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Added a really good example of the confusion from veteran SO users. Remove the screenshot if you feel it was inappropriate.
Greg Burghardt
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So far, the majority of posts being created in Discussions via this tool have been awful...

I have already referenced 2 posts that were Spam and a code dump, but I'm going to give some more examples of posts made since this went live (in no particular order):

The lack of onboarding and guidance the users are getting here is not helping. Discussions are being used incorrect to make comments; Discussions aren't comments. This low quality content is only going to detract the feature from getting interactions from users more, because the quality of the content is so low. The goal of Stack Overflow was to be a repository of high quality content. I'm beginning to think that the ethos of the company is now Quantity over Quality.


Some more examples:

  • Why doesn't the end tag not included in an ASIDE.OuterHTML

    Was a Programming based question. Author has now changed the Discussion to be purely a link to their question; both break guidelines for Discussions.

  • Change jenkins message on start

    Asking a Programming question; it is not a discussion.

  • Change jenkins message on start

    Asking a Programming question; it is not a discussion. Duplicate of prior discussion.

  • What if I don't use Shell? How can I get hold of the platform toolbar to be able to customize it?

    Asking a Programming question; it is not a discussion. It is asking the author of the answer how do achieve something when their environment differs.

  • Loss of functionality

    Saying the solution no longer works, and how to solve the problem now. Should be a bounty or a new Question; it's not a discussion.

  • How do I specify `gridPane.prefWidthProperty().bind(root.widthProperty())` in fxml?

    A follow up question about the implementation of the solution; not a discussion, it's a programming question.

  • The selected option holds over the others - select redirection js

    Follow up question; the answer provided a solution but a new problem. This is likely part of what I touch in in my other answer. Should be an edit to their question, or a new question; not a discussion.

  • Changes needed for acceptance of answer

    A request to the author of an answer to correct some mistakes before the OP gives them the green checkmark. Reading through the replies is enlightening given that the person who posted the discussion has 1.5k reputation on SO:

    jps 22.6k
    Do you realize that you have been tricked into starting a discussion when you probably just wanted to write a comment...

    Curious George 1.5k
    I do not realise anything of the sort! :-) I know this is a beta area of the stack sites, but it's very unclear how to use it, and what the interactions are.

    I know that StackOverflow is often steering me to start a discussion rather than have lots of back and forth, so I thought I would try it, this time.

    This is a terrible way to find out whether the person I was trying to talk to would get a notification, but well, at least now I know. I did try to find out, but I often can't find the information I'm looking for.

    What are we supposed to do, if discussion is needed? Start a discussion, then put in a comment directing them to the discussion post? I certainly didn't want to have the answer on StackOverflow filled with my advice to a potential first-time poster.

    Screenshot of the replies for future reference:

    Screenshot of replies to discussion

    (apologies to those involved, but it was a really good example)

And, perhaps the best example (so far) of how misleading this new feature is:

That is probably the highest quality Discussion I have ever seen. /sarcasm

This is a far from an exhaustive list of examples of bad Discussions created by the new feature; it's just a sample of them.

I am no longer updating this list, or flagging posts that fall afoul of Stack Overflow's terrible implementation, but have been adding replies to help direct users back on track.

Thom A Mod
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