The response from Stack Exchange is always compressed, [as indicated by Glorfindel](https://stackapps.com/questions/9213/why-doesnt-my-xmlhttprequest-call-work-in-excel/9217#comment18484_9213).

If you inspect the responseHeader "Content-Encoding" after you called `send` like so:

    MsgBox xh.getResponseHeader("Content-Encoding")
You will see `gzip` as an answer.

You can indicate to the server with a RequestHeader Accept-Encoding what encoding/compression you support. Add this line before the `send` method:

    xh.setRequestHeader "Accept-Encoding", "deflate;q=1.0"

and you'll get `deflate` as Content-Encoding response. 

According to the [HTTP specification](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept-Encoding) `identity` is a valid Accept-Encoding and should instruct the server to not use compression. This is where our luck runs out as the Stack Exchange server is non-compliant here. It simply falls back to its preferred default compression: gzip. I think SE should return a 406 Not Acceptable in this case, but *meh*.

Given that we can't tell the server to send a plain response, we have to somehow decompress the received response body. After some searching I found [How to decompress http responses in vba excel?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58026702/how-to-decompress-http-responses-in-vba-excel/58027008) by user [Mavin](https://stackoverflow.com/users/4472542/mavin) which has a complete native VBA module with an Inflate method. 

I'm not sure how recent the Excel is you have but when testing this on Excel 2010 I ran into a problem with the use of `Application.WorksheetFunction.Bitlshift` in the `checkgzip` function which doesn't exist in older Excel versions. I have replaced that line with 

    decompressedsize = size(3) * 2 ^ 32 + size(2) * 2 ^ 16 + size(1) * 2 ^ 8 + size(0)

to achieve the same result.

My whole main program now looks like:

```
Dim xh As Object
Set xh = CreateObject("MSXML2.serverXMLHTTP")

seurl = "https://api.stackexchange.com/2.3/tags?order=desc&sort=popular&site=stackoverflow"
          
xh.Open "GET", seurl, False
xh.setRequestHeader "Accept-Encoding", "gzip;q=1.0"
xh.Send

MsgBox xh.getResponseHeader("Content-Encoding")

Dim httpresponse() As Byte

httpresponse = xh.responseBody

Mod_Inflate64.Inflate httpresponse

MsgBox StrConv(httpresponse, vbUnicode)
```

and when run this is the result:

[![SE json result][1]][1]


  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/un9Lg.png "Json Result, click to zoom"