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UPDATE: February 7, 2024

As detailed in the original version of this post, Discussions can now be created on a wider range of topics, using any existing Stack Overflow tag.

To get started with Discussions, click “Discussions” on the left navigation under “Labs.” You can also access Discussions directly here.

Several Help Center articles have been updated or created, to reflect the broader scope of Discussions:

Two notable changes accompany this update. The “Labs” item on the left navigation is now above the “Collectives” item. Additionally, users subject to a question ban will not be able to create a new post in Discussions.

We continue to welcome feedback on this post as the Discussions experiment moves into this expanded iteration.

The Discussions experiment within several collectives has shown potential, with the number of users continuing to engage with Discussions looking promising. There are signs that users are finding value in Discussions and have interest in contributing in this space that has a lower entry barrier than Q&A. For the next phase of the experiment, we will expand the scale of Discussions on Stack Overflow.

In February, Discussions will expand beyond Collectives and be available for all tags on Stack Overflow. It will be possible to create a discussion for any technical topic, allowing us to determine the viability of Discussions as a way to meet user needs. The research behind the development of Discussions was previously outlined in this post.

Details

The primary entry point to view and contribute will be the Discussions list page linked on the left navigation under “Labs.” Collectives that have Discussions enabled will still have a tag-filtered list available within the collective’s navigation, maintaining the view of Discussions that members of those collectives have been using up to this point.

A few other technical notes:

  • Users will not be able to create new tags as part of starting a discussion post.

  • In the rare case that a Discussion post loses all of its tags via automated tag cleanup processes, it will be tagged as “untagged”.

  • The automations involved in tag usage assessment remain Q&A-focused and don’t look at Discussions usage as a factor.

  • The user card displayed for Discussions replies will be the "small" style, showing gold and silver badge counts (this is already used for the initial post that starts a discussion).

  • The separation from Collectives means that the Recognized Member badge will not display for those users in Discussions after these changes are rolled out.

  • Membership in a collective is no longer required to post or reply in Discussions.

Preparing for scale

User guidance and anti-spam prevention measures

Over the past few months, we’ve worked to establish functionality and automations to manage spam in Discussions. Unfortunately before these were released, Discussions was hit with a disruptive spam wave. We have now rolled out several features to prevent it from happening again.

Spam prevention features include:

  • Rate limiting controlling how often users can make Discussions posts and replies 

  • Automated post deletion via flagging (similar to what exists in Q&A). Four flags of either the “spam” or “rude/abusive” types (or one from a moderator) will trigger deletion of a post. 

  • Preventing users who are banned from asking questions from making Discussions posts (this one is still in progress)

In the Discussions experiment, a common issue we've seen is users unclear about the distinctions between a discussion and a question, often creating a discussion that should actually be a question. To begin to address this pattern, we have updated the guidance on the Discussions post creation screen (pictured below) to summarize what a Discussion post should be, and guide users toward asking a question instead, if needed. In a fully realized implementation of Discussions, we can start to imagine scenarios such as:

  • Migrating questions to Discussions, as part of the closure process, when the post is better suited for dialogue and open-ended conversation

  • Routing programming-specific Discussions posts (that really should be questions) over to Staging Ground to help those new contributors refine their post up to Q&A standards

Please note that those scenarios are only ideas at this time, based on what we’re learning. Helping newer users find success (including determining the right place to post) is a focus of continuing development for all parts of the public platform. 

The updated right sidebar from the Discussions post creation screen which displays text and links to help a user determine if Discussions is the correct place to create their post The right sidebar text from the Discussions post creation screen, which includes links to (from top to bottom) the main Discussions Help Center page, the Discussions guidelines, the Questions page, and the Help Center page focused on asking questions.

Discussions moderators

Through March, we’ll also be working to further define what is, for now, an informal role on Stack Overflow – the “Discussions moderator.” With the moderation toolset separate from what’s in place for Q&A, we’re able to extend moderation of Discussions to community members who have volunteered to help “pilot” this role. In addition to assessing and handling flags, these moderators can edit, delete, and undelete Discussions posts. They cannot suspend users or redact content.

Right now, this group consists of Stack Exchange site moderators, Recognized Members from community-managed collectives, and users who’ve been highly engaged with Discussions by offering feedback and putting effort toward curating the content. Future conversations within the community can focus on how users become part of this group and what might be expected from them. 

Discussions moderators are: Abdulla Nilam, Dalija Prasnikar, Laurel, M--, Thomas Markov, Wicket (updated Feb 7 2024). This Help Center article will serve as the official roster for this group and will be updated as needed. As an informal group that is part of the Discussions experiment, Discussions moderators are not yet denoted by badges or other visual role designations. All Stack Overflow site moderators also have access to all Discussions moderation functions, and are welcome to moderate as they see fit, but are not obligated to do so.  

Promising signs

Quantitative and qualitative feedback from the first portion of the Discussions experiment suggests that there is an appetite for both participating in and consuming this type of content.

We are seeing roughly 35% higher weekly retention rate among contributors of Discussions vs Q&A — meaning users that contribute in Discussions are more likely to return and contribute again. There are several factors and caveats to consider as we monitor and compare retention rates: 

  • Q&A is a mature feature with a long-standing user base

  • Q&A content is several orders of magnitude larger than Discussions so we have more data to work with and understand

  • Standards for engaging with Q&A are higher and therefore the natural frequency of usage may be lower (monthly vs weekly or daily)

Comparing retention rates at this stage is only a proxy to understand the potential impact Discussions will have for users on the platform.

On a more qualitative note, it's a good sign that even the lower-quality and "should be a question" posts get genuine engagement, even though many of these will end up being removed if they do not meet the Discussions guidelines. Community members are replying and making a good faith effort to help by offering their perspectives or participating in the conversation. Often the authors of the posts are also interacting in replies. This shows that there is an appetite for this type of lower stakes contribution within the community. Some of those people will stick around because of the experience they’re having in Discussions. And some of those people will feel more confident about participating in Q&A in the future. Some longtime Stack Overflow users will become more active again as they explore new ways to connect, share their knowledge, and learn. This is a potential path for the community to thrive in a new way and to replenish itself. 

By the end of March, we expect to have determined more about the future of Discussions based on usage, retention, content quality, and community feedback.

We will update this post once Discussions as been expanded to all tags.

Are you interested in contributing to Discussions now that more topics are included?

How can new users be guided toward creating a successful Discussions post? How can we encourage the creation of high quality Discussions?

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    "with the number of users continuing to engage with Discussions looking promising" Does this include, or exclude the spam?
    – Fastnlight
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:03
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    "Routing [...] over to Staging Ground" Does that mean SG development is no longer on hold, or is this hypothetically after SG has been hypothetically continued?
    – MisterMiyagi
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:07
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    @Fastnlight It excludes spam
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:09
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    @MisterMiyagi There is no change to the current status of Staging Ground. This is meant as a hypothetical look at how different parts of the platform might feed into one another and help users find success.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:11
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    I mean... discussions has sat at 140-150... "discussions" for a few weeks now, with 2-4 new discussions being posted every day. Does this mean most discussions that are created at this point are being deleted? Seems more work needs to be done on guiding users on what discussions is for.
    – Kevin B
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:16
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    @KevinB More work is indeed needed to guide users. We're making efforts there on the post creation screen (as noted) and when deleting posts, by posting a reply that the author can see after deletion (by following the notification). Action can vary depending on the specific post, but right now we lean more toward deletion, since the most powerful guide is a user seeing the list of posts and using that to understand what belongs there.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:31
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    So basically, an entire feature was created to fill the void that closing as Too Broad created... Content at Stack Overflow can (and historically has) fit this style of format. Why not use what is already available instead of sandboxing any hint of expertise away into these corners of the site. Google accounts for a vast majority of the traffic to this site (aside from Teams which is internal), and it will not get the same benefit of indexing as the other existing pages already have, albeit now diminished. There was a time when Stack Overflow was prevalent in most Google searches... was.
    – Travis J
    Commented Jan 24 at 22:01
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    I must admit, but I fail to see how the "number of users engaging with Discussions looks promising." There are less than 150 Discussion posts in total over the last ~6 months. Though it's not on a large amount of tags, I would have hoped to have seen more. each time I've looked at Discussions recently, it's either been filled with spam, or anything recent had very low quality questions, that shouldn't even be migrated to a question; that doesn't say it's promising engagement to me.
    – Thom A
    Commented Jan 25 at 15:08
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    As I have said before, I don't think the expansion is the greatest idea, especially when Discussions Space is lacking major features. To be fair, I do see improvements being made, but seeing the remaining issues and noticeably lower quality of discussions, I do not change my stance: the experiment should(should have) stay(ed) in its limited scope. Cheers.
    – M--
    Commented Jan 25 at 20:26
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    Discussions? Why don't you call forum a forum? As for "high qulity" it suddenly reminds me that dead SO project, where SO users were supposed to write high quality MSDN. Lets try it again to fail.
    – Sinatr
    Commented Jan 29 at 12:45
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    Each year that goes by I am more confused how this site works anymore. It used to be as simple as you have a question you post it and you get an answer, and it was good. Now we have collectives, discussions, articles, teams, chat, question/answer, insert next random technology. I dont know about you but I looked quickly over the discussions section a few weeks ago and laughed my a** off. It was totally misused and had some very bad information on it. To me discussions is another confusing addition to this site. But who are we to say keep adding more scope.
    – JonH
    Commented Jan 30 at 3:33
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    I guess the company is also not sure how all this is supposed to work. Assuming 99% of useful questions have already been asked and answered, you need something new to keep users from getting bored. Will it be Collectives, Discussions, or Something Else™? No one knows what will work. So they said, "let's throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks".
    – anatolyg
    Commented Jan 31 at 11:22
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    My concern is, that this will end up like FANDOM discussions (formerly Wikia): Before it, there were clear Q&A guidelines, these were essentially watered down by FANDOM's discussions where everything could and therefore would be discussed from then on, causing a ton of extra work, cleaning it up since all the low-quality contributions that were prohibited before and reprimands could be enforced, were now just shifted to the discussions section where people engaged in nonsense debates.
    – shaedrich
    Commented Feb 5 at 7:32
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    Ironic that one of the original motivations found from research was that "chat is not searchable", and the MVP launches with no dedicated text searchbar, and no main searchbar operator.
    – starball
    Commented Feb 11 at 22:20
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    Now that discussion are for everyone, everywhere I had a look and found indeed a discussion worthwhile to read Why do people hate CMake, and why hasn't a "better CMake" taken its place?. I understand why this should be a Q&A (it's kind of subjective, I don't hate CMake and there are more modern build systems (premake, meson, ninja) that might be replacements). But still. This example (kind of reddit style) made me see the value of dicussions. We only ...
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Feb 12 at 12:29

14 Answers 14

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We are seeing roughly 35% higher retention rate among contributors of Discussions vs Q&A — meaning users that contribute in Discussions are more likely to return and contribute again.

I have a hard time believing this can even be compared as the difference in userbase size between the two has to be at least a couple orders of magnitude.

If you're saying that a third of less than 1% became more engaged that doesn't project anything meaningful.

Let me see if I really understand this:

  1. There are 32 discussions for NLP.

  2. There are 38,811 questions on NLP.

So that's a difference of over 3 orders of magnitude, and you saw a 35% increase in those 32 posts (over a 6 month period)? Those are some amazing conclusions being drawn, it kind of defies my ability to grasp the whole concept. Sir, I am awe struck!

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    That section of the post pretty clearly acknowledges that comparing retention rates at this stage is only a proxy. We don't have an apples-to-apples baseline to compare against. The increase in scale is to learn more.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 25 at 20:26
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We are seeing roughly 35% higher retention rate among contributors of Discussions vs Q&A — meaning users that contribute in Discussions are more likely to return and contribute again.

There are 69 discussions in the mobile development collective, created by 64 unique users, 2 of which made 3 discussions each, so you've "retained" 3 users or 4.6%. how does this translate to 35%?

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    note that there were/are other collectives with discussions on. but I'm wondering if they counted the spammers, and wish I could do the data analysis more easily myself.
    – starball
    Commented Jan 25 at 10:58
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    @starball - They must have done, but even if they didn't of those 69, 43 were downvoted, 15 0 votes, 11 upvoted (with only one of the retained users making an upvoted post)... so what good is a higher retention if they're creating posts that aren't even appreciated by those that do take part in discussions
    – Sayse
    Commented Jan 25 at 11:03
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    While one user creating more than one discussion is one form of retention, a user creating a discussion then posting a question or answer should also be valid. But it's still not clear how this was measured. It's also not clear if the opposite is also counted - a user posting a question and then a discussion. If so Users are posting links to questions they want answered in Collective discussions is relevant. Also People blocked from asking questions should be blocked from posting discussions
    – VLAZ
    Commented Jan 25 at 12:37
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    "how does this translate to 35%?" - the post said 35% higher than public Q&A's retention rate, not a 35% retention rate. It implies the retention rate for public Q&A is ~3.41% (because 3.41% * 1.35 = 4.6%), though this assumes a constant 4.6% across the board for the sake of argument. The math is probably correct, but the analysis here is incredibly thin. As you and many others have noted, discussions has very few users, and it's unlikely that the users are representative of the overall user group. I'm not a statistics expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I
    – Zoe - Save the data dump Mod
    Commented Jan 25 at 16:36
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    strongly doubt their numbers and methods would get a pass from someone independent of the company with a background in statistics. This isn't the first time they've made questionable decisions based on numbers sourced with questionable or outright bad methodology
    – Zoe - Save the data dump Mod
    Commented Jan 25 at 16:37
  • @Zoeisonstrike that’s kind of the data I was hoping to get back, it’s all well and good saying a fairly decent percentage but when that translates into 3 users vs an expected 2 that qa would retain for the same 64 then it’s a bit of a weak platform to carry on pushing discussions with
    – Sayse
    Commented Jan 25 at 18:59
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    I updated the post to note that this is measuring weekly retention (i.e. week 2 retention, whether the user who posts or replies comes back within the next 7 days to do another post or reply)
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 26 at 16:54
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    @Berthold - It would be good to see the actual numbers/counts still, the whole metric still just seems to be sugar coating to fulfil a tenuous reason to push this discussion narrative.
    – Sayse
    Commented Jan 27 at 17:32
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    @Sayse That's because that's exactly what it is. They're grasping at whatever straws they can find, and a tiny increase in retention in a tiny userpool looks great to present without details to the public and the shareholders. They're also not going to release the numbers - they never do. That would undermine their dubious claims
    – Zoe - Save the data dump Mod
    Commented Jan 30 at 13:30
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I don't think this part of the sidebar text is quite right:

Do you have a programming-specific question? Go to Stack Overflow Q&A to post your question...

I assume most discussions are likely to be "programming-specific question[s]" (that is, questions that are specific to programming). I think this was probably intended to mean something more like "a specific programming question". Additionally, I think that a link directly to the main-site "What topics can I ask about here?" article would be helpful for informing users what constitutes a specific programming question.

Please feel free to add suggestions for better phrasing in the comments on this answer, as I'm not 100% satisfied with my revision, either.

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    I like that idea, to change the wording to "a specific programming question". We pondered linking to the Help Center article you mentioned, but worried that it might not be clear enough (to a user already at the Discussion post creation page) that it's talking about a different area of the site. /how-to-ask felt more clear with its nuts-and-bolts approach, and it still linked to /on-topic. If Discussions moves forward, we'll probably need to revisit /on-topic's recommendations. I'm eager to see suggestions from anyone else here. Establishing good guidance is always an ongoing effort.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 21:40
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    This change has been made, the wording is now "a specific programming question".
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Feb 6 at 18:02
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    Noting for clarity, I also updated the image in the post to reflect the change.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Feb 7 at 22:01
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We have been told that Discussions is in an MVP status (minimum viable product). The only change since that statement is that two weeks later more controls to combat spam and abuse were rolled out.

Does this roll out to all tags mean Discussions is now considered a fully-fledged product? Or is it still an MVP?

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    Discussions is still very much an experiment, so some might say that always means it's an MVP. It is not considered a fully-fledged product. There are some rough edges, to be sure. We are still in the learning phase right now.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:45
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    I also should note, smaller changes happen all the time. One example is the updated guidance text noted in the post. While not "big" enough of a change to move something out of MVP status or into another version number, such changes can sometimes be very impactful.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:58
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How exactly are the Discussions going to be presented? The post states

The primary entry point to view and contribute will be the Discussions list page linked on the left navigation under “Labs.”

But it is not clear to me whether that is

  • per tag - so, I go to a tag and find Labs there and enter the Discussions for that tag.
  • global - so the menu is there on all common pages (e.g. /questions) and I can go there and see all Discussions for all tags. I suppose similar to /questions or the home page.
  • Something else?
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    Your second bullet is an accurate description. The destination of the item on the left navigation does not change based on what page you're viewing. Tag filtering is available on the Discussions list page. Down the road, I could see us surfacing a link to a tag-filtered view of the list, on a tag page. But there are no plans for that right now.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 19:55
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What methods of entry exist outside of the link to all discussions? I've noticed several discussions where it seems like the user who opened it intended to instead edit their question. Are users directly invited to open discussions on their own questions? Are they given reasons why they should do so, if that's what is happening? Are users of discussions currently provided any form of guidance similar to what is proposed?

The entry-points I can see currently as not a collective member are the left menu that I can't easily access, and the right side bar if the question is tagged for a collective that currently supports discussions:

enter image description here

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    Hopefully, as discussions begin to take further shape, we’ll have a more clear picture of what is a good discussion post. I’m wondering if at least some of the downvotes on discussions are “this is a bad SO question” downvotes instead of “this is a bad discussion” downvotes. Given the distinct form and function of discussions, we’d expect motivations for voting one or way or another to differ as well.
    – Thomas Markov
    Commented Jan 24 at 20:28
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    Most of the ones i've downvoted are lazy SO questions that are instead posted to discussions rather than being properly written up for Q&A. If only we had a stagi....
    – Kevin B
    Commented Jan 24 at 20:35
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    @KevinB Great questions. As Thomas observed, the meaning of votes in Discussions is still hazy. We can probably assume that upvote = "I like this". Many downvotes may be users treating the post like they would a question and applying those norms and standards, even if those shouldn't necessarily apply. The scores are one signal among many to look at.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 20:51
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    @KevinB The entry points are within the five collectives and the link on the left navigation. We are not prompting/suggesting Discussions during the question creation flow. We've purposely steered clear of crossing into Q&A because, as you suggest, additional guidance would be needed to help users know what to do. It's hard to determine the route some of the users took in order to create their Discussions posts.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 21:00
  • That and one of the sidebar collective widget variations
    – Kevin B
    Commented Jan 24 at 21:19
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    @KevinB That experiment has concluded.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 21:27
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    I mean this box: i.sstatic.net/bsSdW.png that links to the discussions for the collective that matches a tag on the question.
    – Kevin B
    Commented Jan 24 at 21:30
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    Good call-out, I can confirm that link will remain for collectives that will have the tag-filtered Discussions list in on their navigation.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 21:57
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    @KevinB Regarding the left menu, the Labs section will be moving to be above the Collectives section, as part of this upcoming update. So potentially easier for some to access, though that nav's configuration can vary.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 24 at 22:01
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    sorry, i just meant I can't be bothered to unblock the left menu to take a screenshot, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it is accessible there. i just use a bookmark since there's no keybind for it
    – Kevin B
    Commented Jan 24 at 22:03
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Rate limiting controlling how often users can make Discussions posts and replies

I'm once again asking how exactly this works. So The Complete Rate-Limiting Guide can be updated.

In the rare case that a Discussion post loses all of its tags via automated tag cleanup processes, it will be tagged as “untagged”.

Kind of off-topic, but if a tag like goes to zero questions and gets deleted, will its usage guidance be gone the next time it's created? I wrote a basic one, but I'm curious whether it'd survive if the tag dies and comes back. My attempt at a tag wiki / usage guidance:

Do not use this tag. This is a system placeholder used if the tags a post is using are removed/destroyed by a system tag removal. Non-locked, on-topic posts with this tag should be edited to be given an appropriate tag.

Routing programming-specific Discussions posts (that really should be questions) over to Staging Ground

Nice idea. So when is work on Staging Ground continuing?

Will discussion flags start counting toward flag stats and flagging bans? Currently, to my knowledge, they do not.

Right now, this group consists of Stack Exchange site moderators, Recognized Members from community-managed collectives, and users who’ve been highly engaged with Discussions by offering feedback and putting effort toward curating the content

What training material is given to recognized members so they know how to moderate discussions and operate the moderator tooling?

What exactly do you mean by "curating the content"? Last I checked, discussions are not editable. And what else is there to do to "curate" other than flagging?

We are seeing roughly 35% higher retention rate among contributors of Discussions vs Q&A

Did you count the spammers? I'm sure many of them posted multiple times (and that they'd love to come back again).

This shows that there is an appetite for this type of lower stakes contribution within the community

My question is whether the average content here is short-term-value or long-term-value

How can new users be guided toward creating a successful Discussions post?

Put the instructions in normal size font at the top of the posting page instead of in small font in the sidebar.

Better yet, put the button to begin drafting a discussion post solely at the bottom of the instructions help center page, and make the current "Start Discussion" button instead link to the help center page.

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    Regarding rate limits, your original request has been on my to-do list. Just wanted some time to make sure the current settings were working well (they are) and also figure out where to add this on that page. We'll get to it.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 25 at 0:27
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    Regarding flags counting toward flag stats and flagging bans, we don't plan to have that as part of the experiment. There's no question that this would be useful, but probably not impactful enough (for the experiment) to justify the risk and effort of integrating a new content type into that system.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 25 at 0:31
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    Regarding training material, we've documented the tooling pretty well, and it's not especially complicated. A primary part of the ongoing learning is the gray areas surfaced by "should be a question" flags and thinking about ways (and eventually scalable ways) to help those post authors be successful. That's something we're all figuring out together, and where diversity of experience is beneficial.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 25 at 0:36
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    Curating is flagging, and helpful use of the "something else" text field when doing that. It's also voting, replying on posts (including encouraging authors to improve their posts) and being engaged in the conversations about Discussions here on Meta and elsewhere, talking about what we're seeing and not seeing as time goes on.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 25 at 0:40
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    Regarding short-term-value or long-term-value, that remains to be seen, but ultimately it will probably be a mix.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 25 at 0:43
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    Not having automatic flag bans will give us all some leeway as we figure out what the rules for Discussions and flagging should be. There are few enough flaggers (and not too many people handling those flags) right now that I think it would be pretty obvious if someone was raising flags in bad faith, and they could be dealt with manually (eg ask someone to send a mod message or suspension). I'm not really a fan of flag bans to begin with, but that's a different conversation.
    – Laurel
    Commented Jan 25 at 14:29
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What flag should we use for discussions that are expressly disallowed by the guidelines? other?

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    Yes, adding context as needed in the text field.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Feb 7 at 22:07
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What is the intended difference between "Discussions" and "Chat". Is it the Chat has chat-rooms and Discussions have collectives?

A better idea might be to make chat accessible to users that wish to discuss a technical issue.

PS. I have been a member for 8 1/2 years and while having visited "chat" on several occasions never found out anything meaningful about how it was supposed to be used. Something about the lack of user information which may have been corrected since.

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    My bet is on that Discussions will replace Chat. After all Chat has little purpose except for those that organize resistance to plans of the company.
    – rene
    Commented Jan 29 at 6:37
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    This answer from August explains some of the differences we see between chat and Discussions.
    – Sasha StaffMod
    Commented Jan 29 at 15:03
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    @Sasha one easy way to define SO's discussions is that they're like GitHub's discussions tab that's been available since early 2022.
    – bad_coder
    Commented Jan 29 at 16:44
  • So, like Uber but for budgerigars?
    – tripleee
    Commented Mar 18 at 14:26
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How should duplicates be handled? I have just answered in a discussion with a link to a twelve-year-old question asking exact the same that was fairly easy to find. That question is not so good, but the answers are extremely well-founded. So is there/will there be a way to flag duplicates?

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    if it's a duplicate of a Q&A, isn't it a question that "should be ask as a question?"
    – Kevin B
    Commented Feb 9 at 15:35
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    If it's a duplicate of an existing Question than you can flag it as "should be a question". Discussions can be similar to or reference Questions, but it should be expanding on it in some way and starting a conversation about it, not just restating the same ask. If it is a duplicate of another Discussion post you can flag it as "something else" and add that context in the text field, including a url to the post that is duplicated.
    – Sasha StaffMod
    Commented Feb 9 at 16:02
4

Two technical issues that I immediately noticed:

  1. Underscores break formatting. Even within code backticks, you can't type a snake case identifier without it getting turned into italics.
  2. The editor hyphenates words and inserts line breaks on syllable boundaries. This is completely uncalled-for outside of dead tree media. I find it readable when displayed but jarring when typing.
3
  • 1
    hmm. I wonder what markdown renderer is being used in there... angle brackets are treated as markup inside backtick-delimited inline code.
    – starball
    Commented Feb 12 at 2:04
  • 3
    Nice, the bug for point 1 has been there since more than a year and yet we are pushing the new editor in more and more places.
    – Abdul Aziz Barkat
    Commented Feb 12 at 9:32
  • 1
    @AbdulAzizBarkat Wow. Why does the new editor even exist? Talk about a waste of developer effort.
    – Kevin Krumwiede
    Commented Feb 12 at 15:26
1

Currently the right column is entirely empty (maybe there's some stuff I've adblocked there? dunno.) but wouldn't it make sense to keep the guidelines box visible on the right so that it's accessible not only on creating a new discussion, but also when replying to one?

-6

This is very exciting. A vast amount of knowledge has been rejected and lost by closing valuable Q&As as "opinion-based." I hope that as Discussions gains traction, it will be more closely integrated with Q&A. It would be great if there were a way to migrate "opinion-based" Q&As into Discussions and completely remove "opinion-based" as a close reason.

4
  • 2
    "It would be great if there were a way to migrate "opinion-based" Q&As into Discussions and completely remove "opinion-based" as a close reason." You could search for highest scored, closed as opinion-based Q&A and repost them as discussion after maybe a bit of improvement. And completely remove "opinion-based" wouldn't make sense because they still should not be Q&A. Some kind of auto-convert to discussion maybe. The same might work for "recommendations" and potentially other close reasons like too broad (not sure).
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Feb 12 at 12:40
  • 4
    You will need a good filter to fish anything of value out of Discussions. Unless you want to use 24 hours per day doing it manually.
    – Peter Mortensen
    Commented Feb 13 at 17:02
  • 1
    @PeterMortensen The amount of interesting new content on Discussions has already surpassed the main site.
    – Kevin Krumwiede
    Commented Feb 13 at 17:36
  • 4
    Nothing indicates interesting content as much as a half dozen or more downvotes, or most discussions that get posted being deleted.
    – Kevin B
    Commented Feb 13 at 17:42
-8

I was going to post (quite independently of this 'discussions' feature) that in view of its declining usefulness and popularity SO should reverse its terrible 'great split' decision of years ago; the decision that banned 'opinion based ' questions. That was a dumb idea at the time, that looks even worse now.

Us SO vets remember when you could post things like C++ book recommendations? Best library for sending email from C#?.... Without getting that immediately shut down. Some of the all time top voted questions were like that... now banned.

Maybe discussions will save SO. But why not try changing the rules back?

2
  • 7
    "Best library for sending email from c#?.... Without getting that immediately shut down." I don't know what point you think you're making here. The historic recommendation questions have, over the years, turned into honeypot for spam. Each one of them which is still open is a ticking spam bomb. I don't see why you think it's beneficial to have more of those. "Some of the all time top voted questions were like that... now banned." and many, many, many that aren't. The spammable ones are usually something with a sum score of 10 across the Q&A. And low views. Not that valuable overall.
    – VLAZ
    Commented Feb 14 at 16:47
  • 1
    The only "declining usefulness" of SO is that it's getting more and more garbage questions that make it hard to find the good ones. Allowing even more garbage questions isn't going to fix that.
    – John Montgomery
    Commented Mar 18 at 17:42

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