The other structural thing, but this would be a major change, would be to have upvoting/downvoting on comments and have this affect reputation. If people could loose a fair amount of rep for dismissive (but not blatantly offensive) comments, then you might get less of them. I think such comments can discourage people.

There are reasons why the comment system is the way it is but I definitely think there is room for improvement. I'm glad you brought this up and I would love to hear more opinions about this.

Currently, comments can only be upvoted and this has no impact on reputation at all. One of the reasons for this is to de-emphasize comments. The other is that comments are sorted chronologically and not by votes, except for the selection of comments that appear in the unexpanded view.

Another issue with comments is the much smaller font size used, which may be problematic for some users. I haven't heard complaints, but I do remember a big mayhem because someone misread one letter in one of my comments.

Will Jagy pointed me to this interesting discussion. I think it's an important one to have.

I honestly believe the broad membership of MO doesn't have any particular axes to grind, or none that one is conscious of. This makes it challenging to suggest structural changes.

There are two specific reasons I don't participate except as a passive reader on MO. Neither warrants (or suggests) a structural change.

I personally don't bother posting questions to MO, because the forum doesn't have enough of a critical mass of people working in numerical analysis/scientific computing to get expert answers quickly. This means any question I post would need to have a more detailed background/explanation of technical terms than is efficient for me. In some sense I've contributed to the 'tragedy of the commons' by not participating. The comp sci stack exchange is a better forum for me.

I'm somewhat old-fashioned and am not comfortable with what to me seems aggressive/unprofessional behaviour. The Internet has its own norms and many MO users are comfortable with these. I'm not. I dislike the dismissiveness and troll-like behaviour which occasionally surfaces on MO and this forum.

A specific episode involving a post by Doron Zeilberger (see http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/1091/how-many-integer-partitions-of-a-googol-10100-into-at-most-60-parts/ for a gory history) proved a bit much for my taste.

The moderators do a heroic job, and most of the users are courteous. But some are not. Even though I dislike their commentary, they have a perfect right to it. I cannot advocate a structural change to limit discourse I don't like. Instead, I have simply wandered off to a forum which was more welcoming, both scientifically and culturally, for me.

This post is already very long, for which I apologize! Again, my best wishes to the site, I think it is a valuable resource.

If MO really does have this bias, then it's the wrong place for this discussion.

I stand by my position in the earlier arguments, albeit not their (sometimes) unfortunate choice language.

That is, I see all of these ideas as solutions in search of a problem. We've seen rep-hiding suggestions to practically every single perceived problem on MO.

Also, the idea that a little friendly competition (through rep scores) would make women feel uncomfortable sounds patronizing in extremis, but what do I know.

Well, since we are discussing the "field bias" and, as an analyst, I'm assumed to be a victim here, I'll comment a bit on it.

First of all, what partly amuses and partly irritates me is an occasional outright lack of elementary analytic education in question posters and voters to close alike. The posters can still be excused because, after all, the whole point of asking a question is to discuss something you don't know, but a short comment with a totally wrong answer followed by the suggestion to close the question as too elementary can look REALLY strange.

Second, the fact that the only real answer to any of my mathematical questions that I could accept with satisfaction was given by myself can hardly improve my general opinion of the usefulness of MO as a research tool for me.

Can any of these two problems be solved by tweaking with the software? I doubt that very much. Will people change their behavior and will I get all my questions answered in the near future? Sorry, but I doubt that very much too.

Why am I still here then? Well, what I derive my satisfaction from is my ability to help other people out occasionally, from trying to solve some unusual problems I normally do not deal with in my professional life, and from some metamathematical discussions. I do not think any of those will go away soon, so I'm hooked pretty well for now. Do I feel uncomfortable on MO? Certainly not. If anything, I feel too comfortable here. What I usually do is just to completely ignore all that algebraic geometry and category theory stuff and look at the rest, which is more than enough to keep me busy during my free time. Would I like to see more analysts on MO? Yes, but there is absolutely nothing you can do with the software, reputation points, etc. to attract them like there was absolutely nothing you could do with such things to attract me in the first place. It is the content of the site and the general atmosphere plus my personal attitudes and preferences that matter for my decision whether to enter or not and whether to stay or not, and no single person, be he a moderator, a system administrator, or a user can change them.

Of course, there are things the admins can do to improve my experience on MO. The first one is to make LaTeX fully compatible with the markup features of the site and to introduce something for drawing pictures (if they don't know how or what, let them look at AoPS, where these problems had been solved to everyone's satisfaction long ago). The second one is to disable that infamous captcha for users with sufficiently high reputation. There are some other technical matters as well, but they are less irritating so they can wait.

The only people who can correct the "underrepresentation" of analysts on MO are analysts themselves and they can do it not by telling horror stories like how terrible it is that nobody in their field is here, or how topologists and algebraic geometers dismiss analysis questions as not suitable for the site, or how the typical number of points for a good answer to an analysis question is far below that for a question about categorification of something, but by entering one at a time and starting doing some real work here. I'm happy to be able to say these words from the "victim side" because when I say them from the "offending" or the "neutral" sides, they are never really heard.

fedja, I had a short email exchange with Francois after my long post. The relevant part would be that Francois and Anton are considering various kinds of outreach. As silly as that always sounds, it is in a helpful direction. You have described very well the circle of under-representation within MO, few askers means little for experts to answer means fewer experts mean fewer asking, something like that. Change entirely from within has real limitations in this case.

Also, you make a very cute victim. We could have an MO picture calendar.

The example she gave is of Google+ compared to Flickr. This gives you the option to shut people out, and invite people in. So if enough people shut one individual out, they're effectively ostracized from the community. This is a little more extreme than what MO does with its reputation system and a little more personal, it would require people to make judgements on whether or not to shun an individual or to give them more access to the community. I suspect most people would consider this prohibitive to passive participation on MO.

I really don't like that idea, Michael, because it sounds like that judgment would be highly publication-dependent. It is quite possible for users to have acquired some level of expertise or good judgment in an area where they haven't published at all. (I'm also not sure how that would work for those who are active but prefer to remain anonymous, such as our friend quid.)

I also understood Michael to mean “active on MO in that field”. This can be tracked by the software easily enough using tags of questions and answers posted by the user, as can be seen already on current MO user pages, but I have no idea whether SE 2.0 supports restricting rights based on this information. In any case, I think this is not such a good idea. For one thing, it might mean there are not enough high rep users in less popular fields to do this kind of administration.

Emil identified the key problem with this idea. As in the early days of MO, moderators would have to actively moderate questions from less popular fields until a critical mass of users in that field make their way to 3000 points. Given the number of distinguishable fields, that process would last forever and would be severely taxing on the moderators. As it stands, it's not a realistic proposal.

@Ryan: I'm not sure that Laba meant to suggest that MO emulate the specific features of Google+ mentioned in the page she linked to. As I understood her comment she was using that page simply to demonstrate that, in her words, "there are actually things that site owners and moderators can do to make [a] site more attractive" to a particular audience, not necessarily to suggest specific things that should be done here.