I mean... I just want it to do what it does currently. Being the page you reach when you click the logo, it's the most reachable page on the site and one I use as a launching point for finding questions I want to investigate.

This is a Q&A site, there's no content other than Q&A that should be prominently displayed on the homepage. All of the other content types that have been added to the network in the past 3-4 years run counter to that.

I never use the front page because it is bad at giving me relevant results.

When I need something I have at my disposal:

• Custom filters
• Search
• Tags

To find what I am actually interested in. Not what the front page thinks I might be interested in.

I flipped over to the front page to see if it is any different and I counted how many questions were in any way relevant to me (based on tags) vs how many were not. The result was 48 relevant vs 50 irrelevant (yes, the front page showed me 98 questions total). No exaggeration at all - half the relevant questions were at the very end. I mean literally the last 24 questions on the page managed to bring the ratio to just below 50/50. If I were not there to count the occurrences, I would have quit scrolling down by the time I hit the big chunk of relevant questions.

A reason I might reconsider using the front page would be if there were widgets that can show stats or other things. Here are some example widgets:

• Custom filter widget showing few items from a filter. I have a few custom filters I watch for new content - right now, I keep a tab for each. If I could see at a glance the changes, that would be a lot more useful.
• Some statistics for various stuff. I personally might be interested in number of pending anonymous edits. There are probably other numbers that would people would find useful.
• Vanity/showcase widgets. I am not too interested but I can see use of people seeing a reputation graph or maybe even badge tracker(s), so they know what to focus on.

If the front page is customisable with different widgets one can pin, it can start off with some defaults. Like maybe just a widget that mimics the current functionality and shows "interesting". Then users would be able to add/remove/change these.

I've never clicked on it before but apparently theres a button on the side just to tell me that something no longer exists. So maybe a cleanup to only show things that do exist

What makes a homepage useful for logged-in users

Ways people participate on Stack Overflow primarily include:

1. Reading/searching for questions/answers to their problems
2. Asking/answering questions

Once they are here and established, they may also participate heavily in:

3. Curation of existing questions/answers via edits, 10k tools, or review queues
4. Participation in chat rooms

So I think optimizing the logged-in user homepage to each of those, in order, would be ideal. It is already optimized in large part for #1 and #2, which is good, and no small part of why Stack Overflow managed to become a top 50 visited site in the world years ago (not sure if it is still top 50...).

Any changes to the homepage should be very careful not to ruin or break optimizations for #1 or #2. That being said, optimizing a bit more for #3 and #4 (literally just adding a direct link to chat to the sidebar would be a huge improvement over the last ~10 years of the site).

For one Stack Overflow power user data point, here's what my homepage looks like, below. I generally utilize the functions in the top bar the most, and then the options shown in the sidebar second most. I only click elsewhere when something catches my eye (like a question that catches my attention or a Meta post announcement that seems interesting/relevant)-- what is use most (top 90% of my clicks) is circled in red.

A large part of this is because it is more or less unchanging on top of being relevant to why I'm here, so I can rely on it as a quick way to get to where I want to go; whether the content outside of the circled areas is relevant or useful is a toss-up literally every time, so it's not so much use to me, especially when there are ample links nearby to search for specific questions or filter for specific types of questions.

Notice also the content I have hidden from view, in particular... that means I find it useless and distracting from the purpose of Stack Overflow. I have also reordered the remaining sidebar content via user styles so that it better fits what I believe to be an order of importance/relevance for users.

What makes a homepage useful

I use the homepage as an entry point just because it has the bare domain as URL. Its usefulness is being 1 or 2 clicks away from what I want and I also enjoy the occasional random post.

The most relevant functionality the homepage offered for frequent readers hasn't been working since late 2022 - the blue activity indicator for new posts after you click one of your custom filters. So that's when it stopped making sense for me to visit the homepage to keep up with new posts.

For me the lack of the blue dot killed two of the items you list:

• Encouraging active participation

I no longer felt encouraged to read up on my custom filters because most of the times I couldn't remember where I had left off on my reading. That in turn lowered my participation because I was less likely to take interest in something.

• Delivering relevant content to users

Since I've gone through the trouble of configuring 1-click custom filters for the techs I follow or am learning, the lack of having new posts marked just isn't delivering them to me. Instead when I open one of the listings I'm left wondering which posts I've previously read or not... So that's one less delivery to me and instead each click became a memory strain.

A few things come to mind. First of all, let me define how I personally use Stack Overflow: sparingly. I don't want to spend all my time on Stack Overflow so I pick moments in the day. Of course I will go there when I'm searching for information or solutions to problems through a web search engine, but when I deliberately navigate to the site it is as a break from work to get my mind off of things. I go to meta to see what new storm is brewing, I go to the main site to find a question to answer. One question. I would be so happy if I could achieve just that. I am really not going to actively do curation/reviewing, I only do that as I naturally stumble onto content.

So those are two key factors: time constraint and finding one question to answer. Just one! Not too much to ask for, right?

Unfortunately the home page right now is not useful to me because there is just too much noise to wade through. I don't find questions that deserve answering, I find questions which are completely out of scope or either off-topic or duplicates. But I don't see the latter as a problem of the home page, that is more a problem for the staging ground. I do hope focus is not dropped from making that feature the best it can be because pretty much everything else depends on it. There is no amount of improvement that can be done to the home page to make it work if the incoming stream of content is Stack Overflow-incompatible.

That being said.

Why do I need to ignore tags?

I need the tag ignore function to be gone. It doesn't work anyway as the feed still fills up with questions I have no vested interest in. What do you expect me to do, put 2000 tags in the ignore list? No, it should be rather blunt; if I don't put Ruby or Python on my watched tags list, I should get no questions related to them in my feed.

I - do - not use Stack Overflow to "discover new interests", it's just not that kind of site. I watch specific Youtube channels for that purpose and other than that I have my colleagues to from time to time tell me I'm dumb for having never used XYZ before. So filter and filter hard.

This includes collectives, by the way.

Prominently display the status of your own recent questions and answers

Right now to see how your (recent) questions and answers are doing, you need to go to your user CP. It is so important that people keep an eye on how their content is doing, to respond to any comments and to be aware of downvotes and/or close votes being applied in a timely manner. But for some reason it is pretty well hidden away and what is out of sight is also out of mind. Put it front and centre - in the home page.

Put stuff in the top menu in there as normal links

Stack Overflow likes its ambiguous icons. I don't. It has two hamburger menus in the top bar and the right one looks like a chat bubble. People can't even find the link to log out. And then there is the fact that important links are hidden away in that top bar, but also in the bottom bar which most of the time is not even visible on screen until you scroll.

So put the most important links in the home page, with readable text. I would personally like:

• Help (maybe even have the help search right there?)
• FAQ
• Ask a Question About the Site (AKA "Meta")
• Contact Us
• User CP
• Review Queues
• Staging Ground
• Log out

Having a need to use the top bar should be the exception to the rule.

Make it a dashboard

All of that would of course require a complete make over because there just isn't space to fit any of that with all the pretty pointless information the home page currently shows (well not specifically the home page, the entire site does it). Does anyone ever actually look at the "recent tags" or collectives? Aren't the tags you want to have on your watch list something you'd interact with only from time to time? Do I really care that people are chatting when I'm not looking at chat.stackoverflow.com?

Responsive design is technology we now have. The home page at least should apply it. Give more space for things on screen, give the ability to toggle panels on and off.

The biggest feat of the homepage in its current form is that it is a page with a well-known URL that still contains links or buttons to most of the things I actually want to do. That being said, I don't find most of its current content (especially the new questions) particularly useful to me.

I don't think I'm the only person that is mostly knowledgeable in a well-established language and technology (C# and WPF). This leads to a situation the current homepage does not address well:

1. All questions inside my domain that I could comfortably answer have either been answered years ago, or are duplicates of said questions.
2. All questions inside my domain that haven't been answered aren't answered because they concern a very involved or specific part of the domain, that I'm no expert in either.
3. All other questions are outside of my domain and knowledge.

In other words, regarding what I can cover with my current knowledge, I feel like Stack Overflow is "done" and participation in the "A" part of "Q&A" is not really an option for me.

On the other hand, all content promoted on the homepage that should invite me to participate is about technologies that I have neither knowledge nor interest in, e.g. the 1475th JavaScript library that will disappear into irrelevance in a year or two, or technologies related to cloud, distributed computing, machine learning and co.

This also means I cannot really participate in the curation of queues either, because 99% of the time I am confronted with content that is foreign to me. I can't tell if a new question or answer is plausible or nonsense or a duplicate, because I have no knowledge about the topic. But looking at questions ad infinitum where 99% of the time I click "Skip" anyway is not fulfilling and feels like a waste of time, so I don't do it.

The main reason I would come to the site is

• to ask a question myself - to which nothing of the homepage content is contributing in a meaningful way, or
• to look at interaction to my earlier content (comments, answers, upvotes), which is available from the quick access - but almost any stackoverflow.com URL would serve this purpose.

If I could redesign the homepage, I'd make it more a dashboard-style with a few big areas to click on to get me where I want to go. And if one of that buttons took me to a list of questions, those would have to be filtered to "must contain at least 1 of the watched tags and must not contain any of the ignored tags", because the current signal to noise ratio of the question list is 1 relevant question within 50 questions (and the "relevant" thing to do being "can be closed as duplicate", which I do not find appealing or motivating search for or to do).

The chat feature could be more prominently displayed to increase activity there. Right now, the feature is kind of hidden away and not many know about it.

Chats mainly fill two purposes:

• Soak up opinion-based questions, lengthy discussions and off-topic questions instead of them ending up in the main Q&A.
• Site or tag moderation of the main Q&A, including space to live for the various moderation bots.

My point here is that chats are already part of the primary Q&A product and moderation in particular would struggle significantly without chats. So increased activity there ought to increase the quality of the Q&A.

The only disadvantage of giving chat more exposure is that diamond moderators are supposed to be chat moderators as well, so increasing chat activity might increase their workload in an area which mods might regard as a secondary priority to keep tidy.

But chat moderation seems like something we could also trust active veteran users with. At least things like edit/delete and a temporary user suspension (in hours not days).

As a frequent (and high rep) user of a corporate Stack Overflow for Teams, I'd like to recommend taking a look at the homepage there and request not doing any of that here.

The homepages of Stack Overflow and other stacks are great in comparison. They focus on new question activity -- my #1 most important thing to see. Not having question activity on the homepage in Stack Overflow for Teams makes it harder for me to get my coworkers engaged. The "Trending this month", "Your Impact", and everything else on the Teams homepage is useless and blocks real engagement. Please don't bring those here.

The utility of a homepage is to reduce clicks and loading.

A homepage is simply a more concise or accessible path towards existing content or features, but it will have nothing in and of itself (unless features are inlined, which is perhaps beyond the scope of this current approach, if I am wrong let me know).

As a result of click or nav reduction, I think the homepage would best be served if it focused on my recent activity, on predefined shortcuts, included something that is usually of interest to me, or something that is broadly applicable to the community at large.

If we were using AI, it would be nice if AI could tell me how my recent week went, with regards to post scores and activity.

If I'm not coming here from Google, it's either to review my own activity or feedback (trophy and inbox dropdowns work fine), or check out new questions from tag/s I'm following (filters work fine), so the homepage is already doing what I want it to do.

I ignore the Home page. It serves no purpose to me. It merely lists arbitrary questions, ranked in various ways that I don't care about.

The Home page is for new users only. Those are people who don't know the site, don't know what to get out of it, who need to explore it first. The Home page is exposition.

I think no regular user has a use for it. Those users come here with a specific goal in mind. I can see a few major goals people have. A single page can't serve all those goals.

• People wanting to ask their question? They'll click the "Ask Question" button and ignore that list of random questions.

• People wanting to search for existing solutions? They'll use the search box. Or a search engine linked them to a specific question directly.

• People looking to spend some time solving puzzles they're good at? They'll have a set of watched tags, and they'll want those questions. I have that search bookmarked in my browser. Why? Because the Questions page is indistinguishable from the Main page, except for the abstract with every question. It does not show filtered results initially. You have to enable that filter every time (or have it bookmarked), and then you have to hide that dialog to get a clean view of the puzzles (again circumvented with a bookmark where edited=true is removed from the URL).

I don't see how "make the Home page useful for regulars" is an achievable goal, or a sensible goal. It is not for regulars.

SO is a big bazaar. I care about the piece of it that I have expertise in, not the whole thing. I think most users come here with very specific goals.

A Home page can at best be like a fountain or monument in the middle of the market, a landmark. A landmark serves no on-topic purpose. It's something meta, e.g. it facilitates socializing ("meet me at the fountain"). We don't do "social" here.

If you wanted to make the Home page more useful to some users, you could just replace it by ChatGPT. Catch all those first time askers. Let the AI catch all their simple beginner issues. The ideal outcome would be that the asker gets their problems solved without any answerer having to deal with these problems. It benefits both sides. The asker gets an infinitely patient tutor, can no longer complain that we're sticklers for protocol at best. The answerer is freed from having to deal with the ever same questions that take five seconds of googling.

If you wanted to reach for the stars, you'd interpose AI between those two camps. Let AI learn how each side wants to be talked to. I don't mean throw verbose generic ChatGPT-written questions at answerers. We'll reach for the pitchforks. I hope you get what I mean.

New Users

In short, the homepage for new users should be an improved version of the site tour.

The homepage should help new users learn what the "question and answer" site is and how to perform the most basic tasks:

1. Understand the site scope and the most basic description of how to find good questions and answers:
   • Question and Answers score.
   • Questions page, paging and sort options.
   • Question page, answer sort options.
   • Tags including tag wikis.
   • Search
2. Introduce new users to the most essential privileges
   • The privileges for new users:
     • Ask and answer questions, including Staging Ground.
     • Comment on their posts and why they can't comment on any post yet.
     • Accept one answer to each of their questions.
     • Suggest edits
     • Notifications / Inbox
3. Introduce new users to the privilege system:
   • Stack Overflow user reputation.
   • Badges.
   • Tag Badges.
4. Introduce new users to Meta and Chat (including the required reputation).
5. Showcase of other features like follow posts, Saves, etc.

Once a "new user" makes their first question, explain flags, review and vote to close.

Once a "new user" becomes an assiduous user, introduce them to Saved Filters, Watch Tags, and other features for assiduous users.

Once the "new user" earns their first reputation points, introduce them to the user profile, starting with

• Track reputation and privileges earned.
• Track tag scores
• How to get their flair

Once the "new user" earns privileges, explain the most recently earned privilege.

To me (a user who mostly answers questions), the homepage works fine already, I don't see the need for any drastic changes.

• I use it to navigate to my custom filters and favorite tags.

• Sometimes I see an interesting question directly on the homepage (maybe it has one of my favorite tags and thus a highlighted background, but not necessarily).

• Sometimes I look at the featured Meta posts in the 'community bulletin' box.

• Sometimes I look at the hot network questions.

I also don't see an obvious potential for streamlining it (other than hiding the left sidebar, which I already disabled in the settings).

Personally, when I come on Stack Overflow, I want to check my notification to see comments on my post, or answer I received.

That could be nice if we have a quick summary on top of the homepage about all update on Q&A we are following. One advantage of this, is to keep the Q&A as main information of the homepage (as requested by the actual most upvoted answer by Kevin B).

Suggestion (made in few minutes) :

We could also imagine having a summary of reputation changes with like "x upvoted post, y accepted answer".

New users and users that only search, but never engaged need to be encouraged, and nudged to participate in the community. I have had many colleagues that only look for answers, and never bothered to create an account and actually engage in the site.

I tried to persuade one of my friends (and coworker) to actively participate, and he ended up getting fed up. I would encourage the developers of SO to create a new account for themselves and try to experience the new user experience for themselves. Many of the beginner questions have already been asked and answered, and if you are truly a beginner and don't know what terms to search for, SO is not very welcoming, to be honest.

Regarding retaining existing users, I would imagine that some intelligent highlights might be interesting. For instance: based on the latest searches and questions, potentially show some "potentially interesting questions".

Personally, my experience is that either I extrapolate answers from some searches, or end up asking questions that are so niche that the chance of other developers having a solution is not always a given.

I have two primary goals for the home page:

1. I want it to be easy to ask a new question.

2. I want it to be easy to find a list of questions that I might be interested in answering, and might be able to answer.

Right now, the existing home page does a great job at #1, and a terrible job at #2.

This seems like an outstanding opportunity for AI/ML to help identify questions that I might be able to answer and I might be interested in answering. It seems like it might not be too hard to build a classifier, based on questions I have answered in the past, to predict which questions I might be interested in answering in the future.

Right now the site has some tools to support that goal (e.g., tags, watched tags, search, etc.), but those tools have many limitations and haven't changed in over a decade. Rather than trying to make small incremental polishing improvements on those existing tools, I encourage you to think ambitiously about how you could make a major change in the relevance of the questions that are displayed on the home page, so that they are much more likely to be questions that I'm interested in answering and able to answer.

One thing I haven't read yet, is the fact that Stack Overflow is just one of the many Stack Exchange sites:

• Stack Overflow deals with programming questions
• Superuser with general computer usage questions
• Software Engineering about design and architecture, ...

Therefore, I would like to emphasise, next to encouraging active participation, on encouraging well aimed active participation.