Opinion-based questions alpha experiment on Stack Overflow

Update December 16th, 2025

Threading was released this morning. You can reply to different replies to the question and then respond to those replies, and so on. We don't have a cap on levels of nested replies, but we'll monitor it to determine whether one is needed. It's a simple addition on our end if the need arises.

For updates on where the experiment could be headed next see this new post about curation

Update November 4th, 2025

As mentioned in the initial announcement, we held a chat with the product manager leading this experiment to answer questions. The chat room transcript can be found here.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• Exposing this to the Charcoal team and their tools
• Eventually, the new anti-spam tool will also be in play here once that is ready and optimized for opinion-based questions; it will be included here as well.

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 bug or feature-request 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 November 4th, 2025 at 9 AM EST. Please check this post to confirm the time, as it might change. Chat room can be found here It will be changed from gallery mode about 30 minutes prior to 9 AM EST.

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