorry, I missed your answer and wrote the same again. I'm seeing these "questions" on the homepage, on the tag page (/questions/tagged/xxx) and when applying custom filters, so pretty much everywhere. Commented yesterday
  • The only place I'm not seeing them is stackoverflow.com/questions Commented 22 hours ago
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New types of questions are not visible on all questions list. They are visible only on tagged questions lists which makes them less discoverable. Since there are no other options to filter them, being visible on all questions list is critical.

We cannot monitor or give feedback on the new kinds of questions if we cannot see them. Please fix this.

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    Could you share which question you couldn't see and which list it wasn't showing up on? I am not seeing any issues on my end. Commented Oct 27 at 23:49
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    @Hoid I've yet to encounter any of the new questions on stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=newest (I've also tried other sorts), I've scrolled to where the questions are 6h old, so to my understanding I should see stackoverflow.com/questions/79802131 (5h at time of writing) amongst them, but it's not there. Same for the home feed at plain stackoverflow.com Commented Oct 28 at 0:05
  • If it matters I'm being served rev 2025.10.27.35959 for that page. Commented Oct 28 at 0:12
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    @cafce25 there are only two of them as of my initial comment. One at the bottom of the 1st page when sorted by newest and the second on the second page about 5 hours ago. Commented Oct 28 at 0:13
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    @Hoid I don't see either of them on that page. Commented Oct 28 at 0:14
  • @Hoid I was specifically looking for question mentioned in other thread, since that is the only one I know of: stackoverflow.com/q/79802131 I can see that one when I click on any tag and scroll down, but not when I go looking for it on list of all questions looking in the timeframe the question was asked. And I did that very carefully not to miss it by chance. Commented Oct 28 at 7:33
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    This is a very good point, apologies for the oversight, we're currently rolled out to 10% of all users but mods should have been included, this has been corrected Commented Oct 28 at 10:09
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    @cart I have tried both as mod and with completely anonymous account. In both cases I am seeing the question on tagged questions list, but not on full list. So if you are doing gradual rollout, you still have potential bugs because there is discrepancy between what can be seen on full question list and tagged questions list with the same account. Commented Oct 28 at 10:30
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    So 100% see them in filtered questions lists but only 10% see them on unfiltered ones? Still quite unclear when they should or shouldn't. Commented Oct 28 at 12:26
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Users who prefer the traditional experience will be able to opt out of this experiment to avoid seeing the new content entirely.

I have opted out of experiments for other reasons. I would also want to see what the new questions look like and how they are utilised.

Is there really no way to discover these new questions at all? Should they not be searchable or have any other way to reach them?

Even if I were to change my experiment setting, it seems like the only way to find the new questions is trying to locate one in the middle of a random question lists. Which is not a good overview at all.

Discussions at least was collected all in one place, so not only could they be easily found, you could also clearly see what topics are there and which topics were in the past. Much easier to get a feel for how the feature is used.

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    Maybe search would be extended to filter by question type. Commented Oct 24 at 9:11
  • "Is there really no way to see these new questions at all" I'm sure you can see a new question if you have the URL, if that's what you mean. Or do you mean from questions lists? Commented Oct 24 at 21:27
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    @TylerH I mean without having the URL. I want them discoverable. Some way of being able to have an overview of what is being asked. Commented Oct 25 at 5:04
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    Right now, we don't have any other way to find them other than being opted in and seeing them in the question feed. But robust user filtering is something we are working on, and eventually, the question labels seen in the mockups will work similarly to tag pages, where you can see all of the questions with that label on them. Commented Oct 27 at 18:40
  • @Hoid The "staging ground" label should be clickable and lead to a page showing only staging ground questions, much like a tag; and these new opinion-based questions should work the same way. Commented Oct 27 at 23:38
  • @KevinKrumwiede, is that just to improve visibility into the experiment, or for some other purpose? We are likely going to add the question labels as a kind of tag page that you can see all questions with that label, but I struggle to see the value in a sidebar option for it. But do please leave an answer on this post with the feature request tag to make your case, and we can give it proper consideration. Commented Oct 27 at 23:52
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Unless you abuse the comment bug on ad-hoc loaded answers there is no way to notify another user about anything making the new questions the least communicative variant of posts yet, from the original post it seems to be the opposite of the intended way they should work.

People participating in "conversational answers" and open ended discussions should be able to converse and it should be possible to notify them about things.

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  • Yeah, we are seeing that. The lack of commenting makes it a bit messy, with what would have been comments mixed in with the answer(replies). We might just put comments back on the question only. Or maybe consider something different, like a back-of-the-question meta. Very brainstormy right now. Will approach the community if we come up with anything that deviates from what the community currently expects. Commented 2 days ago
  • @Hoid Isn't this what you built the entire "threaded comments" feature for? I don't like it in the staging ground, and would really hate it on regular Q&A, but it would really shine on discussions, uh, opinion questions Commented yesterday
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I just saw this experiment. I didn't have much hope for it, but I thought I would at least try it out.

During my attempt to familiarize myself with the new UI, I misclicked the "thumbs down" button. I tried to remove it. Here's what the site told me:

Changing your vote is not currently supported, but coming soon.

Really, Stack, really?

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  • Unfortunately, yes. It will be supported in the nearish future. It's already on the board to be worked on. Commented 2 days ago
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    Could you clarify 'nearish future'? Please don't come next week with a 'we saw an 100% increase in votes' if we can't undo misclicks.... Commented 2 days ago
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Are these posts going to be integrated into question lists the way you've presented above, where they organically get included if they exist and are recent enough to fit into the existing list, or will it be more like SG posts and the watched tags feature where the posts get inorganically injected into the list despite not being more recent/relevant than the things they are displacing?

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    They will be included organically, just like regular Q&A. Under the hood, these are basically identical to regular Q&A, except for the vote type, which is different and unique to opinion-based content(OBC). That being said, for feeds that monitor the score, which I don't have a list of off the top of my head, the score will factor in. Commented Oct 22 at 16:13
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    @hoid Will it be discoverable in Google search? Commented Oct 22 at 19:47
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    @Dharman Yes. Since its still regular Q&A for the most part, it will be crawled the same way Q&A. Should the experiment progress, we will look at this more intently to determine if we need to make some changes so that it can be signaled differently in Google search results. Commented Oct 22 at 21:03
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I am glad to see the thought that has gone into this so far and how you've presented it here. Thank you. I share a number of the concerns already presented by others, which I won't repeat here. A couple questions:

  1. Will the standards for when to cast Spam and Rude/Abusive flags be the same as for regular Q&A posts? Or what might be different?

  2. Same question, but for AI generated content:

    • same policy? (prohibited)
    • same mechanism? (Other flags)
    • same consequences? (post removal, contacting user, account suspension if necessary)

    Or what might be different?

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    Speaking solely for myself (I'm not currently working on this project): For spam and rude/abusive flags, I don't see why the standards for flagging would need to be different from regular Q&A. And I don't foresee AI-generated content being allowed there either. Commented Oct 23 at 16:15
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    To confirm V2Blast. Standards for spam and Rude/Abusive are identical; there won't be any changes there. The same goes for your second point. Commented Oct 23 at 19:59
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Rebrand "opinion-based" as "experience-based" to better express why this kind of Q&A is so incredibly valuable.

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    I like this idea! The whole discussion is pretty ironic because the majority of technical answers here is already opinion/experience-based as many things can be implemented in multiple ways and most of the time there is no single definite answer so every one of them shares their experience about how to solve the question. I wonder why this even needs to be debated and SO does not just admit it's how it always has worked. Commented Oct 23 at 17:07
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    This is honestly a good point, IMO – if we want to still retain high-quality knowledge in this new format, we should emphasize the kind of responses we'd like to see: "good subjective" ones, supported by experience or other evidence. (Again, this is just my personal opinion; I'm not working on this project at the moment.) Commented Oct 24 at 19:32
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    @t3chb0t You are incorrect. The majority of technical answers here are objectively testable as correct or working, because that's the kind of question we allow here. Commented Oct 24 at 21:31
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    @TylerH so why allow other answers to even be visible after OP has accepted one? According to your non-discussion theory of SO, other answers should be considered irrelevant and hidden, yet they remain visible and are often higher voted for than the one with the green tick. Can it be that it's about opinions after all? Commented Oct 24 at 21:37
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    @t3chb0t Because there can be multiple technically correct answers to a question. I recommend you read the tour page if you aren't familiar with how Stack Exchange sites work. "According to your non-discussion theory of SO, other answers should be considered irrelevant and hidden" No, this is also incorrect. Commented Oct 24 at 21:40
  • @TylerH each technically correct answer is an opinion. Commented Oct 24 at 21:46
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    @t3chb0t I guess you don't understand what the word 'opinion' means. Commented Oct 24 at 21:50
  • @TylerH "Correct" and "working" are trivial and not interesting. "Best" is difficult and interesting. Commented Oct 25 at 14:17
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    @KevinKrumwiede Cool, there are lots of other sites where you can ask those questions. Stack Overflow has never been that place. What exactly are you trying to respond to, there? Also, if you think "best" is difficult or interesting, you and I have very different view of what quality content looks like. To me, "best" is code for "I have been lazy and put zero effort into understanding the problem before me, and also put zero effort into describing it for you to answer". I have never seen a question here of any worth that simply asks for the "best" X. Commented Oct 27 at 14:21
  • @TylerH SO was that place and it was better then. Your (collective your) obsession with objectivity has made SO a joke among real developers who get things done better, faster, and cheaper. Commented Oct 27 at 23:34
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The UI for these new question types is intentionally simpler

There's an "edit" link on the question & each reply yet there is no button/link for the corresponding timeline or revisions. Normally these are reached for a post via its clock icon button and "edited ..." link.

It happens that the corresponding URLs can be reached by clicking on "edit", which for those posts goes to an URL of the form

https://stackoverflow.com/posts/postid/edit

and changing the last word, edit, to timeline or revisions.

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The Advice, Best practices or Tooling 'tags' disappear after (attempting) to change the regular tags:

enter image description here

The same appears when editing a 'question'.

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    Thank you, I discovered this myself as well. We have it logged. Commented 2 days ago
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Will questions in this new opinion-based category award reputation to users from 'thumbs up' reactions?

You don't explicitly mention this, just "removing features like the traditional reputation/voting model" which is vague; it doesn't say how it will work, only that it will be different. So... please say no. Or at least, not 10 points like questions get now. The reason we give reputation to questions, especially now that it's equal to rep for answers, is because asking good questions takes effort. Opinion-based or discussion questions do not really take the same level of effort; anyone can ask "what's the best way to do X" or "what are some good tools to do Y".

Will questions in this new opinion-based category qualify for the same badges that current, 'normal' questions get?

IMO there should be separate badges for these questions because of the much lower level of quality they will be.

While we won’t rule out some form of question closure in the future, we want to focus on improving the current process here to something more constructive that encourages the asker to refine their question in a different way, rather than the current closing process. Once we have determined whether this initial experiment has been successful, we will reassess the closing of these types of questions and how that is communicated to the asker.

So, does this mean you won't be able to vote to close or flag to close these types of questions at all? I'm thinking from the perspective of "what do I do if I see one of these questions in the Close Votes Queue? Obviously they can still be flagged as spam or rude/abusive, etc., but I want to clarify what the expectation is since you didn't say how it would work, only that you don't like applying the current closure system for these questions.

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    I believe Hoid has since clarified elsewhere in the thread that no, no reputation will be granted by this feature as it currently stands. Commented Oct 26 at 16:13
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    V2Blast is correct that this won't impact rep. It was mentioned explicitly in the first post talking about this. Opinion questions will reward badges. Though I believe it will only do so for non-rep-related badges. I will have to confirm. For now, these won't show up in review queues. Commented Oct 27 at 19:22
  • @Hoid Thanks. I had to go back and look again for the explicit mention about rep, and all I can find is "The UI for these new question types is intentionally simpler, removing features like the traditional reputation/voting model and the concept of an accepted answer." which is not particularly clear or noticeable. It mentions the UI won't include those things, but reputation is not just a UI feature. If you mean that there will be no reputation awarded at all for the new type of question, I recommend rephrasing that (and adding some header formatting to the section for better call-out). Commented Oct 27 at 19:32
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    First bullet point after the second paragraph I have written: "We will not tie these new question types to reputation or privilege-earning opportunities. We are open to considering a new incentive system for them." Commented Oct 27 at 19:35
  • @Hoid Sorry, I'm not seeing that phrase anywhere on this page except in your comment just now: i.sstatic.net/Dd3nPQz4.png Did you maybe say that in some other post? Commented Oct 27 at 19:38
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    Sorry for the confusion, this was mentioned in the very first post about the experiment Commented Oct 27 at 19:41
  • @Hoid Thanks, it's been a month so basically a lifetime since that, I had forgotten about that detail from the original idea post. Commented Oct 27 at 20:34
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The guidance on the right doesn't seem to be correct now that this went live:

a

It's still showing the community activity and the default asking a question guidance.

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    I am assuming its a caching thing, but I will have someone take a look. Commented Oct 27 at 19:42
  • How did you get the 'type' drop-down to show? Is there a special Ask screen? (Or I guess I can blame caching ... :( ) Commented Oct 27 at 20:13
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    I would suggest caching too here; we have updated guidelines which should be switching in based on the dropdown selection. Hard refresh? @RoddyoftheFrozenPeas we're doing a short staggered rollout & are only at 10% traffic right now, I'm afraid you're not one of the Chosen Ones according to our feature switch algo but fear not: 100% is coming Commented Oct 28 at 10:34
  • @cart Darn. Thanks I tripped over a new user asking an opinion Q&A question that was getting downvoted and wanted to suggest they re-ask using the 'type' selector for opinion/advice, but if only a tiny fraction of users can see the UI i'll hold off. Commented Oct 28 at 14:26
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