This reminds me of an old talk radio adage: don't mistake callers for listeners. The people who call into a radio show represent a fraction of the audience, and are often the most extreme, polemic, loose hinged segment of that audience. And most people don't call.

In the SO world, I'm definitely a "listener." I almost always wind up on the site from Google, and it usually does a pretty good job. I don't think I've ever navigated around the site itself, so the "game-ification" or whatever was completely foreign.

I will say that there have been numerous times where there are pretty good subjective or opinion based discussions (which language is better for x?) that get "closed as non constructive." I can understand why they would want to avoid flame wars, but almost always the discussions were, ironically, very constructive, nor could I find the same type of discussion anywhere else.