1. Purge all generative AI from the network. (Classifying ML, such as for identifying spam, is fine.)
2. Support the existing communities of question askers, answerers, and curators.
3. Address long-term tech debt and old bug reports and low-hanging feature requests.
4. Enjoy the fruit of cherished and supportive communities which get great fun and excitement from answering each others' interesting questions!

I'm not trying to be facetious - I've had several very good SE experiences this week! When our site communities can be healthy and positive this is still one of the best corners of the internet. And I think the company can help foster that, rather than giving into the bleak AI-overrun dead internet that's slowly taking over so many other places.

Create a contest for the users to come up with the site logo, banner, and color for the Stack Exchange sites that lack the site design.

And then actually implement the winning designs. :)

See also:

• Can communities come up with their own site design?
• When will a graduated site get a theme or custom branding?
• With new designs planned for some sites, are there plans to tackle the backlog?

Examples:

See How Network Questions for some examples of sites without logos (marked by red arrows in the screenshot below), compared to sites with logos (no arrows):

Open a web store that lets people buy Stack Overflow (or other major network site) branded screen-printed tee shirts, mugs, mouse pads, etc. There are myriad services (and have been for over a decade) to help manage this kind of thing with minimal overhead. It is an easy way to make many users feel more connected to the network and company and it's better than free advertising: people pay you to advertise your brand.

Of course, you might want to wait until you finish rebranding, I suppose.

I would rather see energy devoted to rectifying the balance of the current 'gamification' (ie. rep). There are currently no rewards for the day to day grunt work of curation including edits, meaningful closures, etc. I largely gave up answering questions a few years ago and now spend most of my time looking for duplicates so my reputation gain has been largely flat even though I spend a lot of time contributing. This isn't fun, and worse, doesn't reward greater privilege despite a very clear curation record.

Community submissions for things like the 404 page, "page not found", or captcha popup images. It could be a monthly thing, replacing the previous image each time.

I guess it feels hypocritical to say that you're looking for ways to make the community more fun after you canceled the April Fool's pranks and the Winter/Summer Bash.

For full transparency: I upvoted the winter/summer bash post - I never used it myself - but downvoted the April Fool's post. I understand the business case for canceling events like April Fools, but doing that leads to the exact problem you're trying to address here.

As someone who doesn't engage as much in the SE community, things like the The Key were fun reasons for me to come back to the site. I think just bringing back April Fools events would be a big hit.

Community challenges

Once upon a time, I attempted to organize fun on my corner of Stack Exchange (The next writing challenge could be yours), but participation dwindled over time, likely reflecting the continued sorry state of participation on the main site, and I eventually had to stop posting new challenges. Still, I've held onto the idea of resuming it, waiting for something significant enough to ensure it wouldn't immediately be a failure again. Official promotion to audiences across the network would qualify—just look at how Hot Network Questions often draws in outside activity.

Like Winterbash, or even something like badges, there was another layer of purpose underneath these challenges. At best it was supposed to trick people into encountering problems which they would ask about on the main site (which I unfortunately never saw happen), and at worst it was something to capture a little more attention towards the site.

Other sites have similar events they might want to share with the network, and still more might start their own with support.

Of course, there are some barriers, but nothing I see as entirely insurmountable. One of the bigger barriers is that many of these events currently require the ability to post on a child meta, and expect participation to be restricted to a small enough crowd requiring next to no moderation. I can't quite find a good solution to overcome this, since there's something a little wrong with each idea I've had:

• Keeping it on a child meta blocks newcomers.
• Lowering the rep to 1 to post on the child meta while promoting that fact loudly would probably expose some weaknesses of moderation on child metas that we haven't really seen much of before
• Moving it to main has its own weaknesses and could get somewhat convoluted. (Make a Community Wiki question to ensure no rep is gained, hope that no regulars try to close it despite it being technically off topic for main, and migrate it to the child meta later to ensure it's not littering the main site?)
• Moving it off-site entirely means no traffic is being brought in at all

Weighing in as someone working at Stack Overflow, I’m genuinely curious: does the Community Open Source Ads tradition count as fun and does it still have value today?

It seems like a creative, community-driven way to promote open source projects, combining fun and purpose. But I wonder: is this something the community still finds meaningful, or has the need for it faded over time?

Here’s the original blog post for context: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/12/19/free-vote-based-advertising-for-open-source-projects/

Edit: 2015?! Tom, I didn’t realize you’ve been at the company so long! Congrats on 10 years!

Arqade runs a fortnightly contest to get an image into the sidebar. Photography also used to run a contest, but hasn't for a long time.

As a bonus: allowing users to use another community's widget across the network would add some nice optional customization to the home page.

Let sites have more control over how we look. Arqade used to look amazing and very on-theme. We had a MOTHERSHIP ask-question button!

Then all sites were changed to look pretty similar to each other (even though they're really not). Could we have more control over the way our sites look?

This is a deep cut but - Bring back the annual contests in some way. I'd also point at the old super user contest. Nothing big - site specific swag like T shirts or stickers since SE doesn't have the very happy VC money.

This would tie into TylerH's suggestion. Get a swag store - maybe bring back 'classic' trilogy T-Shirts and other SE swag, and have prizes be 'store credit' and let people pick their prizes.

Swag giveaways through monthly posts on meta (MSE, and on child sites for more individually themed swag and additional opportunities) that can come in the form of targeted contests such as the screenshot contests on arqade, or more general ones such as what is your favorite x, just some way for the staff and community to interact that is light-hearted and consequence free with a fun outcome.

It doesn't need to be some specific repeated themed thing like winterbash, be more spontaneous. Remember the "How many jelly beans are in this jar?" questions on the surveys?

I think you need to give sites the tools and flexibility to make their own fun. If Stack Overflow is interested in coding challenges, build more flexible infrastructure for that so all sites can do some sort of challenges. If Meta has a happy hour every week in a chat room, but needs that even to be more visible, make a way for all sites to advertise events in their chat rooms to people who aren't looking at chat. A network full of all different sorts of events is more compelling (in my opinion) than one giant event for coders on Stack Overflow.

I'm working on architecting a plug-in API for our tool suite. Maybe that is something that would be worth thinking about for SE. The company doesn't have the resources to do everything it might want to do, and you've got a large community of programmers. Let them help you discover and try out features. I know there are a LOT of things to think about with a plug-in API in terms of security and user experience, but I think the investment would be worth it. Look at how World of Warcraft took the most popular community-created mods and incorporated those features into the game for everyone. The company could run UX betas with plug-ins it wrote and see if they were popular instead of running A/B tests where some of the people who might want to try the new things aren't selected and people who might want some experiments, but not this specific one are selected.

A spammer just bumped a 14 year old post that's relevant: Provide a streaming chat API

When you have a community of people who enjoy tinkering, you just need to give them tools and a little bit of space in your workshop and they will make cool stuff just for fun. Some hooks into the chat system might be a good place to start experimenting with plugins/APIs.

I want more unicorn-meta-zoo. I loved the interview/podcast content about CMs.

It was fun, and I think it helped show that behind all this, it's people, which I think is needed in the context of so many people feeling that our community (or certain parts of it) is hostile.

It doesn't even need to be limited to CMs. I think the thing where you had Spev on the podcast (or something like that) was cool and I'd like to see more. Reach out to mods or engaged community members and ask if they want to do something like that (or if they're not comfortable with voice, something analogous in text-only form).

I like the idea of SE/SO branded merch (see Tyler's answer)!

To add a twist, I think running a contest where users submit their designs for t-shirts, mugs, or other merchandise could make it more fun. Winners could receive a free batch of merchandise and/or a badge. This also directly involves the community in brand development.

This obviously cannot be a regular event, e.g. monthly, due to manufacturing logistics if nothing else, but let's say a bi-annual event like Winter/Summer Bash (but different).

What would “fun” look like on Stack Exchange for you?

Fun has to look 2 ways.

Professional access should have no "fun".

I use Stack Overflow in a professional aspect at work to fix issues I am experiencing at work. Fun in this mode of access shouldn't exist. I am accessing the network via a work PC, which will be monitored to some extent. It will be viewable to a range of colleagues in an open office environment, and I'm being paid by my employer to fix the issues I come across, not to have fun on the site while I do it. So fun aspects should be discreet, non-intrusive and shouldn’t end up with me being pulled into HR for not doing my work/appearing not to be doing my work.

Non-professional access should have fun.

When using the wider Stack network in a non-professional manner, "fun" should be enacted by allowing a sense of community to grow, this could be via collectables, such as hats in the winter bash or competitions that provide "experience points", separate to reputation points, that allow the activation of "user skins" or other display elements.

The worst thing about fun is it being forced, so instead of specific items/areas being developed, it needs a loose framework in which fun can be built which will be different for each site and each user. While the implementation of such a thing as Hats or Easter eggs will be fun for some, it will not be fun for everyone.

Bring back the swag/merch rewards for 100k reputation

I'm almost there and would very much enjoy my t-shirt and a mug. :P

Not sure if this is the kind of "fun" you're asking about.

I'd really like site-specific events that are appropriate to each's theme, with community input on its organization, and that would happen annually or something.

For example:

• Game jams on Stack Overflow or Gamedev.SE with a community-chosen theme (could be in partnership with itch.io, or self-hosted using web builds)
• Writing contests for language-specific SE sites with a community-chosen initial pitch
• Puzzle contests for Puzzling.SE
• A CTF for Security.SE
• For SE sites that can't really have a contest based on their theme, maybe they could default to electing the best post of the year?

The election system used for moderators could maybe be reused to elect winners for such contests and chose their themes, saving you a lot of engineering trouble, which is what killed Winter/Summer Bash.

The community would chose the theme/idea, do the judging with votes and elect its winner. Staff would have to, at worst, do some programming for the first version of the event, then it would just be a matter of pressing a start and finish button on their end, with maybe minor tweaks if needed.

Maybe contest winners could get a silver badge, too? But if so, not a unique per-event badge, but a generic "Won an event" badge, so we don't get a huge pool of unobtainable retired badges that might frustrate people.

Using this opportunity to ask to provide incentives for curation. Currently editing, reviewing, & flagging are rather thankless tasks as your effort is neither visible nor do you get fake internet points (apart from the +2 for suggested-edits) and some other specific issues with the queues, but that is beside the point right now.

While I don't think flags/reviews should give the user reputation points one could certainly add something akin to the Duolingo-day-streak e.g. for doing reviews daily showing a flame next to your profile picture and the number of consecutive days:

Additionally, on hover over the number/flame there could be some random tooltip messages shown in the style of a video game combo notification: "[User] claimed his first review","[User] is unstoppable","[User] is on fire", "[User] entered John Skeet mode™" etc.

Independent of the specific idea above, it would help to increase the visibility of what people are doing as your being "invisible" tends to discourage people from doing it.

I'd say we'd need folks whose job is dedicated to promoting the network at both ends of the user experience spectrum. While it was short-lived, I'd say team chaos was a good example of a network wide community promotion, potentially at scale. It's been a while and if you're unfamiliar - here's the blog post that announced them.

They even did marketing and partnerships. Public Q&A needs to be marketed - the current focus is very much on SAAS products and I feel the approach taken in the past with team CHAOS would be at odds with what I've seen the past decade with marketing.

I'd suggest that we also need an initiative that's in a sense the opposite of CHAOS - I'm not in the mood to sledgehammer an acronym for order yet, but essentially focus on the folks who are here now - and working on connecting to and communicating with them primarily. While Chaos 2.0 would be focused on network-wide site promotion, its counterpart would be focused on community communication and responsiveness. (I've a bunch of ideas on that, but it would be soapboxing on community management, and it'd be a post on its own I suspect.)

As much as trying to work with mechanics and promotions, we need a sustained organised initiative to promote our network, both to new users and folks who were active.

Game Nights

What could go wrong with a bunch of random doods on the internet playing a party game like Kahoot!, Jackbox or Gartic Phone.

I'd just avoid the individualized ones like Valorant, unless the pool of players is the group... Sorta like emulating a LAN party.

I heard Arqade used to do these back in the days, plus with game giveaways to promote the asking of questions and to create content for the website.

Thouogh this is gaming-specific, I'm sure there's similar activities in other communities that could be done, like music group compositions or math competitions.

See also: Relevant meta

As moderator I've often wished I could suspend a user's ability/privilege to comment; without suspending their account entirely (i.e. their ability to post answers).

A user posting overly critical or pedantic comments is the main source of friction on the site -- a "downer", or "anti-fun" -- both for other users and for moderators.

Stack Exchange was born as a Q&A site. The progress of GenAIs today makes the "asking question" part way easier for knowledge seekers -- combined with Search tools, the accuracy is enough for most.

We are, by definition, passively waiting for questions. Communities die when they don't have enough new questions, and self-answer questions are just not a thing in many communities.

But, we don't need to.

However, beyond the Q&A, there is also a vibrant community in each SE that are so enthusiastic that they'd be doing free Q&A job on the topic. These people are not enthusiastic because they like the subject per se, but because they like sharing the knowledge on it.

I don't know whether this is controversial/impractical/whatever, but we should leverage this community to do something beyond "You ask, I answer". Similar to how your local PC SIG does not just repair PCs -- they also hold seminars that teaches others meaningful knowledge on how to empower their digital life. Same applies here. Programming Contests, Bring Your Own Code challenges, Webinars on language learning, Gamejams...... These are all knowledge sharing opportunities.

This would be pretty impractical, but we have the user base, we have the people that wants to do this but can't hold a full event on their own. But, if permission to hold such events are publicly given, maybe this would change.

While the primary function a Q&A is well to ask and answer, there are other important functions as well like editing, flagging and curating. These could be brought to attention through some events: Say for a limited time you get double reputation points for approved edits or a special hat for doing X amount of reviews for a daily for the length of an event. Perhaps even a new kind of time limited badges, e.g. [2025-archaeology-event] badge one can get by participating in an event for editing/updating questions older than 6 months.

Some more sophisticated form of network discovery could also be implemented. Have a monthly(?) MSE post showcasing a small list of the funniest/most absurd out of context question from a given network, like How do I lick a plane? from the Arqade.

Taking inspiration from r/cpp, a periodic (Ex. monthly) project showcase space. Essentially, a space for people to periodically share something like "Here's something I've been working on recently that I'm proud of. <Optional elaboration, like "here's what's cool about it" / "here's what progress I made">"

I think a little bit of outlet for social self-promotion could be nice.

As for how or where exactly this happens I don't have a particular recommendation- just that it not be worth rep, and be relatively information-compact (think character limits, etc.). You could leave it up to each community to organize (if they want it all). Meta could work. Chat could work. On SO, Discussions could work. Letting communities organize it means they can choose how often to do it, and what granularity to do it at (Ex. making multiple for different categories), and community-specific rules.

This wouldn't take much work from the company. Just to tell network-site communities "If you want to do this, go ahead. You have our blessing. Feel free to define rules and parameters as you see fit".

Remember that there is a few things that used to work or be a priority that you removed or made worse:

1. More custom styling. I know this wasn't really scalable, but still -- if you asked me, the sites look quite sterile now.
2. Chat. IMHO it's the most neglected feature of all. Maybe it could use some attention? It works great for the TeX site (from the sites I engage with the only one really), but much less for most other sites.

Is it possible for different sites to create small groups (for discussion and else) for users, sorted by topic or tags ?

For example, you can create a "Quantum field theory" group in PSE , and in this group user interested in the same topic can communicate more effectively.

I know that there are chat rooms available, however, it seems that they are not sorted by topic, making it hard to find a suitable chat. Plus, a lot of room are frozen and cannot be accessed anymore (and the rest does not really cover a lot of topic).

I recently posted on Meta SO about StackQuest – a proposed gamified challenge feature for Stack Overflow, and one recurring theme in the feedback was this:

“Stack Overflow should be more fun and engaging.”

Really? Have we read the same feedback? Because from my point of view, this just looks like wishful thinking. This was already the reason why you suggested StackQuest in the first place:

This is one idea that we’re considering to make participation more interactive, rewarding, and fun, without disrupting the core Q&A experience.
[...]
Would you find an opt-in coding challenge system like StackQuest engaging? Why or why not?

I don't mind making Stack Overflow a bit more joyful, but in that case, be honest about the fact that this is something the team wants, rather than SO and SE users. The majority opinion on SO and SE seems to be that, while improving user engagement is necessary if we want the platform to succeed, it's currently not a priority for many reasons already mentioned here.

As for improving user engagement, as many have suggested, you could bring back some of the previous initiatives that were already popular, maybe tweak them a little if necessary, improve Chat interactivity and usability, and... that's it! SO and SE are Q&A websites at their core. Most users that want to participate are probably not going to do it because it's the most entertaining thing on Earth. I know that the Company is trying its best to avoid the ChatGPT death sentence, but this is probably not going to work. These initiatives are great, because they solidify the community that's already on the website. Use them sparingly, and make improvements on other topics that are actively driving people away (AI integration, lack of support for the current community, taking their feedback into account, and maybe fixing the reputation problem), because if you are trying to copy Reddit and its community aspects, sorry to tell you this, but you are going to lose every single time.

Do you remember those IRC trivia bots (usually written in mIRC script or something)? They were really fun, and you'd often learn something.

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I think doing something similar in chat, with "trivia" questions related to the site's topic, would be fun.

Create some old fashioned arcade games, where the reputation earned one day is also converted to coins that you can expend to play on this arcade games. So if I earn 56 of reputation today, I have 5 credits that I can spent on these "arcade machines". Maybe the credits can be stored between days or maybe not if we want to encourage people to build up the community.