Should meta be Q&A?

Question

Should the meta-MathOverflow have the Q&A format? I don't see any rationale for this. After all, meta is just an auxiliary sub-forum which should help running the main forum. Collecting the reputation points on meta seems to me simply silly. On occasions a vote can be taken to decide some issues in a democratic way. But that's not a reason for having a reputation game. For instance, if some people should be voted for some positions on MO, it should be done based on the overview of their activities on MO (possibly even in the mathematical world outside MO too, why not?) but not on reputation.

When meta follows the format of the main MO forum then instead of fixing certain MO's shortcomings it only amplifies them.

EDIT:   @Emil J. has pointed to me that there are no reputation points at meta. Indeed! (Now I'll sleep better :-). Nevertheless, there is still annoying to me similarity of MO main and meta: the votes on political and philosophical issues. Here I am answering @JoonasIlmavirta's question. My answer is implied by my question https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/1989/mathoverflow-shape-today-and-tomorrow. I am for separating non-mathematical questions from the main MO Q&A list. One of the reasons is that voting (for and against) political & philosophical issues, and in general--voting on opinions, introduces to MO repressive censorship. It also introduces low standards, which are aliens to MO in the case of research mathematics. Indeed, a number of soft questions get a very high score, which in my opinion spoils the research character of MO reputation--instead, it becomes a popularity contest, and similar.

By the way, I love numbers, statistics and trivia like reputation points, but let ranking be objective (as much as possible) or else it is a waste.

PS. Since I have overlooked the absence of reputation on meta I am willing to remove this my Question (here go down the drain my hard-earned reputation points :-). Let me know, please.

Answer 1

As you may know, our old system before the merger with stackexchange had a meta discussion board which is now called 'tea', and it still exists: http://mathoverflow.tqft.net/. There is a brief and easy ritual for registration.

A lot of people (including me) don't like the 'points' aspect of meta (even though, as Emil notes, they don't actually add or subtract reputation). I personally find them a distraction, and they have secondary effects. Moreover, I find the question and answer format somewhat clunky on occasion, especially in cases where one doesn't have a question or an official answer per se, but would just like to raise points for discussion (a frequent result is that discussions get carried out in comment boxes with their 600 character limit, which itself can be an annoyance).

You might try posting a 'question' here, and when you feel that any of these aspects are too bothersome, announce that you want to continue the discussion in tea. A trouble is that probably not many will follow you there. (Or you could even just post there without an announcement, but likely just hear the crickets chirp.) My own reaction, for what it's worth, has been to simply make my peace with the new meta set-up.

We are probably the only SE site with two discussion boards. My understanding was that keeping the old one was part of the deal with the merger.