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I don't think leaving the few doznes of fun questions hurts. Now some of the most linked funny "threads" are gone, and we hope someone has a backup.

Apart from that, I agree - it's Q&A, not /r/funny, not a discussion forum. Though I haven't seen that many questions that aim to ignite such discussions.

1 comments

"Fun" questions are bumped over and over again; thus, they accrue ALL the votes and farm ALL the badges. They're just constant noise on the homepage.

It's not like there's some limited quantity of votes or badges. Or that there's too much fun in the world. So the only reasonable complaint there is that the home page shouldn't have them. Gosh, could there be a technical solution for that?

Time however is a finite resource and it is effectively wasted on 'fun' questions. Every 'fun' question steals time off the actual Q&A content that is the whole point of SE.

Hiding stuff that doesn't below under the rug doesn't make the problem go away, fixing the problem does.

In a gamification environment moreover you need to make sure that the rewards are given for activities you want users to do more of. Participation in 'fun' questions is not one such thing. Since they get ALL the votes etc. they naturally attract more of the same 'fun' questions.

No, those 'fun' questions just have to go.

This is the fallacy that's driving this -- the assumption that people have two choices about how to spend their time and energy:

1. "Fun" SO / SE questions. 2. Serious SO /SE questions.

Given this, of course you want to encourage people to choose Option 2 as much as possible.

But there's also...

3. Do something else completely unrelated to SO / SE.

Time is not a finite resource in this context.

Time is variable with participation. By driving me off through closing and deleting things that don't fit your personal vision, you have reduced the amount of total work time available. Not just for the fun things, but for all things.

Gamification points are also not finite. But if you are really concerned with over-rewarding things that are too gosh-darned fun, just stop rewarding them. It's an easy fix. E.g., instead of marking a question closed, you mark it as just-for-fun; points stop accruing.

I guess what you could be saying is that time is finite for some particular group of people. In which case, you've introduced an us-vs-them dynamic, and are basically declaring that the system is about serving the desires of the in group, rather than all participants or all readers. In which case: have fun with your bat and ball.

They were locked and protected - no one could change them. But they were recently deleted