This isn't purely self-interested for MO. Encouraging your students and friends to participate is good for them as well, not just in helping research but also in developing social skills in a professional environment and overcoming anxiety. Participation is good for mental health. That's why I mentioned in my comment to AT0 that my advice was also life advice.

I think Ravi misunderstood or wasn't familiar with the idiom: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kick_in_the_pants . A kick in the pants is encouragement not discouragement. It's synonymous with "light a fire under (someone)".

@RaviVakil No no, on MO itself we should be all sweetness and etc. I meant off of MO in the real world, we should be out motivating people to use MO (with kicks to the tush, not kisses!). Another metaphor I like is pushing someone into the shallow end of a pool. There is no serious danger but maybe fleeting discomfort. But anyway, this should be done by advisors to their students or grad students to their colleagues, and not on MO.

@NoahSnyder We might be able to negotiate something with SO, since right now they make no money from us and run no ads here. I think the board should look into it..

@TimCampion That's why they're introducing the WYSIWYG editor in the first place, 'StackOverflow for Teams'. It's a paid version of an SE community.

@TimCampion I dunno, internet tech companies do things that annoy me all the time in terms of UX design. If possible, it would be good to have an unruly mob making an issue of every little change or reduction in functionality. I'm still heartbroken over the ruination of Opera after v12 =(. I'd rather pay money than have to suffer the whims of people who don't care about their users.

@DavidRoberts The original point of MO was that we would be a paid community. If we have to keep suffering stupid changes at the SE level, maybe the board should start looking to finally raise money and actually have our own paid community (and a corresponding level of priority).

(by executing an admiral from time to time =) )

@TimCampion Remember when Google claimed the same motivation for removing the API that allowed ad-blocking to work from chromium? This reminds me of that.

Glad you've come around to being suspicious of this stuff Tim!

Anyway the point of my post was that maybe the solution is giving grad students a kick in the pants for motivation.

@TimCampion I dunno that all sounds like a bunch of excuses to try to push through something unpopular. I've done this kind of thing many times in real life so that's why I don't trust them.