JohnMcG

Thanks! Me too! :)

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.

It's all about plausible deniability....

Seriously, I don't think I would dismiss the whole of SE as goofing off if its scope boundaries were relaxed a bit.

Speaking for myself, clicking on a "chat" link crosses a threshold for me from "I'm taking a break and checking stuff out" to "I'm goofing off." Maybe I'm kidding myself that my checking out SE threads isn't goofing off, but once I enter something called "chat" there's no way I can suspend my disbelief, so I don't do it.

I think the reason I find myself resisting this is that what you are saying is that you don't want us as whole people, you just want the specific parts of us that "make Stack Overflow great."

This desire is understandable. I sure would like to pick and choose the aspects of people's personalities that I had to deal with. But, in most cases, life doesn't work that way.

In some cases, asking us to leave behind parts of our personalities is a reasonable request. An obvious example is our employers. They want our coding ability, and would prefer we leave our sports fandom, musical choices, political opinions, relationship issues, etc. at the door before we come into the office. And since they're paying us, they get to make that request. If, say, a significant other told me to go be a sports fan somewhere else, I would probably take her up on that request, and also take along the aspects of my personality she does like.

But Stack Exchange is not paying us. Our rewards are the good feeling of helping someone out, and being part of something. Heck, you wanted to charge us money to leverage our SE work into employment opportunities.

That being the case, by locking us down like this, you are opening yourself up to competition from another site that welcomes us as whole people, not just the parts that help your site be awesome.

I want to be in places where I can be myself, which might include chuckling at the same old jokes or discussing how much my job sucks. The more SO/SE is a place where I cannot be myself, the less desirable a place it is for me to be.

One of the things SE/SO claims to be about is building a community. Well, guess what. Communities are groups of people not just their expertise in a given subject.

Well, it was, but now the moderation there is even more draconian.

What percentage of closed questions are translated to one of the above bullet points?