Seems like instead of rate limiting users ability to ask bad questions, you should rate limit the viewing of bad questions by good answerers. In order to keep up the effort of answering questions, maybe some automation is in order to do best-effort auto answering or collapsing of questions into related ones.

I agree with your first sentence for sure. Another way to implement it would be to avoid showing new questions with no upvotes to many users--only show them to a small sample of users and see if in the first ten minutes the question gets voted up or down to gauge its quality. That way we'd limit the "shotgun" effect of sending crappy questions to thousands of people all at once (we sometimes see 6 or 8 downvotes on a single question before it gets closed or deleted, which implies a ton of people saw it despite that it was crap).

I like it! Would be sorta like A/B testing the questions...

This pattern is so common I'm not sure why it's not implemented more often. It's just like feature flags with incremental rollout except for content.

I find many super lame questions in the new section "Hot Network Questions" on the right side. When looking for "Related", I'm accidently confronted with banalities such as "How does a piano go out of tune" and lots of stuff from Dungeons & Dragons.

I can see how these specific questions could set a bad precedent for "how to deal with stuff you don't know". The omnipresent cross-promotion could lead to more lameness in general.

I've been using a tampermonkey script [1] to hide "Hot Network Questions". I find them utterly distracting.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/amrtn/3ec581e356a94ef3fa0f

yeah,like this one : just spotted a few mins ago :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23509912/flash-player-err...