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I'm certainly less excited about MO than I was a while ago. Partly this is to be expected with anything, as one tends to spend time differently different years. Partly though, I think it's that as the size of the user base of MO increases beyond a certain point the average quality of question goes down. It's a rather general phenomenon on the internet that early adopters to internet social spaces tend to dislike them as time goes on. Once everyone's on Facebook people stop liking it.
Yes, the trash questions are more of a turn off than that lack of good questions. Eliminate the trash questions and the good questions will hang around longer on the front page.
Having also discussed this issue with a number of people, I've arrived at the impression that the lack of "soft/conceptual/non-technical questions" is not at all what is making MO apparently less fun to browse. Rather, it's the overabundance of highly specialized questions that is the issue: it's hard to be enthusiastic about scrolling through a long list of questions in search of the proverbial needle in the haystack. (A similar issue was recently raised by djordan.) In the earlier days of MO the haystack was at least interspersed with other interesting things, in the form of "medium-level" questions accessible to a wider audience. It seems though that the number of such questions has been in decline since the advent of MSE. This is unfortunate, if you ask me...
Dylan, my problem is that I don't want to filter by tags, I want to filter by quality. And since I am a generalist I really want to use the front page, rather than only the fa.functional-analysis tagged questions, say.
+1 markvs
@Andre - the problem is then people who are most likely to upvote questions with serious mathematical content won't see them if they don't already have 5 votes. One would need to operate with and without several filters (subject-specific, minimum vote threshold etc) to find questions that don't quite fit through.
@markvs: In math, useful tools (such as category theory) generate much more excitement than pure subjects (like axiomatic geometry). The former field is viable because it can attract people to just hang out there, and in their idle fascination they become comfortable turning to it for answers to all their questions. And that leads to people like Jacob Lurie doing what they do with it, which is (by some accounts) considered a good thing. It also leads to people actually using Lurie's ideas, which is why it is a good thing.
By analogy, I would say that if MO only brings people in to ask specific technical questions, they will be less inclined to look for the odd specific technical question they would like to answer. That would lead pretty quickly to people using MO as a last resort, rather than their favorite destination. Sure, the site can be primarily about technical questions, but the big lesson of the modern internet is that people gravitate towards total involvement in their online interests, so if there's a little room for fun diversions, the site as a whole will flourish; otherwise, it will stagnate.
@Ryan,
perhaps a comparison to StackOverflow is appropriate. Being an older version of MO it has probably settled down even more. I know people who use it just as a reference tool, and would never spend time there and so accumulate thousands of points, dozens of badges etc, as well as such an online presence in a vibrant community. SO is developed to the point where if you have a problem in writing your program (or whatever), it is likely that someone has had a similar problem, and asked it before, or have had a similar problem and solved it themselves (and hopefully are there at the right time to see your question whizz down the font page). For technical MO questions, and I speak from experience, they are often asked because it is the coalface of research and touching a facet of mathematics which the OP is unfamiliar with. (I discount people asking technical questions from papers they are reading). As such, I don't know if MO quite has the potential to become a go-to repository that SO is. It can in some respects, but the sort of things people do in programming are by and large the same over and over again, with variations and in different languages; mathematics on the other hand has unlimited scope for expansion.
As a somewhat lesser example of what Andre Henriques has pointed out, I'll sheepishly point out my own question on terminology, which is probably not of interest to most people on MO, but is where I was hoping for people who've been in the business longer to weigh in.
Also, +1 for
In the current system, unless a question is immediately answerable, it had no chance: it will get buried and forgotten.
I somewhat disagree with the immediate answer sort of thing. While personally I cannot say that I am capable of answering even the majority of the questions presented here which are related to my work - when I see a question which interests me I remember it/add a favourite/write it down and attempt to solve it. If I see someone had posted an answer I read to get clues, hints, ideas, etc. and had I done some work which I find worth posting - I will post it, and bump the question.
While this is surely not the process of most people, I expect that I am far from being unique in this aspect. Questions which interest me are questions which interest me. Similarly on MSE (where I am much more active). Some questions would take a day or two to solve and MSE has a front page which changes every few hours (while MO is far slower in that aspect).
Regardless to that, I do agree that some questions will essentially be buried deep within the archives of the internet. However this is how the world behaves...
I confess to wasting time on MO, Andy. But it is a better way of wasting time than my other ways.
You are way out of line, Sergei. Kevin Buzzard (whom, by the way, I have never met) is a well respected, prize winning mathematician who is doing the mathematical community a great service through his work on MO. You owe him and the other moderators an apology.