How to make StackExchange (and others) more fun

I saw this question from the Meta Stack Exchange in the sidebar:

While Stack Overflow’s core value lies in being a trusted and focused Q&A platform for developers, there’s room to explore how we can make participation here more enjoyable, engaging, and even a little playful, without compromising the mission.

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

curiousdannii answered with what I would have said:

Purge all generative AI from the network. (Classifying ML, such as for identifying spam, is fine.

Support the existing communities of question askers, answerers, and curators.

Address long-term tech debt and old bug reports and low-hanging feature requests.

Enjoy the fruit of cherished and supportive communities which get great fun and excitement from answering each others’ interesting questions!

It’s currently the top-rated answer on the question. I expect it will be ignored.

People asking these questions think—knowingly or otherwise—that fun is a foosball table in the office, or a quirky site update. In the words of that Weird Al Yankovic music cover: MANDATORY FUN.

Except, that’s not how fun works! Fun is a side effect earned from a positive work or website culture. It comes from feeling respected, empowered, valued, and being surrounded by good people. It comes from working at a place you want to go to, or visiting and contributing to a website you find rewarding. It does not come from buzzwords, empty platitudes, and ignoring reasonable requests for improvement.

(I can’t help but draw parallels with Pride Month, where companies around the world are desperate to cover their logos in rainbow colours. The reaction from my queer friends ranges from bemusement to frustration, given how little those companies care at other times of the year. You support people with actions, not platitudes).

Believe me, we’d all love it if fun were a switch you could flick on at the drop of a mixed metaphor. But that’s not how the real world works. Fun cannot be bolted on. Managers and business executives will continue to forget this at their peril.

I don’t envy StackExchange’s position right now. They’ve seen traffic to their sites plummet since LLMs started producing industrial quantities of technical debt. But their solution to lean into this trend—their latest blog post concerns vibe coding, yuck—has burned more goodwill than any festive hat or website Easter egg hunt could paper over. Selling out the people who made you successful is certainly one short-term business strategy, but it runs counter to the mission they take great pains to publicise in posts like this.

Taking a stand for quality and trust instead of the latest unsustainable valley bubble would go a long way to regaining that respect; and with it, the goodwill required to make a site fun. I have every confidence they could do this… if they wanted to.