One idea I had was to position ourselves as a sort of mechanical turk: yes, there is a proliferation of polls and greatly subjective questions, but that has value to a passerby because it's a great forum to get a variety of possible opinions about something.

Take Job hopping, is it a problem?, for example. There are a ton of different opinions, some similar to others, some completely divergent. There's very little evidence to support any one answer's perspective as being the canonical answer.

But the value in the question is being able to accumulate all possible perspectives on the issue in one shot so one can synthesize their own answer to a related question.

This could even be applied to the categorically silly questions like What is your favorite “programmer” cartoon?: if I was looking for programming cartoons for whatever reason, I could spend a lot of time performing Google searches, or I could just ask "What's your favorite programming cartoon?" on Programmers.SE and relatively quickly have a fairly-curated list of them.

Another example that would be beneficial to Stack Overflow (while still being off-topic there) are questions like What is your opinion of the new Java 7 features?. You can ask here to get a list of various opinions about a specific programming topic to get up to speed and so you can create an informed question or answer on Stack Overflow.

In short, I think we can keep being the garbage dump for Stack Overflow and still have some selling point when it comes time for Programmers.SE to be reviewed as being viable.

One idea I had was to position ourselves as a sort of mechanical turk: yes, there is a proliferation of polls and greatly subjective questions, but that has value to a passerby because it's a great forum to get a variety of possible opinions about something.

Take Job hopping, is it a problem?, for example. There are a ton of different opinions, some similar to others, some completely divergent. There's very little evidence to support any one answer's perspective as being the canonical answer.

But the value in the question is being able to accumulate all possible perspectives on the issue in one shot so one can synthesize their own answer to a related question.

This could even be applied to the categorically silly questions like What is your favorite “programmer” cartoon?: if I was looking for programming cartoons for whatever reason, I could spend a lot of time performing Google searches, or I could just ask "What's your favorite programming cartoon?" on Programmers.SE and relatively quickly have a fairly-curated list of them.

Another example that would be beneficial to Stack Overflow (while still being off-topic there) are questions like What is your opinion of the new Java 7 features?. You can ask here to get a list of various opinions about a specific programming topic to get up to speed and so you can create an informed question or answer on Stack Overflow.

In short, I think we can keep being the garbage dump for Stack Overflow and still have some selling point when it comes time for Programmers.SE to be reviewed as being viable.

One idea I had was to position ourselves as a sort of mechanical turk: yes, there is a proliferation of polls and greatly subjective questions, but that has value to a passerby because it's a great forum to get a variety of possible opinions about something.

Take Job hopping, is it a problem?, for example. There are a ton of different opinions, some similar to others, some completely divergent. There's very little evidence to support any one answer's version as being the canonical answer.

But the value in the question is being able to accumulate all possible perspectives on the issue in on shot so you can synthesize your own answer to a related question.

This could even be applied to the categorically silly questions like What is your favorite “programmer” cartoon?: if I was looking for programming cartoons for whatever reason, I could spend a lot of time performing Google searches, or I could just ask "What's your favorite programming cartoon?" on Programmers.SE and relatively quickly have a fairly-curated list of them.

Another example that would be beneficial to Stack Overflow (while still being off-topic there) are questions like What is your opinion of the new Java 7 features?. You can ask here to get a list of various opinions about a specific programming topic to get up to speed and so you can create an informed question or answer on Stack Overflow.

In short, I think we can keep being the garbage dump for Stack Overflow and still have some selling point when it comes time for Programmers.SE to be reviewed as being viable.

One idea I had was to position ourselves as a sort of mechanical turk: yes, there is a proliferation of polls and greatly subjective questions, but that has value to a passerby because it's a great forum to get a variety of possible opinions about something.

Take Job hopping, is it a problem?, for example. There are a ton of different opinions, some similar to others, some completely divergent. There's very little evidence to support any one answer's perspective as being the canonical answer.

But the value in the question is being able to accumulate all possible perspectives on the issue in one shot so one can synthesize their own answer to a related question.

This could even be applied to the categorically silly questions like What is your favorite “programmer” cartoon?: if I was looking for programming cartoons for whatever reason, I could spend a lot of time performing Google searches, or I could just ask "What's your favorite programming cartoon?" on Programmers.SE and relatively quickly have a fairly-curated list of them.

Another example that would be beneficial to Stack Overflow (while still being off-topic there) are questions like What is your opinion of the new Java 7 features?. You can ask here to get a list of various opinions about a specific programming topic to get up to speed and so you can create an informed question or answer on Stack Overflow.

In short, I think we can keep being the garbage dump for Stack Overflow and still have some selling point when it comes time for Programmers.SE to be reviewed as being viable.