Look at the history of the network, specifically the first few years. Purely opinion-based questions were allowed then, and they were quite popular. But they caused a lot of issues with the system, though many of these issues were related to reputation. Many of those questions were non-technical, so not quite what you're proposing here. But the problems are mostly similar.

There's a lot to learn about the potential pitfalls from the discussions of that time. If you exclude reputation gain, there are still big issues around voting. Those posts tended to attract a lot of votes, much more than any objective, technical questions. So if you merge them into regular questions, they will drown out any list sorted by score.

They also attract a lot of answers. More than you can effectively moderate. Not everyone knows the answer to a specific question, but everybody has an opinion. Nobody will read the late answers, which is problematic in terms of moderation and also not a nice experience as a user.

Established site rules don't work for them. So you need to change the rules for these, which will make the rules even harder to understand.

Duplicate rules are even more of an issue than for normal questions. Adding new answers to old questions is futile, as they attract too many answers in the first place. The opinion-based questions also get out of date more easily. So you might again need special rules for this content type.

I think you're underestimating again just how difficult it would be to make this work well.

Opinion-based questions by their nature do not lead to answers, they lead to discussions. The Q&A format, even with the new comment system, is not a good format to support discussions, especially when we have spent literally decades trying to train people to not use Stack Overflow like it is a forum.

Why is this not a separate product from Q&A with systems designed specifically to support discussion rather than trying to shoehorn it into Q&A?

Let me quote something from before:

As many of you know, Stack Overflow has mainly focused on objective content: questions that can clearly and definitely be answered. [..........] aims to expand upon this with subjective content.

[..........] threads may not have a specific conclusion with an answer that’s right or wrong. Instead, participants can discuss, debate, and explore varying opinions, perspectives, and implementation strategies in order to make more informed technical decisions.

We expect some [..........] threads to only be relevant for a finite duration in time, while others will become long-lasting points of reference. Our goal is for these conversations can be easily accessible and discoverable in both the short and long term. ^a

or

[..........] provides a way for developers to learn or share a new perspective outside of the traditional question-and-answer space, with a lower barrier for engagement and covering a broader range of topics. ^b

[..........] = Discussions

These are from the posts concerning launch and expansion of Discussions;

_{a. Discussions experiment launching on NLP Collective}

_{b. Discussions: Learnings and experiments}

Do you see the similarities? Basically, you are bringing Discussions to the main Q&A. They'll be a great source of cluttering the main. We have already pointed out the issues with Discussions, things that need to improve, and why and how they are different from Q&A.

Take this part of Tyler's answer about Discussions:

Discussions are not Q&A. They are a new product; users need not expect or rely on similar interaction options as Q&A (like voting). For open-ended, opinion-based discussions, voting never really made sense in the first place. Especially if it's not tied to any user reputation (which was the entire point of adding voting to Stack Overflow Q&A in the first place--to give the post authors reputation to signify their knowledge and effort on the site, and then also to unlock site privileges).

Now let me go through some of your commitments:

We will work with the Charcoal team to make sure that all of these questions are exposed to their tools to help prevent spam. We’ve learned from our experiences with the Discussions project.

Same promise was made about Discussions at some point. It never happened.

We will work with moderators to ensure that the appropriate moderation tools are available to moderate new question types if this becomes a permanent change.

Same as above.

So, I believe it when I see it.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but it sounds like you just want forums: something more structured than chat, but less structured than Stack Exchange's No-Nonsense Laser-Focussed Real-Questions-Have-Answers system.

Forums have been around forever, and Stack Exchange was designed to take the role of what forums were frankly terrible at: Distilling everything into focused questions and useful answers, separating the wheat from the chaff as it were. Instead of people needing to scour countless threads full of opinions and valuable technical discussions and piecemeal bits of knowledge and figuring out what is relevant and what is not, Stack Exchange concentrates the useful bits all into one place, easy to find and ready for the next person who needs it.

Stack Exchange Q&A never tried to take over what forums were already quite excellent at: congregating like-minded individuals and fostering valuable discussions on a wide range of opinionated topics. It was a supplement to the existing tools, not a replacement for them. Rather, the whole Stack Exchange system is — by design — TERRIBLE at being a forum, because otherwise people would just treat it like another forum and, well, what even would be the point of it all? What makes Stack Exchange valuable is its unique model which is designed to do only what it does and do it well.

And as best I can tell, you want to take this system and shoehorn it back into being a forum, something it was explicitly trying to distinguish itself from? Stack Exchange works because it eschews the noise, the distractions and detours that stand in the way of a clear answerable question and a useful valuable answer. A forum works because it embraces the noise, bringing in a variety of opinions and perspectives, churning them together to (hopefully) produce something more valuable than its component parts.

I don't disagree that there's a place for something like this on the Stack Exchange network — Stack Overflow likely never would've succeeded were it not for the countless forums already full of knowledge that had paved the way — but integrating it right into the Q&A like this feels like exactly the wrong approach: They're two completely different approaches to information handling, and blurring that line by merging them into one Q&A system feels like it'll just make everything worse for both, instead of better for anyone.

Over the next few months, one of our key focuses will be centered on finding a home for a wider range of technical questions on Stack Overflow.

With respect, no. You are misunderstanding your own product, or rather, conflating Stack Exchange with Stack Overflow. If you want to find a home for new types of questions that currently are not a good fit on Stack Overflow,

You already have a platform for that: Area 51. Make a new site and leave Stack Overflow alone.

A new site would not even require massive efforts in development because everything you need is already baked-in: you can set your own topic rules, you can set your own privileges and the reputation level they apply to, etc.

Sites on this network have communities that keep them alive, and those communities generally decide what they want their site to accept. I get that Stack Overflow is the money maker/star performer here and therefore special, but there's a reason it is the money maker and the star performer: strict quality control. You can leave SO alone and put all your efforts into this new site if you want it to succeed so badly.

In this scenario you are Victor Frankenstein trying to find how to renew life and create something good. That's understandable. Laudable even. I empathize with you on that. However, you are currently at the step where you are strapping Stack Overflow to the table and trying to create a monster by sewing an arm of Reddit onto it and a leg of Quora onto it, which will destroy Stack Overflow in the process, however slowly.

Let me ask you a rhetorical question: which website has the reputation for being a high quality, thorough resource of information? Wikipedia? Quora? or Reddit? It's Wikipedia, because they have strict quality controls and editorial standards. Stack Overflow is the programming Q&A version of Wikipedia. Please stop trying to make it like Reddit or Quora.

This effort is to simplify how more users want to ask and answer questions that have not typically been allowed. This isn’t an attempt to diminish the valuable and high-quality questions and answers we have, but to expand the knowledge base for more types of content to exist alongside it.

This is exactly what Area 51 is for:

Area 51 is the Stack Exchange Network staging zone. It's where groups of experts come together to build new Q&A sites that work just like Stack Overflow. Here you can:

• Propose new Q&A sites. If you have an idea for an expert Q&A site, propose it here.
• Get involved in the process. Help sites get off the ground by defining the types of questions that are wanted, recruiting a critical mass of experts, and committing to the site's success.

Back to this post:

We will not tie these new question types to reputation or privilege-earning opportunities. We are open to considering a new incentive system for them.

Users will not be forced to see this content; community members will have the option to filter their feeds to their liking. Or opt out of opinion-based content entirely.

So why try to tie them to Stack Overflow yet at the same time make them completely separate/optional?

You already have a way to do this. Area 51.

You can even just call it "Stack Overflow Subjective" or something.

Again, with respect, y'all do not have the grasp on the ins and outs of how Stack Overflow's code (or, apparently, design or ethos) works to change it so much without fundamentally breaking the site every time you try something huge like this. This is like Chesterton's Fence, except instead of no one knowing why the fence was there, the entire village is yelling at you not to remove the fence, while explaining why it is there in the first place.

• What kind of tools would you like to see that allow you to curate your question feeds to include only the content types you are interested in?

Why is this predicated on expanding the types of questions asked here? Why not just put effort into this for the site as it is now? We would actually be grateful and supportive if you put in efforts to just fix and improve the site we already have and love.

• Opinion-based content allows for a considerable amount of room in defining what makes a good question. What guidelines would you like community members to see when asking these types of questions?

I would not like opinion-based content on Stack Overflow as that's like going to the grocery store to buy nails and lumber.

• We don’t believe that reputation as structured today is the correct incentive for addressing these types of questions. How should quality discussion-oriented content be rewarded or incentivized?

Opinion-based discussions don't merit reward or incentives. But if you must, give them badges like popular question or famous question. Just make copies of the existing code for those Q&A badges and adjust them slightly for opinion-based discussions.

I'm super-wary about the concept. It seems at odd with the aspects of Stack Overflow that drew me here. But I'll run with your premise and offer a sketch of a possible design that might address some of my biggest concerns with this.

Focus on aggregating expert opinion. Focus on where you can add special value: questions that need answers from experts, and where Stack Overflow can collect and aggregate information and opinions from experts. Don't try to be everything for everyone. Don't try to be another Reddit/Quora/Yahoo Answers clone where anyone can post anything and anyone can post any answer they like.

Set clear expectations for subjective or open-ended questions. I would suggest that such questions must (1) ask about software development, (2) be practical and answerable, (3) be directed towards answers that can be supported by evidence or experience, and (4) ask a question that requires answers from experts.

Restrict who can answer. Require 250+ reputation to answer. This is designed to signal that the goal is to gather expert opinions, and the goal is to focus on questions that require aggregating expert views. Also, it helps reduce answers from people who just want to engage or chime in, from people who have opinions but no expertise, and from people who want to share their opinions but have no buy-in to the requirement for providing evidence or experience. Only rep from standard questions and answers should count towards this 250+ threshold; rep from these new subjective questions or answers on them should not count. If people want to engage with subjective questions, they should first contribute to the knowledge base and establish their credentials as knowledgeable in this domain.

Restrict who can vote. Require 250+ reputation to vote (same as for answering).

Require that answers be supported by evidence or experience. Set a clear rule that all answers must be supported by evidence or experience. Document this rule prominently. Delete all answers that don't follow this. Create a new flag type on answers, 'primarily opinion not supported by evidence or experience', and either (a) get buy-in to act on it from SO moderators or (b) enable the community enforce this, e.g., if there are 2 such flags, the answer is deleted. The tradeoff for lowering requirements for questions and making it harder to close or delete questions is higher requirements for answers and making it easier to delete answers.

Mark subjective and open-ended questions separately. Put a post notice above such questions that indicates it is a subjective or open-ended question, and different rules apply, and link to the rules.

Change the closure rules. I suggest disabling the "opinion-based" close reason and (maybe) the "duplicate" close reason on such questions, but allowing other close reasons to remain.

Change how answers are sorted and vote totals are displayed. Use Bayesian ranking to sort answers, to take into account aspects of the current system that don't work well for opinion polls. These issues aren't a big deal for most existing questions, because most existing questions don't receive a lot of answers or a lot of votes; but opinion questions often receive many answers and many votes, which creates new problems.

See https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/26833/2921, https://planspace.org/2014/08/17/how-to-sort-by-average-rating/ (also: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/10/23/alternate-sorting-orders/, https://web.archive.org/web/20111003060234/http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html, https://julesjacobs.com/2015/08/17/bayesian-scoring-of-ratings.html, https://www.evanmiller.org/bayesian-average-ratings.html, http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html, https://web.archive.org/web/20150214083151/https://camdp.com/blogs/how-sort-comments-intelligently-reddit-and-hacker-).

Currently, answers posted earlier and answers at the top of the sort order tend to receive more votes. So someone who posts an early answer gets more votes, which raises it to the top of the sort order, whence it receives even more votes. Late answers languish at the bottom, get little visibility, and don't receive many votes. So the current sort order is influenced by "which was posted earliest" as much as it is influenced by quality. Bayesian ranking reduces these issues.

Do I expect to like such a system? I don't know, it feels pretty different from Stack Overflow's existing mission, so probably not. There could be some value in opening up in a limited way. But, do I trust the company to implement this in a healthy way? Not at all, the circumstances right now are so dire for the financial future of the company that I don't trust the company's ability to resist the desire to maximize engagement regardless of quality. But I thought I'd do my best to sketch a possible way that is as consistent as I can make it with the goals articulated in the question.

Opinion-based content allows for a considerable amount of room in defining what makes a good question. What guidelines would you like community members to see when asking these types of questions?

Are they actually going to be used? because we had guidelines for people asking questions, but they were replaced with AI slop a while back.

The question we need to ask ourselves is... what kind of opinion based questions are we not going to allow. For example, are we going to allow questions comparing different SaaS solutions, either by price and/or by feature? Are we going to allow "What is the best practice way to do X?", even when it has a properly worded "How do i do X" dupe that has a good answer?

What is an example of a good useful opinion based question that the team wants to exist here? It's clear (at least to me, given we've never pushed to change the guidelines to allow opinion based content) the meta community doesn't generally want opinion based questions here, so getting us to decide what should be allowed seems kinda... out of place to me.

Can you give a couple hypothetical examples of "well-reasoned, opinion-based questions"? I'm struggling to imagine what kinds of questions you're envisioning in this category.

We've observed that many valuable questions are closed as 'opinion-based' because they don't fit our traditional format for objective Q&A.

How do you (throughout: I mean the staff, collectively) know this?

Why do you presume to be able to judge what is "valuable" in our Q&A?

Have you written questions (and answers)?

Have you participated in the meta discussion in which standards and criteria for "value" were set?

Have you attempted to understand the reasoning given for the guidelines of the "traditional format" (i.e., not a discussion forum)? Specifically as relates to opinion? Even more specifically, from the discussion on meta, have you read https://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask , and considered deeply the reasoning given there (to my understanding, by former staff)?

One quality standard should be providing details in the question. "I want to program, so what language should I use?" is a terrible question, regardless of objectivity/subjectivity, because most programming languages can be very useful for programming. And "in 2025" would not make it any better. People looking for opinions should share what truly distinguishes their needs, goals, or context.

Like I mentioned in a comment this sounds like another attempt at Discussions. I'm not against this (I think the feature has merit), but like I also noted, part of the reason Discussions failed is because of the lack of tools you state you're committing to putting in a new attempt.

I did, admittedly, spend a good amount of time in Discussions, almost entirely curating. This wasn't a great experience for such users; it was impossible for us to track our flags and we couldn't even retract them. If a flag was declined, for example, I had no idea it happened, let alone why. I can see the tools that the moderators have now, and I can also understand why it was difficult for them; like others have mentioned in the past you can only access the flags if you navigate to the home page of the feature, and they don't appear in the main site mod pages at all.

Quality is important as well; a lot of the posts on the old Discussion area were very low hanging fruit and not interesting. Unfortunately, as much as SO might not want it, giving curators the ability to close such low quality questions is likely needed; those posts don't get engagement from the users SO needs them to (the SMEs) and (from prior experience) often attracted LLM content. It wasn't a good experience for anyone.

In terms of your points about showing such questions on the ask feed, please gives users the ability to opt out seeing these within the preferences, like with the Staging Ground, and add a search feature for explicitly searching for them. There are users that don't want to see SG posts and I suspect the same is going to apply to these posts. I would, honestly, likely want use a different custom filter for such questions so that they don't "invade" my normal feeds.

If someone asks an opinionated question, but not as a "DiscussionV2", what does SO Inc think would be the correct path; Closure? Migration? Something else? What happens to any reputation changes if the post is migrated from "Question" to "DiscussionsV2"? We also, likely, would want to avoid overlaps with Software/Hardware Recommondations; would "DiscussionsV2" have an option for migration to those sites?

There's a lot of history around such a feature, as the last attempt failed; this really puts SO on the back foot here. If you truly want this to succeed any release likely needs to be feature rich from the start. Having a "MRE" product that lacks the ability for the community to utilise and curate properly, and (as much as SO might not want them to) avoid, is only going to end up with the community disliking it again; you need the community to engage with it for true success, high volumes of low quality content *isntZ a success as people will learn to not trust the content. Yes, making it feature rich from day one is a (significantly) larger effort before a release, which might be wasted if it fails again, but I'd suggest that with that effort there's a far better chance of success.

Don't mistake entertainment for knowledge distribution

Having a lively opinionated discussion might be fun, but often enough is also a waste of time with little to nothing that can be learned from it. Don't believe me?

• Q: What is the one book that every programmer should have read? A: There is no such book.
• Q: Is PyTorch or TensorFlow better for Deep Learning projects? A: Both are really well suited.
• Q: Can AI replace programmers? A: Not yet. Don't ask me when, I really don't know.
• Q: How to get really good at programming? A: {study, practice, compare} a lot
• Q: Why do so many people like Rust? A: Because of its features (if only somebody would ask for them).
• Q: Why are programmers so weird? A: They aren't.
• Q: What is the best for ..? A: Nobody knows unless you tell us your exact requirements.
• Q: Why is the singleton pattern not used more often? A: Difficult to say, but there may be sunshine or rain on the weekend.

And did you learn a lot? I would guess not. I just made them up and I could go on. I think there are many questions that one cannot learn much from them and only wastes time. I don't think we miss a lot there. We miss only a very modest possible knowledge gain while risking lots of curation effort. But the company seems to think differently. Hopefully it won't go wrong. (Collectives, Discussions, AI generated answers)

However, if we wanted the modest possible knowledge gain to be included, maybe it would help to:

• Most important: avoid such questions at big costs, always try to make a real Q&A out of it first. Only if that doesn't work (and often it will actually work) ask that other kind of open ended question.
• Make it about a specific as possible situation? Asking for a book, say what you know and what you want to learn. Asking for a comparison, give at least three specific use cases. Asking for advantages, specify the areas of interest (or use cases).
• Do not answer what is best, should I, how can one ... type of questions? Only answer "how is it typically done" type of questions instead. Answers then would optimally link to existing code.
• Do not ask for recommendations if possible. Ask for advantages and disadvantages with regard to specific requirements.
• Let real experts give the opinionated answers. Avoid simple questions that only invite bike-shedding.
• Avoid A vs B (eg. Redis vs. Memcached) questions. This is something like the XY problem. People ask for A vs. B but they really want to know what is best for their use case. Let them explain their use case and do not limit answers to only A or B.
• Expect answers to be substantial, i.e. not only an opinion (I can have multiple ones at the same time about anything) but an actual chain of arguments.

But I also see some silver linings at the horizon. I could imagine that:

• Why questions might work if you can get the actual authors to answer them. Typically we don't know why certain aspects of a programming language are like they are for example, but sometimes the actual designer is available and can comment (I remember at least one such case) and that would still be only an opinion but an interesting one.
• Best practice questions might work if actual experts answer and the scope is reasonably limited and people avoid bickering over details.

Maybe it would also be good to create a list of good example vs. bad examples. Something like:

• Bad: How important is it to reach 90% test coverage?
• Good: Why is a high test coverage important and how much test coverage is typically achieved? or How do people typically determine the trade-off between effort and benefit for test coverages?

All in all it might become a lot of work, especially with curation when there are multiple content types surely we will need a system to somehow migrate content from one type to another or mark content of one type as duplicate of content of another type. And who will do that work? Please do not introduce anything without such a system. And this kind of knowledge might also age even faster than the pure factual knowledge we typically have. Think about trending sort by default there.

However, I actually see some potential if done right, but I find it difficult to give a comprehensive guide how to do it right now. There would still be millions of questions people might come up with that aren't a good fit for a knowledge library.

Basically always ask yourself: what are people supposed to learn from that? If there is no (lasting) knowledge inside, it's not a good idea.

Most of the time when I'm looking for a solution, to a problem, because Stack Overflow's own search isn't up to it I'm searching using an external search engine with a prompt like site:stackoverflow.com how to foo the bar If the new question types live in the same space as current questions my search result is going to be watered down with the new question types when I'm only looking for the tried and trusted kind.

Please make sure I can also filter out subjective questions from a search with an external search engine, not just from some user settings in my profile which doesn't apply to these searches.

We are focused on attracting any quality technical questions; we do not intend to attract generic homework questions, or frivolous conversations

I urge you to figure out the purpose of the new question types and how to keep them to it as a priority before launching them.

There should be a way to keep a focus. I always thought Discussions was a good idea. But the implementation was ultimately doomed for several reasons. Mainly the lack of focus. One of the most popular discussions was what music you listen to while programming. That, I believe, was not what Discussions was for. There were many other topics that were all over the place but not really within the spectrum of technical conversations. Some were "boat programming", many were random questions. There was no real unity of purpose.

I mentioned this problem before, so I will just include the quote here again:

There was a post about why Documentation failed where Jon Ericson cited Horyun Song:

Horyun makes a wonderful analogy involving chairs. Imagine walking into a room with these two setups:

The right hand side is clearly more welcoming since the chairs are arranged in a way that welcomes (affords) sitting. Without clear organization, Documentation started to look a lot more like the the chairs on the left. Private beta users saw a clean slate and users at launch walked into a work in progress. Some topics were better organized than others, but our focus on content creation distracted from content curation.

The same thing is repeating with Discussions. But we never had the right side chairs because:

By design, there was never a clear definition of what Discussions is for, since the idea was to see what participants wanted to do there.

Only leads to the left side of the picture. There needs to be something that conducts organising the content.

What kind of tools would you like to see that allow you to curate your question feeds to include only the content types you are interested in?

I'd like to be able to use watched/ignored tags to curate my question feeds... but currently, watching tags (and enabling SG posts to appear) makes the question lists worse by randomly injecting tagged questions at the top, out of order from the rest of the content rather than simply highlighting this content.

But as far as this new content type is concerned.. we simply need a labeling system that supports both this new content type and SG posts, with a filter that lets you pick and choose which types are shown.

Given this quote:

Simplified posting experience: We're exploring simplifying the process of asking questions on Stack Overflow, so that any technical question has a place and can find an answer.

In what way will this simplify the posting experience? Are you going to have some kind of AI inspect the question and determine whether or not it is opinion based and have it automatically route the question to being an discussion opinion based question? or... I'm just not sure how giving people two different kinds of posts they could make and making them decide would be simpler.

The simplest solution would be for there to only be one route, asking a question, and having our guidelines simply expand to meet whatever new criteria the company wants to force the community to accept. As long as this asking process involves getting the asker to choose what kind of question they are asking, it's going to have the same problems discussions had where people were routinely asking regular questions as discussions.

How are you going to segregate this content for SEO purposes? In other words, when I google something, are subjective discussions and actual fact-based content going to look the same? Or will there be a clear way to tell them apart without clicking on every link?

One of the most infuriating things is searching for a problem, then reading through 25 pages of a forum discussion that never actually gets to an answer. That's why I click on links to Stack Overflow first. It's really quick and easy to tell if there's an actual answer to the question. Opinion-based questions have no true answer by definition, so intermixing them with regular Stack Overflow content would greatly reduce the value of seeing a SO link in your search results and thus make people less likely to click on it.

In the past, we've created separate sub-sites for handling more subjective content (think Software Recommendations, Code Review, etc.). That gives them a home with a different URL and logo that are easy to distinguish from the standard Q&A sites. Wouldn't something like that serve the purpose without diminishing the value of the existing site?

Remember, nobody on this site actually knows anybody else. We're all just Internet strangers. You may value the opinion of someone that you know and trust, but the opinion of a complete stranger is beyond worthless. You can trust their answers in a Q&A format because answers can be tested and verified (also how academic research works). Putting random people's opinions mixed in with actual factual information would only make people skeptical of anything they find on this site.

With no rep for answers, will closing apply to opinion based questions the same as for regular questions? Is the community going to be expected to police comment answers, which closing does not affect? Or are comment answers or threads the goal here, instead of self-contained answers?

Also, you say stopping spam is a goal. However, the line between an opinion post and spam can be much thinner than for an objective post. When we see what could be marketing copy for a recommendation, do (or when do) you want us to try to remove it as spam? And perhaps more importantly, are mods going to be ready and supported in handling these flags?

The last few years, you're bending the Stack Overflow formula more and more. I can already see the first signs of it being close to the breaking point. I don't think this is something you can just glue back together if it breaks. All the users will leak out though the cracks.

There's a fundamental contradiction in how this is framed: by definition, a question can't be both "well-reasoned" and "opinion-based":

In our upcoming experiments, we will explore allowing well-reasoned, opinion-based questions to sit alongside our traditional Q&A.

If the answers to a question can be reasonably defended, then it's not opinion-based. If they can't be, then the question isn't "well-reasoned." There are even clear guidelines about which subjective questions are acceptable.

Also, the original point of Software Engineering Stack Exchange to allow questions that were somewhat more subjective than what was traditionally allowed on Stack Overflow.

That being said, I don't understand exactly what need this is supposed to be filling. People can already post well-reasoned opinion-based questions - as long as people can reasonably defend the answers, you can probably already post the question either here or on Software Engineering SE.

Also:

While this strict format is the foundation of our site's quality, it also means our library of knowledge has lost out on crucial technical discussions.

As someone who actually remembers what wading through technical discussion forums was like before Stack Overflow, we're not missing much. The entire point of Stack Overflow was that that model was badly broken and made it hard to find the actual information you needed.

As with so many ideas in the last few years, this again seems to come from people who either forgot or never learned the lessons from Stack Overflow history. There are very good reasons why opinion-based questions are not allowed and nothing in the announcement gives me cause to hope any of the problems with these types of questions will be adequately addressed. You say

This isn’t an attempt to diminish the valuable and high-quality questions and answers we have

but you might very well achieve that result without even attempting to do so, as those who do not understand SO history are doomed to repeat it.

However none of this will fly without the community. As long as the downvote arrow still includes "not useful" as a downvote reason, all users with downvote privileges are not just allowed to but explicitly welcomed to downvote content they do not find useful. For me, that will probably include every single piece of opinion based content. I implore all users to make use of that privilege freely.

One more thing - the OP asks

How should quality discussion-oriented content be rewarded or incentivized?

Any my answer to that is not at all. If you truly believe that this content is valuable and that there is a demand for this, then you should have no trouble finding enough participants in the community without promising any shinies as a reward.

This sounds good on paper, but I have mainly one question:

What kind of content do you want to attract and why?

From my experience, most of the opinion-based questions that we closed and deleted were stuff that either didn't provide any value to the programmers or was useful only at the time when the question was asked. For example:

What kind of software can be written with PHP? A: Anything you'd like.

No value whatsoever. But it is sure to attract many software ideas.

Which JS framework is the most mature? A: JQuery (or something else that was relevant at the time)

JS frameworks come and go and it's difficult to provide an answer that will stand the test of time. Opinions like this can quickly change. This is why when you Google this, you will get links to Quora and Reddit first.

One can argue that if I want to search for opinions, it is useful for me to find posts like this. But is Stack Overflow the place for it?

If you want the current opinion, you'll have to ask a new question. Looking at old questions will just confuse you. And this is pretty much the model that sites like Reddit employ. The newest stuff is what people read, and the old discussions are essentially dead and archived in read-only mode. Resurrecting them is frowned upon. For Stack Overflow, it has always been the opposite. The old and well-established questions are what most users read. So what kind of benefit does our site gain from attracting forum/chat-style questions which don't fit our model?

Couldn't you just redirect such questions to Reddit instead? I know I'd rather ask it there than here.

At the risk of sounding naive (I have only been on SO for 14 years), I really don't understand what exactly is meant by an "opinion-based" question. It looks to me like almost every question turns out to be opinion-based. (Self-referentially, even the question "What is an opinion-based question?" is opinion-based.)

• Why do you ever answer a question that has already been answered? Because, in your opinion, a different answer would be better. Often, you have no expectation that the other answer authors will agree with you -- you expect that their opinion will remain that their answer is better. To put it simply, the answers are opinion-based.
• On sites like Parenting.se or Workplace.se, opinion-based questions and answers are common, and are valued. These sites function just fine. They don't need a different interface or different infrastructure. They just have different taboos, for example they will close open-ended questions that don't make it clear what problem needs to be solved. Opinion-based questions are not inherently a problem for the existing SE system.
• Many highly upvoted questions with very technical answers are in essence opinion-based, even on Mathematics.SE (arguably the SE site with the strictest sense of "right answers" and "wrong answers", and of course it has a similar anti-opinion-based policy.)
• As a totally random example from the "Hot Network Questions" sidebar, this question is obviously opinion-based, but it seems prima facie like a valid question that invites specific answers, which could be valuable to future users. It is easy to find such examples.

This question was closed recently for being opinion-based after having consistent engagement for 15 years. Expert opinions are clearly valued by the community! Both the question and 5 of the answers are from users with over 10k rep. The closure makes no sense, neither from the perspective of SE users nor SE goals. It only makes sense from the knee-jerk "opinion-based == bad!!" over-simplification that I am arguing against.

In short, even after reading all the other answers, I don't understand the hate for opinion-based questions, and I see tons of opinion-based questions that are loved by the community. So I think when people say "opinion-based", they mean something else.

• If the problem is that the question's bar for engagement is very low so there is too much engagement, creating a mess of low quality content, then we should recognize that as what we are trying to address (either as now via suppression or as proposed via moving such cases to a different infrastructure).
• If the problem is that high engagement leads to large reputation effects that don't reflect whatever it is reputation is supposed to reflect, then we should recognize that as an issue to address, and find a way to directly address that issue (an issue not just limited to opinion-based questions), similar to how the existing design keeps meta reputation from polluting regular reputation.
• In practice, every SE site has its anti-patterns that cause questions to get closed, and if "opinion-based" is just a catch-all term referring to certain anti-patterns ("how can I learn X" / "what is the best language for Y" / "given situation X what should I do" / etc.), then we should recognize that, and focus our attention on the anti-patterns.
• If the problem is that people tend to start unproductively arguing with each other, then we should again recognize this as an XY problem, where the unproductive arguments are the real problem, and tools for fixing that problem should be developed (e.g. "this discussion has been moved to chat").

But there is no reason to prohibit the many opinion-based questions (like "what is the best way to understand X" when X is something technical) that are actually useful and appreciated by the community.

Even the proposed "new" opinion-based site parts will have anti-patterns that get questions closed, for the same reasons as before: to maintain a sustainable quality level. So I do not think the "new parts" will be particularly different from the old parts.

In my opinion, the best route forward would be to eliminate the unclear/incorrect umbrella term "opinion-based" and replace it with concrete (site-specific) lists of closure-warranting anti-patterns, where each anti-pattern is accompanied by a description of why it is a problem for the site. For example each anti-pattern could be a "question" here on meta where people vote on whether the pattern merits closure, and the answers and comments would clarify exactly what sorts of questions are being referred to, and why they should be closed. This would allow expert-opinion based questions to remain, while still eliminating the low quality ones. Which is, after all, the goal.

Okay, I had some time to sleep over it and I want to try a second time. This time fully optimistic. I want to make it happen but how? This is the million dollar question. It failed in the past for programmers (even good subjective was still not good enough) and it failed for discussions (drowned in spam), so can this be avoided and what actually makes really great discussions™?

I think that..

Really great discussions demand a really great basis/introduction

Typically we are happy if a question doesn't get closed, i.e. the bare minimum to be answerable. But that's not enough for a discussion. A great discussion must include a great question, a question worthy of upvotes (discussion votes which are of course different of normal votes). And a great discussion question must be discussed beforehand in order to optimize for greatness.

I propose that discussion type questions allow responses only above a certain score (say 5) and only after at least 24 hours have passed since creation.

There is no rush. A great discussion can take time. Discussions can have something like a staging ground and learn from our experience with the staging ground.

I think that..

Really great discussions need experts discussing the subjects.

Often I regret having read something. How could I discourage everyone and their relatives somewhat (not completely) from joining in.

I propose that people giving responses to these type of questions should in one sentence state the relevant experience they have at the beginning of their response. It's perfectly fine to say: I taught it to myself 30 years ago and used it heavily since then.

Tell me from which side you are coming. You build, you sell, you use or you repair the things? It's relevant for the discussion and a diverse discussion panel is actually good.

Order of display could be random but not per score and there won't be winners anyway. That's not the point. One could even display public support only until after the discussion. I'm a bit undecided there. Votes make sense but displaying it too prominently not.

And finally I think that..

Really great discussions may be somewhat entertaining or somewhat philosophical, but at the core they are about things programmers (and related) do during their occupation, something practical?

We could do entertainment (Which line of code produces the funiest output?) or discuss the metaphysics of programming (Has code run if nobody checks its output?) but it wouldn't contribute to a knowledge library. We must concentrate on discussion topics with practical relevance for programmers for their work.

I propose to include strict moderation tools and clear messaging right from the beginning. We wouldn't want to demotivate people to discuss programming topics but it must be clear that it's not for fun or in vain, the purpose is to generate practical (expert) insights. Discussions that do not fulfill that purpose should not happen (close reason, still needs to be detailed).

All that together and possibly other things too might result in useful discussions. But I'm not sure we will find enough people actually wanting to do all this. Actually, it will be quite a bit of an effort.

I get a sense it's an attempt to take a slice off of the programming pie that is happening on discord right now, and I don't see how successful it will be. When people ask for opinion it very often naturally derails offtangently into other related topics. It works fine in a chat stream, but makes it less useful in terms of retroactive searchability which has always been the point of SO.

Banning opinion-based questions or discussions isn't a problem. A problem that I experienced is that questions seeking for "best practice" have often been downvoted and closed as tending to attract (only) opinion-based answers, although they could have been improved by clarifying "best" like adding aspects or asking if there are authoritative recommendations like RFCs or PSR specifications.

So, please don't allow opinionated discussions. That would be another useless experiment playing around with Stack Overflow instead of fixing its real problems that have been addressed and discussed for years already.