89

Discussions has been a poorly received product almost from the outset, and it's still a bad product.

At the moment, there are less than 900 undeleted posts (even though it's been live for over a year), and presumably many more deleted posts (certainly there are 1,000's of deleted spam posts). It is impossible to validate how well these posts are received (no SEDE and no downvotes), but engagement is very low. Most mornings, I drop in and end up flagging 70%+ of the posts that I can see as Spam, and another 10%-20% as Not suitable for Discussions (almost all of these are from 1 rep users posting incredibly low quality posts, that should have asked, been sent to the SG and had their post improved or never released).

This has been how the "feature" has worked since the outset; it is not a new thing.

I get that Stack Overflow tried, but it's clear the feature is dead; no improvements to curators has come to try and make things better:

  • Still no community edits
  • Still no API
    • Charcoal can't help with the frequent spam that go to the site and stays there for sometimes hours
  • Still no flag history
  • Still no downvotes (yes, it's needed).
  • Doesn't appear in SEDE.
  • I think it doesn't appear in the data dump (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

The engagement level is terrible. On the front page, as I look at this right now, the 15 posts fit into the categories:

  • 9 spam
  • 2 not suitable for discussions
  • 4 Discussions
    • 2 barely more than a sentence
  • All score of 0

This is how it looks every day.

If the product actually had had some attention over the last few months, it might actually be an MVP (minimal viable product), it is not; it's not viable.

If Stack Overflow want to finish the product, and try it again in the future, then sure, but the area is just attracting bad content that is impossible to curate effectively, and which goes completely against what the community and company should expect of the site: high quality content.

27
  • 14
    Frankly, I never actually see discussions. As far as I can see, they take very minimal space in the UI anyway. Does not seem like it's causing a problem. I'd prefer they got rid of collectives, they are a bit more "in your face", and actively distracting. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 9:56
  • 9
    Quite related to @yivi's comment: how are people intended to discover Discussions? Is it advertised anywhere besides the left menu? Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 10:20
  • 24
    Honestly, the fact that so many 1 rep users do find, and then go and ask a (normally very low quality) question really confuses me, @RyanM . I have often wondered "What did you do to end up here?" Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 10:26
  • 6
    @RyanM as per the introduction on the top if accessed from the left menu, there's Discussions tab inside each Collective: "Threaded, public conversations on technical topics. Available for any tag on Stack Overflow and [these 8] collectives." Now, are there more discussions from collectives' tags compared to other tags? I don't know... Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 10:41
  • 3
    Ahh, @AndrewT., we could use as SEDE to find that, o.... oh... Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 10:47
  • 2
    The fact you cannot perform SEDE and you cannot downvote suggests this feature was always setup to fail. We as users cannot improve the content or even moderate it, its inability to use SEDE, means no analysis of the content can be done. Collectives are another thing we should take out back behind the barn…. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 11:10
  • 5
    IMO it's not that discussions should be gone, it's that there should be a plan for discussions with respect to moderation, encouraging high-quality content, discriminating between high-quality and high-engagement content, discoverability, etc., with reasonable timelines (so not let it stew for a year then we'll see). The idea that we should have a less restrictive environment to discuss is almost as old as SO itself (the old programmers.se), and this need is still unfulfilled since discussions is broken. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 11:47
  • 7
    It seems to function as an implementation of the "Crap Overflow" idea from many years ago. You could choose to think of it as a harmless place to dissipate the "crap" energy that might otherwise be directed at the main site. Personally, I think it was born useless and then got worse. We certainly don't need a discussions site, at least not associated with Stack Overflow. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 13:35
  • 5
    Sites in public beta have this 1 requirement where they are shut down if they become mostly/exclusively bad content. I think this should apply to new features as well. Please turn it off. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 17:03
  • 3
    I feel like the main issue, other than receiving hardly any love from the company after introduction, is the total failure to integrate it into the site... both in a technical sense and a more abstract one. It's sectioned off in its own corner and hard to find (much like chat, frankly), to the point that you have to go out of your way to engage with it at all. It's also socially unintegrated; they gave zero incentive (and I don't mean rep) for existing site members to engage with it in any capacity... I think it'd be closer to true MVP if they made it feel more tightly tied to the site. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 20:30
  • 20
    Aside from the problems you mentioned, it's effectively unmoderated, because moderators simply don't see flagged posts on Discussions until they go to the Discussions page. And, to my knowledge, none of us ever do that. There's no reason we would want to, for the reasons you noted. This means that the classic "broken windows" problem is even bigger. There's no guidance given; there's no good examples. It's terrible. There's no better way to put it. If this kind of content was something we wanted and could work on SO, we should just allow it in the Q&A format, not give it a new separate place. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 21:16
  • 18
    Let's just get rid of collectives altogether. Commented Sep 26, 2024 at 1:39
  • 3
    Had never been to discussions before. Opened it for the first time and this was the first post: stackoverflow.com/beta/discussions/79033544/… Hard to argue with OPs point after that... Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 7:20
  • 9
    Similar to others, I've been a SO contributor for over ten years and read this title and thought to myself,' what in the hell are discussions?' So I went and found the link and saw the first two posts: Temu Coupon Code ╰┈➤ [acq523678]: >>|||$250 Off ||| and something in Russian. Yeah, I won't be clicking that link again. Commented Sep 28, 2024 at 19:08
  • 3
    It's not as if the spam is hidden and requires SD to locate it, @Ryan. Anyone who intends to moderate Discussions looking at the page would be sufficient to clean it up. Yet, every time I look at it, it's got tons of spam posts, many that are hours old. Thus, I conclude that it is effectively unmoderated. The "larger issue" that you note may well be true, and will certainly cause problems for scaling in the future, but we're nowhere near there yet, and that isn't the central reason that the entire page looks like a broken window. Before Charcoal, spam Qs didn't live this long on SO. Commented Sep 29, 2024 at 11:36

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
30

I just don't see discussions as it is currently built as a great fit for a Q&A site. If SO wasn't a Q&A site and instead was more of a blog it would serve as being a mediocre replacement for a forum-like system, but SO IS a Q&A site and thus we already have a place for creating useful content... Q&A.

The community would be better served by giving chat the improvements it deserves (API? Tools to support chat bots? better flagging system?) and putting a link to it in the menu.

6
  • 3
    But Q&A won't accept the questions that Discussions is generating, and chat can't really handle single-topic discussions like that either. For a good example of a Discussion, consider "Most Useful New PHP Features for version 8?" There are also a lot of Discussions on soft topics. (Discussions and chat, of course, both have their own unresolved problems.) Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 17:18
  • Why can't chat handle such discussions? i know it could back when JS chat for example was populated before the welcoming killed it. Sure, you couldn't easily refer back to past discussions or have a discussion over the course of weeks without spinning off a separate room, but back when it wasn't dead you could certainly have such discussions. (and it's certainly still possible to spin off new rooms for longer time period discussion topics.) Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 18:12
  • 2
    You're correct that Q&A doesn't currently accept many of the questions being asked in discussions, though i'd argue that's largely because they aren't really questions, they are search terms looking for a blog article result. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 18:16
  • 3
    "you couldn't easily refer back to past discussions or have a discussion over the course of weeks without spinning off a separate room". This is exactly what I mean. Though many Discussions are broad, they're not as broad as "Anything JavaScript" so you can refer back to previous Discussions, no matter how old (well, in theory, but search ain't great). Blogs meanwhile are a completely different niche, with the biggest difference being that they're non-interactive and therefore usually represent only one voice. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 18:28
  • 3
    One voice that is well presented is better than a dozen ai generated or one line "X is best!" responses from randoms. that said, even in that case, Q&A is a better framework for that kind of question than discussions is... even it being currently off topic. Commented Sep 25, 2024 at 19:28
  • 3
    @Laurel SO doesn't necessarily need to handle every single programming-something topic that someone might want to discuss at any given time. That's in fact the reason why there are so many spawn-off SE sites like Software Engineering, Code Review, Software Recommendations etc etc. Commented Oct 1, 2024 at 10:48
-9

Discussions is by far the most valuable and interesting part of the entire SO network. To whatever extent it has "failed", it's because SO has intentionally sabotaged it by not even giving it basic features like threaded replies and a working text editor.

4
  • 2
    Well, that's the point. Documentation has also failed, even though it was very much liked. Improper implementation kills good ideas: meta.stackexchange.com/q/408764 Commented Jun 11 at 14:00
  • 9
    The most valuable? Come on. The absolute biggest value of Stack Overflow is that when you search using Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo/etc., Stack Overflow is usually in the top 5 hits at least once, but probably twice or more times. It pretty much made AI code "assistance" possible. That is unbeatable value, no matter what nuts and bolts are layered on top. Discussions was a quaint, severely underdeveloped feature. Nothing more. Commented Jun 11 at 14:14
  • 2
    "Discussions is by far the most valuable" I would certainly argue against that. As for the failure, yes Stack Overflow are definitely to blame for that; if they wanted it to succeed then it would have functionality on par with the main site by now (or just prior to code challenges going live). That it doesn't only evidences how little attention it got, and how little hope it had of succeeding. Commented Jun 11 at 14:14
  • 1
    Even under the "don't delete anything ever" stance that you seem to be following, I don't see how you can argue that. If it had pulled a meaningful portion of the opinion-based questions away from the main Q&A space that would have been something of value at least, but it didn't even accomplish that much. Commented Jun 11 at 22:53

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.