For example, on MO, we are able to change our votes for 1-2 hours after we make them without getting the error message "can't vote unless post is edited blah blah". This is annoying because I've often "used up" all of my votes for the day and have removed votes that I cared less about in order to vote on other posts. With SE2.0, this threshold is lowered to less than 10 minutes (I got the error message at 10 minutes 31 seconds).

I think we on MO should make a list of things that work differently, negative or positive, on SE2.0 (those of us who have used it a bit). This should be considered if and when we are offered a migration deal.

Where can I read more about the changes in SE2.0?

The two things mentioned here so far don't seem so bad to me.

Harry, if latex is supported you can say

Nice Job! $\mbox{}$

or something like that :)

@Suresh: Niether OSQA nor SE have latex support. Both theory.metaoptimize.com and MO simply use jsMath ... all the math is being handled by your browser, not by the server. I think this is a near-optimal way to handle mathematical markup, and it's completely independent of the server side software. So latex support shouldn't be an issue in deciding what platform to use.

Yes, this "smart" notification of comments is the biggest innovation in the new site I've seen. Overall, it's quite similar to what we have here on MO (I recently got my first look at the moderation tools, and they seem to be identical to the MO version).

One interesting difference which is not so immediately apparent (especially if you don't ask questions; I recently asked my first question on the site): an upvoted answer still conveys +10, but an upvoted question is only +5. That's a big reweighting towards answering versus asking questions, and I think I like it.

One other feature that I really like. When you're awarded a badge for a question or an answer, you actually get told what question or answer it was!

Edit: and another, in case anyone is still evaluating the merits of SE 2.0. Sufficiently high-rep users have access to the total up- and down-vote counts of questions and answers, which is strictly more useful than knowing only their difference.

Yet another change to the SE2 software that may contradict existing practices here in MO: they've made Community Wiki disappear.

http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/941/community-wiki-checkbox-disappeared/

Fortunately, answers can still be made CW so the idea of having a summary answer or a this-seems-on-the-right-lines-can-anyone-help answer is still okay.

(I shan't be sorry to see big-list questions made harder to ask ...)

Well, those that know that big-list should be CW will now be a little discouraged since they will (I hope) have to go through the extra step of making sure that a moderator knows about their question and hits it with the wiki hammer. And when someone who doesn't know about this convention posts a big-list question, we mere mortals now flag it for moderator attention rather than posting plaintive "This should be CW!" comments (only to be followed by "What is CW? How do I make it CW? Oh, I didn't see that.").

Great. I've got a question I was meaning to ask for a week now, and I guess I'll ask it now.

Regarding Ben's comment: I agree.

I try to click on the Hunger Site pages each day and, presumably by way of encouragement, they have "wise quotes" on their pages. I have a suspicion that the selection of these is a perpetration of that common "all dogs have four legs, my cat has four legs, therefore my dog is a cat" fallacy that we all know and ... know ... from grading homeworks; namely, "Wise sayings are too deep for me to understand, I don't understand this saying, therefore it's wise.". One of the current crop is:

Children can ask questions that wise men cannot answer.

Which anyone in the neighbourhood of a kid aged around 6 will respond with, "Tell me something I didn't know!".

The difficult thing is not to ask a question that no-one can answer - that's trivial. The difficult thing to to ask a question that someone can answer, but that nonetheless is interesting and that you - the questioner- can't answer.

at the moment, I think MO running out of good questions is a much more serious concern than running out of good answers.

I am not sure about that. The two problems should be strongly related because if the site is to attract good questions then it's by offering a high chance of getting a good answer. My personal experience is: I have asked three questions in the past three weeks. They got between 8 and 23 votes each, so can be considered reasonably good, as judged by the community. But two of them didn't attract any answers at all and one of them received an excellent answer treating a special case. I would also say that Noah Snyder, who was the author of that answer didn't nearly get the votes he deserved. The question was natural and got me 23 votes, while the answer clearly required some thinking on Noah's part and is very pretty, but only received 5 upvotes. So my (very limited) experience is almost opposite to Ben's.

Apologies if this came across as I think it might have done. It was in no way my intention to praise my questions. I was just saying that they seem good enough to attract answers (I assume that if people vote up a question, it means that they find it interesting to think about it or they want to know the answer, or maybe just that they appreciate the work put into asking the question), yet there was only one answer. If the questions had not received a few up-votes, I would have put the lack of answers down to a lack of interest. But as things stand, from my point of view, the site also lacks in good answers, not just in good questions.

I am not saying anything about the true value of questions, since I find it rather hard to evaluate. I am just observing that if a reasonably well-received question doesn't produce an answer, then the site might not be attracting the right people to answer it. This in turn might adversely affect the quality of the questions, because people might begin to think that their questions are unlikely to be answered anyway.

Again, let me make doubly sure that I am not misunderstood. The last sentence does not apply to me at all. Actually, the one answer I got from Noah already made the question worth asking. I am just speculating on the connection between the problem Ben is pointing out and the "problem" that I as a newcomer have experienced myself.

Andrew: Oh. I found that site, but assumed you were talking about something different since I didn't see a reference to wise quotes. In any case, never mind. :)

First, I don't see why you bring up something over a year old just for that.

I also disagree about your main point. I think that well formed and interesting questions are equally useful for this site as the answer they may attract. The people who make this community are mostly researchers, and good questions can stimulate and help with the formation of new ideas and new research.

(in fairness I have to admit that most of my reputation comes from questions just as well)

There is also the point that on MO reputation doesn't mean too much except perhaps as an indication of "how active you are (were)".

Yemon, in every voting based system there is going to be some disproportional voting from time to time. This is also a result of people skimming over something and basing their vote on the appeal of the question and the score at time of reading (if I see a question which "looks interesting" and has 6 votes, I'll be quicker to upvote than a question without any previous votes).

Note that many of the high voted questions are big-lists which are CW so I'm not counting them into the whole reputation argument anyway.

Secondly, there are many under-voted questions as well. This is again a result of the system's design and will not change if we move to SE 2.0; furthermore the fact reputation is higher on MO is better for those under-voted questions, as they award the asker twice the reputation they would get otherwise!