As someone who has never asked or answered a question on Stack Overflow, I never got a good idea of what's expected of a question, even after looking at so many for work...

As someone that has talked with a few long-time users of Stack Overflow about troubles with a huge amount of incoming questions and not enough people to properly moderate them... I kind of actually like this. All the essentials are still there (log in, sign up, search bar), and it may actually send a better message than the page of active questions.

I jotted down a quick thought in The Tavern a while back:

What I remember from being new... I read a lot of posts. But a site can have a frontpage full of bad questions, but you don't really see it until they're actually closed. (If no one comments, you may see downvotes on stuff that seems totally reasonable and you won't find out why it's bad until it's closed).. so you see a lot of broken windows

It's especially true for visiting the home page of Stack Overflow. You get dropped into this huge wave of new questions and activity, and as a new user you might not be likely to ever see one closed or downvoted enough to make you think twice. Instead, the constant stream of questions sends a message of 'okay, time to drop one like that too!!'.

Right now, there's this big giant search bar at the top, instead of a flood of activity. That new user that remembers Stack Overflow from a previous visit?. They can use the giant search bar. The more experienced user that accidentally got logged out? They can find the log in button exactly where it always was.

The user coming in through a search engine won't see this page at all before they get to their answer. That person that got told about this awesome site with questions and answers? Well, hopefully they got told to use the search function too!

Someone that's already moderate familiar with other parts of the network? They should know about the existence of the search bar already.

And from what I remember, you won't be able to ask a question without having at least an unregistered account. So the sign-up button is also still there, for those who are in a hurry. I think there will be only a very, very small amount of people that will be confused here, thinking Stack Overflow is suddenly behind a paywall.

So, this makes me wonder... what do people without accounts/logged out need with a list of active questions, most of them broken windows anyway? If you're logged in, you can use it to help moderate or find interesting stuff to answer, but if you're logged in then you won't see the page. If you've visited Stack Overflow before and had a tiny bit of experience here getting your answers, you know where the search bar is or to log in before you can ask/answer anything.

Instead of adding some kind of banner or big 'Go to Public Q&A' button that drops new users into the big chaos that's Stack Overflow, tweak the search bar a bit to make clear the one that seeks shall still find free answers (hopefully). And I'm kind of curious to see if Stack Overflow is collecting data on this, if the amount of bad questions by first time users will go down or the amount of searches up, or something...