He then conceded that that there maybe a need for 'undersexed 20-somethings like Harry' who sit in front of the computer all day (or some phrase to that effect; I don't think it was "unsexed" as JBL says) to police the place so the number of big list questions don't get out of hand.

@Scott: bad Scott no cookie. The non sequitur response is a bit funny on hindsight. The insult not so much.

I would really strongly discourage deleting a question after it's been answered. People put real work into those answers, so they should be kept. You will just have to come up with a nice technical question as penance.

But seriously: it's clear that a lot of site users like "big list" questions, and honestly, I've learned some cool things from reading the answers to some of them. They annoy me from time to time, but I think on the whole, they're a net positive for the site.

One possibility would be to habitually close any question that gets more than X answers, say X=30. I very much doubt that anyone ever reads the tail end of the answers -- there's some evidence for this in that late answers to questions with very many answers rarely get many votes. It would be nice to be able to quantify this if we had the database dump.

This would solve the problem of "big-lists" cluttering up the front page for weeks.

if you'd really like it closed or deleted, I can do that. I don't think it's necessary or even best, however. As you can see, there is some resistance in the community against too frequent big-list questions, and stronger resistance against discussion questions. At this point in time, I don't think there's actually much of a problem, and we have a good mix of questions. The thing to be aware of, however, is that if this mix changed much, the moderators (I think) have a fairly strong consensus that we should limit the rate of such questions.

"Discussion" questions are pretty much verboten: there might not be a better place for them, but they still don't belong on mathoverflow. Your question didn't particularly set off my "discussion" radar.

I'd encourage you to try to stick to your goal of staying focused on only the mathematics for a while. In this case, I wouldn't have minded if you'd just posted a link to meta at the very beginning. I've deleted the comment thread between you and Steve (sorry for not asking permission, Steve) and replaced it with a short comment explaining what the link to meta is for, which I think should be a good model for you if you have future complaints about posts: a short sentence explaining the subject matter of the discussion behind a link to meta. Ideal would be if it wasn't even clear which side of the discussion you were on, until the reader clicks through to meta.

Note Tom says you are still the loudest voice on mathoverflow! Personally, I'm pretty happy with your role on mathoverflow at the moment (some reservations about on meta, I admit), but the more you can do to limit complaints about you being the loudest voice, the easier our lives as moderators will be.

What about the following.

biglists can be moved to biglist.mathoverflow.net, and soft questions can be moved to soft.mathoverflow.net... Or both could be in one name.

These can be running on SE, or vanilla, or whatever Anton prefers.

I think for big lists, soft questions and other such subjective and prolonging stuff, the older platform of bulletin boards(in vBulletin, phpBB, or vanilla as in meta.mathoverflow.net) is more suitable than stack exchange anyway.

So we create another sub-community within mathoverflow, to channel these old-school stuff away from the main screen.

What say?

Aren't you supposed to be focusing on math for a month and not spewing your opinions all over the place?

@Steve, remember that although Harry is the loudest voice on MO, he's only one of many. He is far from speaking for the entire community.