One Ask Page to Rule Them All

(Addressing the company at large, here, not just OP.)

Have one unified Ask page format across the Stack Exchange network to simplify the code base, making it easier to roll out fixes and improvements in the future

There are differences? Aside from the option to use the horrific Ask Wizard, and some site-specific sidebar help (which probably should be site-specific - and communities should be able to customize it themselves!), I can't find them.

Give all users access to the version of the Ask experience with the most functionality and best performance

Include an improved review step so users can see how their post will really look before submitting it

If you were serious about these points, you would be rolling out the Staging Ground network-wide. Because that is "the version of the Ask experience with the most functionality and best performance". The one where people get to identify and help fix the issues with the question (the only functionality that matters) before it's exposed to the voting system and the risk of premature answers (both of which cause poor performance via social friction).

Give all askers access to Question Assistant

You mean the thing that the community has repeatedly told you is a bad idea that doesn't work well and is clearly yet another excuse to use AI, despite how much embarrassment these poorly thought-out features keep causing the company?

Give all first-time askers access to Staging Ground

Congratulations; you fundamentally misunderstand the one good thing you've done since the acquisition.

The entire point of the Staging Ground is that it works because people don't choose to use it. How many people are going to submit themselves to human pre-screening of a question if they're told it's optional?

Yet when they decline, they'll be subject to screening afterwards, which will very often tell them things they aren't prepared to hear - brusquely and with less useful detail, and more expectation to read the site help (which incidentally is nowhere near as discoverable as it should be - and no this does not mean add another popup somewhere) proactively.

You were told this before.

The reason the Staging Ground works is because it helps set proper expectations up front. Which is something we've complained about, with respect to how the tour and other up-front information is presented, over and over for many years.

If you want to attract site traffic, how about not forcing new and experienced users to play those kinds of social games just so that people understand how the site works?

Hint: you do not actually get to say how the site works. Not if you expect people to volunteer content for it and license it to you for free, anyway.

You were told all of that before, too. Many, many times, in many different ways, for many years.

And, again, there is no reason to hold this feature back from other sites. Especially not if you're talking about unifying codebases.

An upgrade to the Stacks Editor to use in drafting questions (the same version which has recently been made available for drafting answers on Stack Overflow.

You mean, the one we told you we hated, in the very post you link? The one that keeps seeming to get worse with every "upgrade"? The one that will still mess up the escaping and create a pile of undesired backslashes if you play with the editing modes a bunch? The one where you keep getting reminded that you've been ignoring bug reports for years?

A visual change at the “review” step. You will now see an improved preview page, showing what your question will look like once posted.

Users already have to scroll past the live preview to apply tags to their post (which is mandatory) and hit the review button.

A side-by-side preview (such as what Discourse offers) would probably be better. But realistically, people usually don't post badly formatted content by mistake - and if they do it by mistake and are taken to the actual question, they'll fix it. (I've done this many times myself on ancient forums that lack a post preview.) People post badly formatted content because they either don't care, or because it hasn't occurred to them that formatting is possible (or expected).

The wizard was developed to help new askers be more successful on the platform, by guiding them through the asking process.

As we've told you before, the "wizard" did not in any meaningful way resemble actual "wizards" from the days in which it was common for desktop software to work that way; it simply forced a workflow that makes problems harder to fix and encourages unnaturally phrased question bodies. Plus many users misinterpret the prompts (e.g. putting things like "some code to solve the problem" in the "what you were expecting" field).

While we were generally more positive back then, we also told you up front about many problems with the design. The good people at https://ux.stackexchange.com could likely have found more. When you told us "The two sections of the question are merged, and presented for review", I don't know that anyone imagined that this would be literal string concatenation. I certainly expected something smarter than that, and this was (I think) before all the AI talk.

So, yes, it's not surprising that "the one-step Ask experience" - i.e., what you had before - "actually performs better", and this is data that you reasonably should have already had.

• Give all new askers the ability to determine the destination of their post – whether they want it to be posted directly on the main site, or go to Staging Ground for review first. This way, new askers who want to receive support from and collaborate with experienced users can do so, and reviewers can avoid wasting their time reviewing questions that are likely to be abandoned by their authors.

This essentially negates the entire point of the Staging Ground: it helps new askers understanding the standards of SO and get feedback on their question so it can be improved. If the users is unwilling to cooperate with the community, then their question is ditched (or even flagged if needed) before it goes public, therefore saving other users from seeing those bad questions. By letting them choose, I'm afraid most will decide against it to save time or because they're convinced their question is good enough even though it's not.

On the reverse side, I, a "non-new" asker, would sometimes like to use the Staging Ground when I'm not sure how would my question be received and would like some feedback from more experienced users (I actually made a post about this, which currently stands at a score of 0 with 10 upvotes and 10 downvotes).

So, with this change, people who the Staging Ground was made for can (and, in my opinion, will) chose to ignore it, and not all people who'd like to use it can use it. At this point, you might as well remove the Staging Ground.

Give all new askers the ability to determine the destination of their post – whether they want it to be posted directly on the main site, or go to Staging Ground for review first. This way, new askers who want to receive support from and collaborate with experienced users can do so, and reviewers can avoid wasting their time reviewing questions that are likely to be abandoned by their authors.

As someone that has been banging the drum for getting more content sent to the Staging Ground (SG) this is really a kick to the ... This is the complete opposite of the site needs, if I am honest. As I'm sure I've stated somewhere else, this won't save the time of reviewers, it's going to waste time of users who are trying to answer questions and get low quality content.

Stack Overflow have frequently shown in results that questions that are promoted from the SG have a higher "survival rate" than those that didn't, so why do you want the lower survival rate? If a user is going to abandon their question in the SG, they are going to abandon it on the main site; that is worse. This likely results in the question being closed and deleted and potentially puts them onto path of a question ban. It's like Stack Overflow (the company) wants new users to have a poor onboarding experience.

Volume of content that goes into the SG is pretty low now. I, admittedly, rarely check it as 99.9999% of questions from new contributors in tags I frequent go straight to the site, rarely with the wizard, and many end up closed. This is only going to continue...

I've also been an advocate to get users that are question banned sent to the SG as well, as they they can't dig a bigger hole for themselves, however, this feels like it'll be impossible to implement well with the option to bypass it.

Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder what Stack Overflow (the company) has against the SG, as the community and stats both seem to really like it. (With all the implementations the community hates, it almost feels like spite that the one we like is being kicked while it's down.)

Give all first-time askers access to Staging Ground [...] Give all new askers the ability to determine the destination of their post – whether they want it to be posted directly on the main site, or go to Staging Ground for review first.

For those that choose to go through SG, will there still be some kind of cap on how many things can be in staging ground at a given time? (not implying that I want it one way or another. just information-seeking)

Replace the Ask Wizard, which is currently shown to approximately 25% of Stack Overflow askers [...] recent experiments show that the one-step Ask experience actually performs better

So when you say "replace", do you really just mean to get rid of and go back to how it was before?