What about measuring number of upvotes on questions closed as not constructive /not about programming? I get the feeling that the technical questions are getting saturated, and that the community moved towards more soft issues (management, people skills etc). But soft issues get rejected. Perhaps start softie-programmer.com? At least do something other than closing them.
I'll be the first to tell you that our Q&A engine isn't necessarily effective at every topic. It's primarily effective at technical-ish topics where there can be somewhat definitive answers backed by a bit of research. That's still a pretty big chunk of the world, e.g.:
My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5 sites. I want to read 1 site with the content I want on it.
The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.
No, I don't think I've ever seen any official support for customizing themes. There is the Hot Dog theme for SO (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/34939/1288) that you might be able to use as a starting point for a custom user theme.
Sorry, should have been more clear. What I really meant was having things like the score, number of answers, etc, in nice big numbers next to the question.
Oh, not on the official site. I don't think that page is updated in real time, so the vote counts would be off by quite a bit for the hottest questions on each site. You might find an app on http://stackapps.com/ that uses the API though.
Do you visit only one site on the Internet? I just wonder how far you're willing to go here, because the beauty of the internet, to me, is that there are zillions of sites on lots of different topics.
As time goes on, the number has certainly decreased. Look at how popular rss ands sites like reddit are.
In fact, in terms of my actual daily "rotation" of sites, there are exactly 3: Reddit, HN, and Gmail.
I absolutely want to visit less sites. Stack-Exchange as a product for me would have significantly more value to me as an integrated network, rather than the current mish-mash of partitioned off sites. Let me search all questions, let all questions (in tags I don't have filtered, and of subject areas I've added) appear in my questions list.
I love SO and the SE network, but I have to admit that far too many interesting questions get closed on SO for being too broad or not having a specific answer. I understand that they want SO to be a fact-based QA site, but sometimes I find myself looking at a very interesting, closed SO question and wishing it hadn't been closed.
That, and the fact that the SO/Programmers distinction is rather confusing and unnecessary in my opinion.
