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+1 Also, we do not meddle in the affairs of Governments, even oppressive ones. I have opinions on what laws people should or should not follow, as does everyone, but Server Fault isn't the place for such discussions.
People don't vote. I don't know why, and have no idea how to fix the issue. That's a problem now, and more so for your proposal. Tags, top questions, etc are still more effort, so still the same issue. Stack Overflow has better filtering abilities, but I believe it's all still manual, nothing automated or "intelligent" (if you answer a question with XYZ tags, you don't see more questions with those tag for example). This could be improved, but it's not "there" now. I doubt that there will be enough eager beavers to make up for expert losses, but would be willing to try if not for the other issues.
I've heard your ideas. So has the Moderation team. I am unconvinced by your argument. The key problem I have is that it takes energy to ignore the "noise" (questions you aren't interested in). The higher the noise level, the more energy an Answerer devotes to ignore it, and the less energy they have to put into Answers. At some point the Answerer does not feel personally rewarded by their contributions enough to justify putting the same level of energy into SF and leave. What part of that is wrong, or how specifically do you address this issue in your "allow everything" proposal?
So how would you explain the Network Engineering site being created? The site's purpose completely overlaps with Server Fault, yet the people who created the site felt 1. Underserved by SF because the SF's audience was "too wide" 2. That they could not attract networking experts to a site with such wide topicality
There is no "natural balance" - that is the problem with your line of thinking. Please take a moment to read the article linked in the the comments above, it does a good job of explaining the situation. This has happened before, and now it's happening again.
@JamesRyan SF DOES work as a handful of high reppers answers questions for all of the masses. In the last 30 days half of all answers were provided by just 122 users; a quarter by just 25 users. Given the 3170 questions in that time, in the top quartile there's over 30 people asking questions for every 1 person providing answers - and this goes on every single day. Those people providing answer tend to burn out - stats show they leave after about 6 months. Super User is the only other site with this level of imbalance, which causes their own set of problems.
@JamesRyan I don't know when I've ever suggested that there are no other opinions. But if you want a site where anything goes, why aren't you on Yahoo Answers or /r/SysAdmin? Why do you think we should change when the paradigm you advocate is already available elsewhere? It can't be that you find some additional value in the Stack Exchange model, as you vocally wish to tear down that structure.
@TRiG Fool's Gold is a great read if you're interested in a concise guide to "education" for kids. It shines in explaining some misconceptions - the main two being 1. to be smart by age 18 you need to cram kids full of info starting very early. Technology gives people access to every bit of human knowledge and is a great tool for accessing knowledge; but cramming kids full of it is bad, and explained. 2. "Education" is in quotes because knowledge isn't the only reason kids are at school, there's a lot of other development going on as well, also explained.
You'll have to get a SE Employee to answer those. Can say that December 2013 saw the least Questions and Answers ever, and Jan '14 was in the bottom 5. Question closing remained steady at ~1Q/h.
