And by the way, another idea you should follow up on: Occasionally, people post these really interesting questions about breaking up with their boyfriend or something. WE ALL want to know how it goes on. What happened next!? But it never comes, because we lose track of the question. One should have this question as a sort of miniblog or so, so people can post updates, and the interested stay subscribed to the blog. People get notifications that an update or so has been posted.

This is gold I'm giving you here. If you don't get it yet, someday, someone will, and that person will have a huge site.

The core philosophy I am pushing here is that you should not disassociate the person from the question. Human life is all about social interaction. Metafilter kills the social interaction. You should weave it in. Each question should have the capacity to be a mini story, leading to further questions and so on, till you have an interwoven mesh of question and answer, cliques and groups, and real friendships developing on the site. Mirror humanity where you want people to flock to.