> What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.
I guess a whole lot of the people who could have helped you left long ago because of your fellow moderators. A reasonable first step would be by adjusting the attitude.
Maybe part of the problem is we just don't see all those "primarily opinion based" and "ugly discussions" questions that seems to be oh such a serious problem.
We definitely see a whole lot of the most useful questions closed, often for technicalities. It doesn't exactly encourage participation, does it?
HN somehow seems to be better at dealing with the problems without scaring good community members away. Of course HN has issues as well but so far the moderation team is doing a very good job of keeping politics and promotion away while leaving to the broader community to vote if something is interesting or not.
The problem with discussion boards is that it is absolutely painful to dig through a post until you stumble on a solution, and even then, you're in no way sure it's a good solution.
They need to harness that opinion/discussion/off-topic-subject energy in a way that doesn't work against their strategy. I think they are losing a lot of opportunity along the way.
I totally agree. This manifests itself in the worst way at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/. Or at least it did when I bothered with that site at all.
Or maybe, as I have already answered ircmaxell, Stack Overflow could raise the bar for asking questions ever so slightly from being the one thing you can do without rep?
If torrents of new users asking stupid questions are the biggest problem on the site this seems like a first obvious step.
I think that if you do what you propose, the site will just freeze in terms of user base.
It just would not be worth any new users time, especially given that when a user wants a question answered, it tends be slightly time sensitive.
One can easily overcome that with ten skillful edits, 2 upvotes (or 1 upvote and an accept) on an answer, or 4 upvotes on a question (20 rep is required for chat).
It's fairly easy for an individual to get into the chat, if they want.
That barrier does keep spammers from flooding the chat, though. And if you consider it an interview process, that's what the earning of reputation points accomplishes, and I'd argue it does so rather elegantly.