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

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

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

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

> We are thinking about structured downvote reasons.

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

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

I remember [my first question][1] and today I know how silly it must have looked to an expert. However it took awhile before I received an answer, watching the amount of views grow, maintaining a positive score and no other feedback at all. Today I would hesitate to address that question myself, not because I can't answer, but it requires *a lot* of context for a *good answer*. I would guess *old-timer* here would have even closed the question with *asker lacks of a fundamental understanding of the problem*.
Maybe some would say it lacks of focus, but I would say the question isn't well scoped which you can see on the amount of views it received. No-one really cares about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair enough.

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

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

> Then the asker would still have the opportunity to accept the proposed
> duplicate answer or leave context explaining why it doesn’t answer
> their question.

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

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

This also could make the closing/reopining *wars* more transparent.

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

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


----------

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

  [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/62050496/13629335