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Would there ever be A / B testing?
Would there ever be a scenario where an experimental feature is tried out with a smaller cohort of users in order to observe the resulting dynamics and compare it to the alternative?
I mean more than just a feature testing playground (https://meta.codidact.com/posts/288826/288833).
I mean, in case people want to see what the site would be like with some change in design, that they have the option to sort of “fork” or branch off to see it, so that we don’t always have to agree as a majority what features the site can and cannot try out, sort of.
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Not in the forseeable future. Building a system to A-B test new features takes time, as does the analysis afterwards. While we're still a small team, it's more effective for us to collect feedback via Meta, make changes, and continue to collect feedback afterwards. This lets us make changes quickly without needing to go through a major process, while still being able to refine what we've done later if necessary.
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ArtOfCode's answer covers true A/B testing, which involves a randomised experiment and the system to support it.
However, the question sounds as if it is also considering the ability for individual users to choose how to see the site:
... in case people want to see what the site would be like with some change in design ...
This could potentially take much less developer support than full A/B testing, as there is no random selection of which users to show the new design, especially if there is no record kept of how users interacted with it.
If the change being considered is solely a front end change (no change to the code running on the server, just changing what the browser displays to the user) then users are free to experiment with userscripts, which require no developer support.
For example, there is not yet developer support for implementing and maintaining a dark mode, but a couple of people (one of them me) have posted scripts that users can use to modify the colour scheme in the meantime.
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