I'd like to share my perspective as a newly "activated" user:

First as a student and then as a very junior developper and sysadmin, I have always enjoyed SE (SO, superuser and serverfault, mostly) as a source of solutions. I did not feel confident I was competent enough to provide my answers to anyone else's problems, and critically, I did not have any problems that weren't already solved by SE.

There's 2 things in what i just said. the first is that I believe SO, superuser and serverfault are mostly solved, in that either my issue is so specific that the answer won't be very useful to anyone but me, or the issue is so widespread that my question is already answered. This isn't to say that the site is useless or that new questions are useless either, it's just that as a new user, you basically have no way of contributing meaningfully to these sites. The fact that when you have an issue and try to upvote the answer that helped you, the site tells you to go away (because you have 1 rep), and so you do.

The second thing is that as a non-activated user, the only actions I may take are post questions and answers, or leave. This isn't conducive to me feeling like i'm part of any community at all (and in fact i believe that without chat.SE, I still wouldn't), and just makes me want to come for questions already answered, take my code snippet and leave. I don't think removing these restrictions makes sense either for moderation reasons, but I'm not pretending I have all the answers.

What i'm getting at is that without a paradigm shift of the entire platform, the want to "activate" users out of sheer love for reading stackoverflow questions is nonsensical. Users that "activate" do so out of their own will, because they have found something to come back to, and i genuinely don't think "finding SO questions to answer to" as a day job is something to come back to. Personally, it took me finding codegolf.SE, which i grew attached to because I am autistic, then getting chat priviledges introduced me to an actual community of users, and i come back to see what they have posted. SO, SU and SF in my opinion are not conducive to finding a community like puzzling, codegolf, worldbuilding are.

In my opinion, if you really want more registered users more active more of the time (why?), the big technical Q&A sites are not how you convert them, and smaller more community-oriented sites are a significantly better tool to do that, through showing the diversity you offer and letting a would-be convert find their niche. I am sadly acutely aware that the endgame of what I'm describing is ultimately just old reddit wihtout the cat videos, maybe I just miss it.

thanks for reading my ramblings, good luck in the meta.SE jungle.

I'd like to share my perspective as a newly "activated" user:

First as a student and then as a very junior developer and sysadmin, I have always enjoyed SE (SO, superuser and serverfault, mostly) as a source of solutions. I did not feel confident I was competent enough to provide my answers to anyone else's problems, and critically, I did not have any problems that weren't already solved by SE.

There's 2 things in what I just said. the first is that I believe SO, superuser and serverfault are mostly solved, in that either my issue is so specific that the answer won't be very useful to anyone but me, or the issue is so widespread that my question is already answered. This isn't to say that the site is useless or that new questions are useless either, it's just that as a new user, you basically have no way of contributing meaningfully to these sites. The fact that when you have an issue and try to upvote the answer that helped you, the site tells you to go away (because you have 1 rep), and so you do.

The second thing is that as a non-activated user, the only actions I may take are post questions and answers, or leave. This isn't conducive to me feeling like I'm part of any community at all (and in fact I believe that without chat.SE, I still wouldn't), and just makes me want to come for questions already answered, take my code snippet and leave. I don't think removing these restrictions makes sense either for moderation reasons, but I'm not pretending I have all the answers.

What I'm getting at is that without a paradigm shift of the entire platform, the want to "activate" users out of sheer love for reading stackoverflow questions is nonsensical. Users that "activate" do so out of their own will, because they have found something to come back to, and I genuinely don't think "finding SO questions to answer to" as a day job is something to come back to. Personally, it took me finding codegolf.SE, which I grew attached to because I am autistic, then getting chat privileges introduced me to an actual community of users, and I come back to see what they have posted. SO, SU and SF in my opinion are not conducive to finding a community like puzzling, codegolf, worldbuilding are.

In my opinion, if you really want more registered users more active more of the time (why?), the big technical Q&A sites are not how you convert them, and smaller more community-oriented sites are a significantly better tool to do that, through showing the diversity you offer and letting a would-be convert find their niche. I am sadly acutely aware that the endgame of what I'm describing is ultimately just old reddit without the cat videos, maybe I just miss it.

Thanks for reading my ramblings, good luck in the meta.SE jungle.