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As my clarification edit to the question's title was rolled back, this is a discussion question relating to the linked announcement titled

Starting February 24, 2026: check out our new site design at beta.stackoverflow.com

which includes the text

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

How does this proposed change (which will no doubt be made, despite overwhelming pushback) make you all feel?

Moderator note: An edit has been made by staff to the linked post attempting to clarify their position on the future of closure and review queues. Please continue to voice your opinions on this proposed change.

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    I don't think I need to repeat my thoughts, as I share them in my answer on the linked question. I'm, admittedly, not sure we do need a separate post to discuss that specific point, as the answers can bring them to the attention of the readers, but I'll let Meta decide on that. Commented Feb 18 at 19:01
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    @ThomA answers can't go in the sidebar on the main site. Commented Feb 18 at 19:02
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    I should say that I would've rolled back that edit too. Yes, they are concealing a very important aspect of the change like it's nothing, but it's their post. That said, I appreciate you posting this question to shed light on this. Sadly, as I said in the comments there, I too believe that our feedback/pushback won't do anything. Commented Feb 18 at 19:42
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    Separating it out into a separate discussion is good. It lets people focus on this change here, and review the beta on its own merit (or lack thereof) in the original discussion, and keeps the well from being poisoned any further than it already has been. Ideally, we could create a complete separation, with the original discussion addressing the buried change and linking here to discuss it, but I don't think that's particularly likely. Commented Feb 18 at 20:53
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    @user4581301 del votes are going away according to the linked post, and if it's just discussions going forward... downvotes are also gone. All you've got is flag for mod review. Commented Feb 18 at 21:35
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    @user4581301 All posts are moving to the open ended questions format where you upthumb or downthumb them. And downthumbs don't have any impact on a post - they don't change the score of a post , nor change the user's tag score. Upthumbs increase both of these. It's basically YouTube rules for voting. Commented Feb 18 at 21:43
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    @user4581301 "unless SO really steps up its game on preventing substandard questions from reaching the main site": you seem to be missing the point. They are removing curation specifically because there aren't enough questions sticking around. Not enough "engagement". Like I keep saying, they probably want AI training data, and curation is a direct obstacle to that. Since they aren't monetizing the knowledge repository. They are monetizing the human text generator. Commented Feb 18 at 22:14
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    @Dominique like the announcement posts title says: "Starting February 24", not today. They likely block all external IPs until then. Commented Feb 19 at 7:54
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    This seems the proverbial Straw that breaks the camel's back. It's a condition called Straw Overflow. Commented Feb 19 at 9:01
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    @Yogi I'm not sure "straw" is the right term to convey the scope of the planned change. Commented Feb 19 at 13:40
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    Bella_Blue: No, I do not believe this is the end Hoid: Hold my beer Commented Feb 20 at 11:05
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    @Cerbrus I don't understand I'm afraid. How come that post about design changes is worth featuring but about removal of the closure is not. To me these look equally important both being about very radical site changes Commented Feb 20 at 18:46
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    @Machavity I suspect Miyagi's comment was at least partly aimed at your edit. The post update there says "review queues and question closure will not be going away for the time being" (emphasis mine), and that "Removing all review queues or curation altogether is not the direction we currently plan to go". This sounds like wordsmithing to avoid having to lie. They won't remove all queues, or curation altogether, and anyway nothing changes for the time being. That update, and the fact it took 2 days to squeeze it out, tells me nothing has changed since that question was asked. Commented Feb 20 at 21:13
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    @Machavity The company hasn’t said they will backtrack on the issue. Their clarification is completely compatible with both partial backtracking and the original plan, it’s so vague. Commented Feb 21 at 17:11
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    @Machavity "...the company has at least said they will backtrack..." Really? I don't think they have. To me the edit sounded like a reminder that the changes haven't gone live yet. Which was kind of redundant and already clear from the previous message. They don't say that curation will stay and that workflows will not be retired. Or have I misread them? Surely they are capable of expressing it unambiguously and at least verbally backtrack in a clear way. My impression is that Hoid basically had nothing new to say but tried to save what is to save there. Commented Feb 21 at 22:57

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I don't care anymore. Stack Overflow is dead. They killed it.

If I were employed at Stack Exchange Inc., the end of 2025 would have been a good time to hand in my resignation. As I am unpaid, I'll keep the diamond for as long as there's still something of this iceberg floating around, but it looks like that ice cube is quickly melting.

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    Afaik they pay above average and they have an overprarkinsonized hierarchy. So the net monetary optimum would be to wait until they fire you, you work the little what they want, and you are doing freelance in the free time. And, you keep shut. Reason is simply, anything what you say would decrease the expected length back in this well paying job. And, quite honestly, if you see how a company would work, where there are 4 levels between the CMs and the CEO, and everyone is doing this, yes you get the SO. Commented Feb 19 at 3:32
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    My thought exactly. Commented Feb 19 at 12:08
  • Stack Overflow was already dead because people like you were closing valid questions and removing good answers, but it will just stay dead. Commented Feb 24 at 18:48
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    @alamar True, the concept of the site is what has been driving many users away from the site, but it isn't something that was killing the site. Valid questions were closed from the start of the site, and yet it proved to be extremely successful and useful for developers. And just because a question is valid and someone's feelings may be hurt doesn't mean that it's a bad thing for the site. On the contrary, that is what contributed to the success. Commented Feb 24 at 20:25
  • I will repeat: since the site is now done, mean things you did no longer have any excuse. Commented Feb 25 at 7:57
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    @alamar If you refer to closing questions then it's not a mean thing. It's never about a user. It's only about what is suitable for Stack Overflow. Commented Feb 25 at 9:30
  • You were awful at deciding what's suitable for Stack Overflow. That did a huge net damage to the community. The winning move for this game was, usually, not to play. Commented Feb 25 at 11:53
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How does this proposed change (which will no doubt be made, despite overwhelming pushback) make you all feel?

Like the current leadership of the company has no idea and doesn't care what their product or business actually is, and like they have no respect for any of the people that came before them or the users of said product who tried to help them along in a space they were clearly unfamiliar with. Like someone bought the company said "yeah, I think I can make some money off of this, whatever this is."

Like they took this 2012 New Yorker comic by Tom Toro to heart and used it as their north star for how to handle Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow:

'Yes, the Planet Got Destroyed' comic, depicting a man in a ragged suit explaining the folly of capitalism to three hungry children in a post-apocalyptic Earth

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    I have a hunch that it all started when a marketing genius sold the company for $1.8 billion. Anything since can be explained by scrambling to reduce losses on that deal. At that point "leadership of the company has no idea" might be a moot point. The platform making sense and surviving is not a KPI. Commented Feb 18 at 22:27
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    Don't blame this on the person who did the selling. Blame the idiots who bought a community-built library for 1.8 billion dollars. Commented Feb 18 at 22:30
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    It was an awesome deal for those selling... But to expect any profit on that deal as a buying party is the first massive mistake they made... Commented Feb 18 at 23:03
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    I'm not even sure how this will create value. It might curb the shrinking number of posts somewhat, as nothing will get closed or deleted, but it will devalue the content. This will likely devalue selling a dedicated API to AI companies, as the new content no longer is high quality. This seems 100% misguided to me, like the people running SO do not realize what makes it successful and distinct from other Q&A sites like Quora/Yahoo answers/etc. Commented Feb 20 at 8:30
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    @ErikA Most of tech world for the last 10-15 years is about creating artificially inflated 'value' so that people can trade around said artificial value and people who call themselves founders and CEOs can get rich. It's not referring to real value which is useful to people. Commented Feb 20 at 20:08
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    @TylerH That's not really true. Pre-AI, if you asked your a bunch of programmers "how much would I need to pay to not visit SO for a month", you would probably need to pay a reasonable bit. I'd argue SO has created more value for people visiting it then it ever did for the people directly making money off it, or the people who sold it. And if you assume SO is net improver of LLMs as well, that's probably a few billion dollars of saved productivity from dealing with less idiocy from AI and more useful answers. Commented Feb 22 at 0:25
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    @Starship You misunderstand, like Erik A. Let me reiterate, the term "value" in my answer refers to shareholder value, AKA fake stock market money. It does not refer to real value AKA a tangible measure of benefit to real people like you or me. Even though real money might be involved in the conversation of 'how much money do you save by being able to use Stack Overflow vs paying a consultant or whatever', that's still not what the term 'value' really means in that comic. Commented Feb 23 at 14:30
  • @TylerH Agreed. But the relevant point is that a company creates value for users, than it should be able to monetize some of that value. And therefore create value for itself. Commented Feb 23 at 14:37
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    @Starship I don't have a problem with a company making money off of its products. That's not the point of the comic. Commented Feb 23 at 14:54
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    @Starship The issue isn’t whether the company can make some money from users, but whether it can make a ludicrous heap of money from users. That’s the kind of money that counts for shareholders, especially if they invested a ludicrous heap of money already. Commented Feb 23 at 17:21
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The removal of close votes will mark the end of curation itself. And if that happens, then Stack Overflow will join the dead internet. Bots will be tripping over other bots, screaming into the void in an attempt to drive fake engagement, all to compete for pennies worth of ad revenue.

The way I see it, management has made it perfectly clear that there is no way for the company and the community to co-exist peacefully. We're standing in the way of a line going up, and the line must go up at all costs!

A few years ago, there was a massive moderator strike, and ultimately, representatives from the company actually met with representatives of the moderator collective to try and resolve things. If this happened today, I'm convinced that moderators would just be replaced with LLMs. So I feel like we have no more leverage of any kind. We're being written out of the story. All we can do is find somewhere else to go.

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    If this happened right now, that would be exactly what SE wants. A strike to say "we want to be allowed to moderate content effectively" only works if SE wants you to moderate content, at least somewhat. Here, you are saying "you don't want us to moderate, so we will put pressure on you by doing exactly what you want away" Commented Feb 20 at 1:01
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Late last year some CMs wanted to pull a Dev or two and I into a Zoom meeting about the Opinion-based Question system. We didn't talk about anything super secret, but closure came up in the mix.

Opinion-based, to me, feels like a strange thing that happened here in the US. There are many gimmicky cereals on the US market, and one of the better-known brands is called Captain Crunch (they coat the cereal in an oil of some sort so they don't get soggy). One variant of that cereal is "Crunchberry", where they mix in "fruity berries" with the main yellow-square cereal.

Then they made it more gimmicky with this: "Oops, all berries!". No cereal, all berries.

I told the assembled SO staff that the Opinion system felt like "Oops, all comments!". Worse is that they were supposed to be "staff moderated" (which has proven to be an oxymoron). The Beta will be all Opinion.

Stack Overflow has always been schizophrenic about whether it is a forum or it's not a forum (fun fact, the Help Center as of this writing still insists it's not).

Stack Overflow is now definitively going to be a forum.

The good, the bad, and the ugly on closure

As someone who spent a lot of time in the SO Close Vote Reviewers room, I've seen a lot of discussions on closure itself.

Closure has been good because we had tons of folks coming in asking anything and everything they could think of. Sometimes they even included an answerable question. It was part of the chain of curation. When Stack Overflow was in its prime, this was a way to limit poor content.

The bad? We constantly have to keep explaining the process

Let's say we added a canned comment to every reopenable question we close. My experience is that most users won't do anything. At best, I've seen canned comments left for things like this (NAA, etc) maybe get a 1-2% success (anecdotally). It's not a lot. I'm also a SO moderator and I delete a lot of stuff. Very few people avail themselves of Meta to question moderator actions.

There's a reason I have 55k close votes and 750 reopen votes. Virtually nobody tries to learn. They just give up.

The ugly? Some people have taken to gatekeepting via closure

Tag gatekeeping

And that's just one aspect of problematic closure. Mods have been tired for some time of instant deletion after closure. It sends the wrong signals to users. Then we have people who engage in lazy closure and such. There's no tooling for mods to find it on our own, so we have to wait for the random Meta post or flag about it (and those are rare). That rabbit hole is way deeper than we really know.

Should curation go away?

From where I sit, no. We still need a quality control system. People post unanswerable things all the time. But, to play some devil's advocacy here, I also understand that SO Staff would have to invest all sorts of resources to reform the process to where it's not the pain point it is today. We're talking Staging Ground-level systems to shepherd users through a complex semi-political process. And SG's success is marginal at best. I just don't think they can afford that anymore. I do wish it had been considered when SO still had some resources, instead of the massive waste on AI systems that never went anywhere.

The impression I've gotten from the internal announcements to mods about this is that they want a system that presents new users with less friction because SO is finally going to be the human alternative to AI. Given the massive traffic drop, it's easy to see why curation is being viewed as a luxury that can no longer be afforded. It flat-out sucks.

What I would caution folks on this, however, is that this is not being done in the same backhanded way it was handled 8 years ago, where staff pointed the finger at curators and said "Hey! You're the reason we're being viewed badly." No staff have suggested curators are the problem this time. It might be a day late, and a dollar short, but it is appreciated.

Even if it still sucks.

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    It doesn't need to be said, for it to be the message everyone outside the network takes from it. It doesn't need to be said, for every reddit thread bashing SO for curation to suddenly point and laugh at the company finally putting the lid on people they hate, even though they'll never come here anyway. It doesn't need to be said, for it to be the message being presented. Commented Feb 19 at 4:35
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    Reddit may have more traffic than SO but it’s virtually useless when it comes to asking questions that require expert knowledge. As far as I know, there’s only one subreddit where you get experts answer your questions (AskHistorians) and you know why that is? It’s heavily moderated and dupe questions get closed and opinion based answers get deleted constantly. SO transforming into the crappy side of Reddit was not on my bingo card but here we are. Commented Feb 19 at 5:02
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    Effectively, the company has abandoned it's mission/community because it was too hard. It's throwing it's hands up and just rooting out the features that people cry about from the outside, rather than doing anything to improve them in away that would keep the community here. They don't need to say it, their actions say enough. Commented Feb 19 at 5:15
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    "That rabbit hole is way deeper than we really know." I think it's okay for me to share out here that I recently went down one of those rabbit holes (with help from SEDE and the CMs), and found some... interesting™ close vote behaviour (not the good kind of interesting). essentially some robo-reviewing / not very careful or proper, but very high-volume review activity. Commented Feb 19 at 5:26
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    I generally "side" with invested users helping curate, but not surprisingly, there are some bad eggs. it also weighed on me that that/those bad eggs didn't do bad closures alone- there needs to be reviewer agreement after all. so (with some other mod support), I had a todo-list item to write up a meta post to (in a friendly and appreciative sort of way) encourage people to review carefully and maybe brush up on close-reason guidance... I've deferred writing that up for a handful of weeks now, and I guess now I don't need to do it anymore(?)... so, yay? (not really) Commented Feb 19 at 5:29
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    @starball it's not your job, as a moderator, to manage the community. so i hope you don't feel at fault for any of this Commented Feb 19 at 5:31
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    Thanks for your perpective, cereals included. I'd argue that instead of backhanded now we have underhanded. I don't care about the packaging if the end result (unlike with the welcome wagon) is gutting the site. @starball if users abuse their powers they... need to be moderated, not the powers universally taken away. I assume this goes without saying but better to be explicit. Short of real data showing that abuse is the norm, abusive cases are just anecdotal excuses for what the company wants to do anyway for all the wrong reasons. Commented Feb 19 at 5:58
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    It feels funny to see times and times again this narrative of linking curation with lack of engagement. Curation was why I trusted SO content and used it passively. Curation was why I felt value in providing SO content and used it actively. That not even the company felt it worth speaking up to really defend this is why I have gradually stopped using SO. It’s strangely fitting that the company now thinks the appropriate way to stop this decline is to throw its sole selling point under the bus. Commented Feb 19 at 7:12
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    I guess what it does illustrate is that one of the places where our systems (which are built around heuristics for trust to grant privileges to people) can fall over is... the people. but that raises the question for me- why (would the company essentially) rip out those systems instead of trying to deal with those more human issues? apologies for being so long-winded in comments. Commented Feb 19 at 7:26
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    Curation needs some tweaking, but what is proposed does not look like that. Commented Feb 19 at 12:18
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    "SO Staff would have to invest all sorts of resources to reform the process to where it's not the pain point it is today" I'm not sure. I think that much could be done with comparably little effort if one really wanted to (we never wanted to). Just a few example which would have been easy to implement: go back to requiring 5 close votes for a close, require a minimal time before closing, require close voters to comment, ... I think it's wrong to assume that SO was the only sensible system. I can easily imagine a multitude of similar but different systems easily to be transformed to each other. Commented Feb 19 at 19:23
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution Fair enough, but it wouldn't solve the politics going on behind some closures. I mean, we had to warn a user once who had voted to close some 70% of new questions in a major language tag as "resource request" because they thought they didn't meet some quality standard they themselves had set (and this was thousands of votes). That's the rot in the closure system that's hard to weed out. While I don't agree with ditching the system entirely, I also see it as understandable from that angle. 5 votes would have only taken the edge off. Commented Feb 19 at 19:34
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    If curating is not affordable: can the company honestly say they think they have a viable product? Why not just close up, sell the assets and direct everyone to reddit? Commented Feb 19 at 21:15
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    Having seen how quickly questions can get closed as duplicates if they resemble another issue, the question closing system could use revision. However, I am skeptical that removing close votes entirely is the correct path. Commented Feb 20 at 16:25
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    "this is not being done in the same backhanded way" / "No staff have suggested curators are the problem [...] it is appreciated" - no offense, that reads like stockholm syndrome. This isn't something good by SE, it's just the absence of actively maligning users. And the reasons might just be that SE a) no longer has its stuff together enough to construct a clear narrative why they change things and b) stopped caring about the community (the actual users here, not some disjunct-from-reality CM notion of community) to the point where they don't even bother to include a critique of curators. Commented Feb 23 at 13:20
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How does this proposed change (which will no doubt be made, despite overwhelming pushback) make you all feel?

I saw it coming. Let me quote myself:

You are currently not attractive enough to grow your user base again. That requires some large and visionary changes, if it can be done at all. Stuff like opening chat to everyone certainly isn't that. Of course, large changes might drive away the remaining community. But you'll have to take (more intelligent) risks or it will be lights out soon.

Maybe the part in parentheses was a bit too subtle. The visionaries have left the company long ago. The company appears to be not capable of creating a viable product. Stack Overflow is dead and I suspect I will log out for good soon after the proposed changes go live on the main site. I just hope somehow the historical data is kept available and accessible (and not only as AI training data). And maybe someone will start a nonprofit, take the data dump and continue the original vision ...

I think a famous philosophical text has expressed my recent feelings regarding Stack Overflow best:

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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    "I just hope somehow the historical data is kept available and accessible", good one! Commented Feb 19 at 7:24
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    "And maybe someone will start a nonprofit, take the data dump and continue the original vision ..." Just about this, there is for example Codidact and they started even with some partial data import but that wasn't working that well either. You can probably read about their problem with importing content without importing users or traffic over on their site. Most likely, we all have to start over again somewhere else, which hurts, but I don't see a good alternative. One could though use the repository here as a place to mine knowledge and to improve it along the way (streamlining maybe). Commented Feb 19 at 11:36
  • @NoDataDumpNoContribution Google detects and understands mirrored content, and it see as a huge disadvantage for the secondary sources. It might be a possible reason, why the company made such a taboo about question migrations, although I have never seen it admitted. Commented Feb 20 at 15:41
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    @peterh And typically Google is right. Whoever simply copies something typically does not offer a better service. But this might be an exception, Codidact actually offering the better value of the content than the original site. Unfortunately google wasn't smart enough to understand that? Commented Feb 20 at 16:25
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution Afaik the current goal of the google is to kill all the small sites, so I can not see any surprising in it. Probably there are some loopholes what maybe the codidact can start. I think the de-valuation of the SO might had happened because already the Google started to fear, what is going on here. If only half of the closed-deleted questions generated someone hating the site and the system... Google is not a wizard, if people starts to use alternatives, they are out like the SO. Another option is that simply the expelled newbies boosted the quora/reddit. Commented Feb 20 at 16:31
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This is the end of Stack Overflow as a site. This place will become like Reddit or 4chan. There’s nothing left we can do to save the company from their own stupidity. For the past 9 months I’ve brought myself from one of the most active curators to only small sporadic activity. I guess now is time to say goodbye. I’ll keep my account for a bit in case the change is reversed but I’m not hopeful. The only solution is to try to rebuild somewhere else.

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  • Actually if you ask something from google, it will put you reddit first. I find reddit and quora simply disgusting, also reddit blocks my VPN, and I do not see why should I connect them directly so I rather choose other sources. But, I think, codidact is good. Today I use mostly the SO AI frontend to ask questions, I am also considering using more codidact. Commented Feb 20 at 15:35
  • Some years ago, Google seemed prefering SO to reddit/quora. Probably we will never know, what happened. Btw, I have found the content on these sites lesser quality as on the SO. But codidact is better as all of them, sadly it is too small. Commented Feb 20 at 15:39
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    @peterh Codidact is good. But the issue is there is no community there. It’s a ghost town. Honestly, the best future I can imagine for SO is they sell out to the WMF or back to Jeff Atwood or something Commented Feb 20 at 18:18
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    Codidact was the most friendly site I have ever known until now. And they are also smart. About WMF/Atwood: the company is a non-public LLC. There are many owners, the usual way to get their share that they sell it to you. If they do not want to sell it, or say an irreal price, opts are out. Public companies are better, there is a free market of the shares. Commented Feb 20 at 20:24
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    @peterh My understanding was that Prosus had complete or near-complete ownership of Stack Exchange stock (presumably that's what they paid 1.8 billion for). Is that incorrect? Commented Feb 22 at 0:06
  • Right. Afaik some minor owners remained. Commented Feb 22 at 7:07
  • @peterh So Prosus could sell the controlling shares… Commented Feb 22 at 15:14
  • Yeah. Question is, will they do it. 1.8billion $ for 40million question? That is $45/question, clearly far above what it worths. I think they bought the influence and not the content. As they have bought it, LLMs were yet nowhere, and SO was the first hit in the google, searching for anything. Now that is over. Cold business logic would say: 1) write down the loss and sell it for which it can be sold (remember yahoo's fiasco with the microsoft) 2) OR extract everything from the company what is in there, then sell the IP to an IP broker. Question is the outcome of these. Commented Feb 22 at 15:44
  • I think, Jimbo Wales lives quite well from the wikipedia, despite their regular spams in the frame "give money to remain independent", that is a possible direction also for the SE. Originally wikimedia started as a foundation, it was always non-profit on the surface, while the SO had always large monetary dreams. I think, that it surely over. Question is, a wikimedia-like half-profit entity can emerge from the current, fluid state. Commented Feb 22 at 15:47
  • I think, if it can, they our work in the last 1.5 decades, does not go into the waste entirely. Commented Feb 22 at 15:50
  • @peterh Consider that a 1000 ad impressions is typically worth about $15. So that's saying 3,000 views per question...that's not crazy. Of course they have expenses too, though. But the thing about WMF is that (with a couple of scandalous exceptions) they listen to the community. WMF isn't my favorite option, I just think "we develop a new site ourselves" is harder. And I think any idiot could see the company is certainly not worth $1.8 billion today. Commented Feb 22 at 17:14
  • Sum of the page views of the not closed questions from the SEDE is about 6billion (6e+9). SE sites together might add roughly the same (can write a query if you want to). That sums to maybe $150M. Although probably only part of it is real visit and not robot visit or so. Commented Feb 22 at 19:53
  • @peterh Okay that's actually surprising, at least to me. Given the 50x decrease in activity (and probably a similar decrease in views), that would also probably point to SO only being worth $1-2 million at best which would put it in the range of being bought by WMF, Atwood, or even someone or a group of people from the community who think they could make SO be less terrible. Commented Feb 22 at 20:42
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    The value of SO isn't just ad revenue... It's user data. It's teams. It's a brand. I'm not saying the company is worth anything close to that 1.8, but it's absolutely worth more than "pageviews * ad revenue per view" Commented Feb 22 at 20:51
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    @Cerbrus Yes. But SO also has expenses and there is always risk. So I used pageviews as an approximation. Commented Feb 22 at 20:54
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I answer this question for the purpose of posterity. Not because I believe it will change anything, because it won't.

As I mentioned in a comment on the announcement post, the reason for these actions is:

The issue is that the company’s incentives are not to produce a good quality Q&A site; the company’s incentives are to get as many eyeballs as possible so that ads can pay the bills and make them money. Their KPIs are shortsighted on the eyeballs part, and they seem to believe that the curation workflows are at least in part responsible for eyeballs going down, so they are removing them. As long as the visits metrics go up and to the right they are happy. Nothing we can say will fix their flawed outlook and flawed strategy.

Eyeballs. Making the monthly active users metrics go up and to the right. Whether they need this for profitability of ads or so their private equity owners can 'flip' this to another owner is unclear.

The issue they have is that if the quality folks on Stack Overflow are doing their job correctly, in so far as they:

  1. Have good, quality, questions that are generally useful such that they show up in search results,
  2. Have good, quality, answers that are useful to the visitors from those search engines (Google, let's not kid ourselves)

then folks bouncing around on the site seeing more ads and boosting the PPM or the PPC as the case may be (I believe it's Pay per impression here) is antithetical to that outcome. If I only need to visit part of one page to get my answer, I'm certainly not going to stay around on the site, and the bounce rate will be high, as it should be!

But, Ad revenue-based businesses are based on eyeballs engaging with multiple pages around the site. They need traffic to stick around. They need to get folks to continually come to the site, and that number needs to go up and to the right.

Here, we have a fundamental disconnect as to what makes the site useful, and what makes the site profitable to the degree that a private equity company wants for its purposes. It's always been this way, but we've ignored that issue because somehow, the economics of Stack Overflow are somehow different. They are not.

If you want the Stack Overflow you grew up with, then Stack Overflow must be divested from private equity and from VC-based economics in general. It was always going to get to this point as long as its ownership remained in the hands of Private Equity or VC. Funny enough, this website and the Stack Exchange network would do well in private hands that aren't chasing exorbitant returns, and it would do well in a non-profit's hands, but in order for it to get there, its potential value has to align with its potential profit, and right now there's a belief by the company that introducing these changes will raise its potential value.

That also means, that if you want the Stack Overflow you grew up with back, you're going to have to let this one go. Stop contributing, stop visiting, stop wasting your time and energy on helping it "produce value for shareholders".

Let it fail.

5
  • Isn't this some general argument for some sort of socialism? Whenever shareholders are involved the goals will be to make money instead of serving the customer. The two seem to align often, but a dedicated group of people could make it better. That seems to be the gist of the answer? But who would then pay for the programmers and the servers? And why are there so many companies in private hands currently? Are they just exploiting some sort of external advantage (you have nothing to lose but your shackles) or are they maybe better than thought at also satisfying the needs of their customers? Commented Feb 23 at 6:21
  • I have nothing against this answer, just want to point out that the long term monetary value for the shareholders might be as well tied to long term success and the company, if it cannot achieve that for whatever reason, would fail anyway (and that's normal), even without us actively helping, and another company could replace them for example. My question would rather be what happens to the collected knowledge when this happens. Do we need to start again more or less somewhere else? Commented Feb 23 at 6:24
  • @NoDataDumpNoContribution are we really turning this into a real world politics argument? I think the idea here is far simpler: there is no incentive for the company to stop as long as the site stays profitable, and this means that the only argument they listen to is something that will hit said profit. George idea is quite close to what I said to the Tavern crew quite a bit ago... If you are unhappy you should for example stop running Smokey because you curation is just making the site more profitable for ads, LLM training etc etc etc. Commented Feb 24 at 10:17
  • @SPArcheon Was just following the arguments. They were not so specific for SO or I didn't immediately see it. Doesn't mean I really disagree. Apart from that, this is the real world. Commented Feb 24 at 17:14
  • @NoDataDumpNoContribution: George did distinguish (I think rightly) between ownership by private equity/VC, which is typically going to be focused on short-term generic measures of profitability —since that's how they maximize stock value and maintain an easily-liquidated asset— and ownership by someone who's in it for the long haul, who can have the deep domain expertise and care to think about value in future decades. Those are both "capitalism", but they inevitably have very different attitudes toward anything not expressed on a standard balance sheet or SEC filing. Commented Feb 24 at 23:45
14

I am content, upset and afraid all at once.

I am content the change in direction is finally pushed through because this has been left to fester for way too long... although I am unhappy it is with the usual high level of ambiguity and evasive wording. But that's just the company being sick and tired of meta, I presume. They're not going to waste any more words on us than they have to. I do expect meta.stackoverflow.com to shut down at some point in favor of the chat rooms. Remember those changes where they started to remove the reputation requirements to use chat rooms? Yeah that was not without a reason. Meta is built for old Stack Overflow, it is pretty much obsolete for new Stack Overflow. And maybe that's a good thing too? Meta is many things, and it is also a place where people feed off of each other to stay frustrated and angry. It's hard to be friends or at least respecting peers when there is so much negative energy going around. Maybe it's time we start to talk to each other differently too, in a different environment.

I'm not saying I'm a fan of letting old Stack Overflow go - quite the contrary, I am gutted. I wasn't a part of it for its entire runtime, I missed the golden early years and signed up in 2012 when it was already pretty much in its strongest point. I loved it for what it was; it really did fill a dark hole in the web that no discussion forum I had ever been a part of (hello forums.sun.com/forums.oracle.com, I do miss you) could even begin to approach. It provided the relevant google search results that have saved my butt time and time again. It succeeded masterfully on that end of the spectrum.

On the other end of the spectrum, where all the pruning and curation and reviewing and voting and moderation was happening, it was a very hard beast to tame. Too hard, I would say. It involved a lot of mechanical thinking and doing, kind of forgetting that at the end of the day the site is still operated by and visited by human beings, primarily. People who rebel against mechanical thinking and doing.

That is where my fear comes in. New site - I'm fine with that. I don't have to use it if I don't like it.But Stack Overflow as we know it is not primarily the web front end. Stack Overflow is the knowledge base, the back end. The thing that has been built up over so many years by so many people and the thing that feeds web search results and has made the current generations of pseudo-AI coding agents possible. What will happen to that when curation is no longer really a thing and people start to human-it-up to their heart's content?

Nothing good, I'm afraid. That's pure web erosion that we are now going to face. Will I, at some point soon, be forced to use ChatGPT to find answers because it at least has in its training set the classic, untarnished knowledge base embedded? I know it is coming, and I hate it. Dearly. That may spark the beginning of the end of my journey in software engineering entirely, who knows?

0
6

This is not new.

The idea of removing question closure is already clearly expressed in Modernizing curation: A proposal for The Workshop and The Archive. However, that post has not attracted as many downvotes as the new announcement. The reason is likely that the last post was framed as a "proposal", which kind of gave the false hope that there is still a tiny probability that the company may change the direction, or that it's merely another experiment on top of the current SO site instead of fully replacing it (but if you read the "proposal" again it's clearly about revamping the current SO). This new announcement sealed the deal and simply forced everyone face the reality. And it has made some people finally realize that the feedback they wanted on that earlier proposal is only what they explicitly asked for: the ideas on the details of the implementation of the new curation model.

And of course they can make an edit claiming that curation will not vanish. From their perspective, they are just replacing the old curation model based on closure and review queues with a "superior" form based on content promotion.

Nothing more needs to be said. Enough has already been said in the answers to the original "new curation proposal" post. The only new info (to some of us) is that it has finally become clear what "proposal" and "feedback" actually mean.

Time to make up your mind and move on.

1
  • 2
    Yes, everyone who thinks that they might be persuaded to do something different than they want to is a fool. However, they still don't have a good way to achieve that "superior form of curation" without relying on lots and lots of experts free work that they don't have. They will change the rules to their liking, then they will fail. And hopefully by then nobody is here anymore, that would really be time wasted and this would be a pity. Commented Feb 24 at 17:12
-7

The company plans to remove closing questions

I really hope the closure option doesn't go away with the new site version. I am okay with everything else gone(on SO) but not the closure option since being able to close bad question(s) by the community is one of the best things about SO.

-31

While I'm probably going to get a lot of flack for this, this is a good change.

As @starball pointed out in a Meta answer a few years ago, Stack Overflow's purpose is "to make it so people can come with a specific (well scoped) question and not have to sift through a bunch of text to get the answer to their specific question." The problem is, SO has so much content nowadays that you have to sift through a bunch of text to find existing answers. As a result, even if you do your due diligence and look high and low for existing questions, it is very hard to ask a question nowadays without it getting closed as a duplicate.

As it stands, the user experience for new users is roughly:

  1. Look for existing answers to their question.

  2. Not find what they're looking for.

  3. Ask a question.

  4. It gets closed as a duplicate (not to mention downvoted into oblivion.)

  5. Repeat steps 1-4 until they get question-banned or give up on SO as a lost cause.

12
  • 29
    So, the solution to the library of knowledge being filled up with sand, is to add more sand to it? Commented Feb 20 at 18:05
  • 1
    @VLAZ In effect, yes. There's so many good questions that it's very hard to find a specific good question unless you already know precisely where to look. Commented Feb 20 at 18:10
  • 1
    Alright, so the solution is to make it not be a library of knowledge, then. Commented Feb 20 at 18:10
  • 26
    Re: "it is very hard to ask a question nowadays without it getting closed as a duplicate" – this mode of thinking is a huge issue; I'd argue one of the existential issues for closure... for a variety of reasons, people don't see duplicates as a good thing, despite it being intended as a win-win for both author and community. If it was working correctly, the author would be happy to receive an answer, and the community would be happy to consolidate another question... but it doesn't work this way, both because authors see closure as negative, and because some closure is overzealous. Commented Feb 20 at 18:10
  • 1
    I get that the current status isn’t all sunshine, but I fail to see how removing closure is going to improve things. As it stands, there are only barely enough answers because there are hardly any questions. Removing closure might fix the latter but it won’t magically attract people to answer all that. Commented Feb 20 at 18:10
  • 17
    "It gets closed as a duplicate" Yay! Someone pointed you to a place where an answer exists, awesome! Unless the duplicate closure was incorrect... In my experience, more often than not, dupe closures are accurate, but OP wants a narrowly tailored answer for their specific usecase. Commented Feb 20 at 18:38
  • 6
    If search isn't good enough, improve search, no? Commented Feb 20 at 19:23
  • 14
    Duplicate closures are not contributing to getting a question ban. Downvotes do, however. A question closed as a duplicate which has downvotes would count. A question closed as a duplicate which has upvotes would count against getting a question ban. And before you say it - no, not all questions closed as dupes receive downvotes. A lot of them but not because they are duplicates. Duplicates are supposed to be sign posts, leasing to the canonical. To be good sign posts, they should be clear and a new way to get there. Most aren't. Most questions are quite sloppy, in general. Commented Feb 20 at 21:00
  • 2
    For your reference, I actually self-closed one of my questions as duplicate immediately after posting and that question got several upvotes. Commented Feb 21 at 3:16
  • 11
    So what you're saying is that it's so difficult to find the relevant answer that we need to let more answers in and drown the site with duplicates? Commented Feb 21 at 10:43
  • 5
    @peterh "revenge delete votes" revenge for what exactly? I cast a delete-vote there because the answer is an unconstructive rant about how unfairly you feel you've been treated. And as far as flagging your content goes: If your content weren't in violation of SO's rules, flagging your content would only result in a reprimand for the flagger. If your content is being removed due to flags, then clearly there's a problem with that flagged content. Again, someone flagging your content is only a problem for you if your content is problematic. Commented Feb 22 at 12:56
  • 5
    @peterh I would be inclined to undelete you answer here, because downvotes are merely disagreement, and your opinion does not have to align with others, but that particular answer of yours also contains plenty of statements which paint the wrong picture. Not to mention that yet again, you are poorly choosing your words and you tend to fight with insults instead of arguments. If you could tone that down, your views would be better received, because it is not your stance that is completely of base, but your interactions are. Commented Feb 22 at 13:10
-34

While I generally disagree this decision, I think you must understand also the other side of the story.

I remember a guy with 2000 comments, and I could not find a single one where he did not want to close, downvote a post, and punish its creator. His whole communication, from his first comment until the last, is that he wants to punish and harm others. I do not know that he had been ever punished for that. But by writing this post, I am now in risk.

I remember another guy with 100,000 downvotes and maybe some thousand ups. He kept a low profile, I found him with SEDE. I criticized him in a short comment. I have got a half year ban for that.

I remember a guy who alone voted a seventh of a whole meta site down.

I remember the guys, a lot, where I have checked their review history and they voted excluvely close, reject, "leave closed". Except the rare cases where it was an audit, where they should vote positively. Btw, nearly everyone among the avid reviewers are this type.

I remember as I did the opposite. I have got 1 year review ban for that.

I remember the numerous occasions, as a guy, whose - pretty on-topic - main site question was closed by a fake reason, and then he asked us on the meta, where to go further with it. And the treatment was 20 downs, closure and deletion.

However, guys simply unwilling to use capital letters or punctuations, are pretty fine. Pressurizing them to at least try to play not an functional illiterate, resulted warns, sometimes interventions. Somehow it was okay. Asking about anything what you disliked, that was, for example, "xy problem".

I remember also the incalculable amount of off-topic questions, which could have been migrated to better sites. You could have done it with some clicks. You did not. Many of you do not even understand, that content can be moved to other sites, instead of destroying it.

Quite honestly, it has never really worked. Social inertia kept the system together, and not your "curation". People were here, because this was the site, what they have found with google. Not because they had been happy, after you have killed their pretty fine and valid question with a trash reasoning.

I think I do not disclose a big secret, that they hate you for that. A million of people, many millions of people, active IT guys around the world, are currently actively hating you. If they see stack overflow, the first what they think, that you have killed their question. They never forget it.

The best way to piss of an IT guy, if you demonstrate for him, that he is bad in the IT. It is yet more worse, if you do it with an unfair reason.

By the way, the concept - community self-curation by automatically garanteed privileges - could work. The concept is very good in my opinion. The problem is only that having a good system is not enough.

If a lot of hostile and intelligent actors are actively gaming the system to cause the most possible harm, if some social mechanism is actively filtering for such actors and puts them in position, then it does not matter, how good the system is.

I think, now the company maximizes out what they can earn, then the curtain closes.

You can see everywhere in the stats, the degeneration started in 2014 and not in 2022.

Not the LLMs killed this business.

You killed it.

18
  • 30
    It's easier to write a bad post than a good one. So negative curation actions - downvoting, close-voting, rejecting edits - will quickly exceed positive curation actions. It's sad, but I don't think it can be avoided if you want to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio. Commented Feb 20 at 7:57
  • @S.L.Barthisoncodidact.com Focus of the post is that the curation practice was hostile and bad. Btw, my main (and only) concern with the codidact was that I can not see, why the same would not happen with it if it could grow. Commented Feb 20 at 8:00
  • 18
    On Codidact, you cannot review edits until a number of your own edits are approved. Unlike Stack Exchange where you get the ability if you just have enough rep, even if you never edited a thing. I think that approach - merit-based abilities - will mitigate the risk of hostile curation. Commented Feb 20 at 8:09
  • 1
    @S.L.Barthisoncodidact.com Please read also the second half. Starting with "The problem is only that having a good system is not enough." Btw, I have codidact accounts (I use the same logo and nick) and occasionally I use them, I have found a wonderful atmosphere and I hope it will remain always so. I only can not see why would it. I think you are prone to become some like a "closed circle" and that will be the path of the SO in a smaller size. Commented Feb 20 at 8:13
  • 30
    I've also seen guys who do blatantly false callouts get banned, users who do not know what to ask where, get redirected to the right location, and rudeness is dealt with extremely swiftly. The bans you received are the system working. If you personally criticise someone after searching for a pattern through SEDE, you're actively harassing that person. If you intentionally go through review queues to "boost" acceptance rate regardless of content, you're abusing the system... Commented Feb 20 at 8:39
  • 23
    I don't understand what point you are trying to make. There is "a guy" for every single feature on this site who abuses it, breaks its rules, harasses others. Should we get rid of answers because there is "a guy" who spams, "a guy" who belittles askers, "a guy" who deliberately breaks the rules? Should we get rid of questions? Comments? Profile descriptions? Heck, there is no problem finding cases of even "positive" things like upvotes being used in a harmful way because dangerous content gets upvoted and balanced content drowned out. Commented Feb 20 at 11:13
  • 7
    As @MisterMiyagi said. There are users who deliberately upvote any and all content to offset what they perceive to be "toxic downvoting", which harmful and abusive as well. Commented Feb 20 at 11:35
  • 1
    @NoDataDumpNoContribution I think reflecting is quite important. But I am rather surprised by the limited selection of topics and actors then, though. It might help if the author were to reflect on that and share their reasoning. Commented Feb 20 at 14:15
  • 6
    "many millions of people, ... are currently actively hating you" I have been working in "IT" throughout SO's existence and I have never heard anyone express a strong opinion about SO, good or bad. To most people it's just a website. Commented Feb 23 at 9:52
  • 1
    @snakecharmerb In the other fragment of the world I am familiar with, SO is not even topic in professional IT context. IT guys rarely mention that they know that it exists. In practice, everyone is using it. But it is not topic. I believe, in this case, (y)our direct experience is not relevant. What is relevant, as I can remember as my questions were killed, I tried really my best on them, and nothing happened. What is relevant, how external sources talk about the site. Btw, on the first killed question, I think the OP feels shame. If he can not delete it, then he feels being doxed. Commented Feb 23 at 10:10
  • 2
    @snakecharmerb Until some years ago, the site was the first hit for practically any related google question. Then something has happened and the google seemed favor quora and reddit, although both their outlook and content is nowhere to the SO. Probably never will we know, why. A possible reason is some political game between the companies. But also that is possible, that the google has seen something, something more, in its very sophisticated DB processing results, that something is not okay here, despite that here are the best resources. Commented Feb 23 at 10:13
  • 9
    @peterh There are many factors that influence what website gets top position, and none of them are as sinister as you suggest. Wild speculation like that is extremely unproductive. Commented Feb 23 at 13:16
  • 5
    @Cerbrus just a note that I've edited your comment to tone it down a notch. peterh, in general, if you see people using their privileges in a way that repeatedly strays meaningfully from associated guidance (in definition and/or intent), please raise a moderator flag. mods take flags seriously and strive to make principled judgement calls. Commented Feb 24 at 7:01
  • 1
    @starball okay. I don't exactly remember what you've edited out, but ok :D Commented Feb 24 at 8:00
  • 1
    "About third of the close votes are blatantly false" Citation needed. Don't pull statistics like that out of your behind, @peterh. You're just lying to make your point. It weakens your argument. Commented yesterday

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