<p>I disagree with one of your metrics - I hope that I am allowed to do that if I have a good reason.  I think the zeroth metric to return is value.  Value can hard to measure because it can mean different things to different people.  One person's cost is another person's benefit, sometimes.  Metrics should be built to measure and allow value to be maximized.</p>

<p>First off, CV is one my favorite sites.  It really is.  I can learn.  I can be challenged.  There is a community of excellent and admirable folks who treat each other well and if you treat them well and with respect you can ask good questions and get good (and sometimes truly amazing) answers.  I am on here at least daily.  </p>

<p>I'm going to tell you something personal, but brief.  I had a neighbor that I tried to build any sort of connection with for years.  One day I was making cookies, and had a thought.  Even though I had sugar, I went and asked if I could borrow a cup of sugar.  They loaned it to me, and in return I brought them some cookies.  The next day there was a knock asking if they could borrow some butter.  One day!  By giving my neighbor a chance to give, I got the chance to have a good friend.  It was a good win, and a win-win.</p>

<p>There are a number of different demographics that use the various Stack Exchange sites, and I think that CV as-it-is offers things that other, adjacent technical ones (Stack Overflow, mathematics, computational science) do not - an entrance to the community for "entry level folks" or even "highly capable but new-to-statistics" folks.  For me that "entrance" or "accessible participation" has been through the older unanswered questions.  I have earned "necromancer" by looking through unanswered questions under my favorite tags and seeing a "gem" that I know just the right answer for.  There is a lot (whole honking lot) that I don't know and so having the right (non-zero) questions down my (atypical) alley has been good.  If all the questions were answered then I would not have had that opportunity.  This community would have been a lot more closed to me.  Being able to answer questions, even if they are sometimes less technical, is like CV giving me the chance to share a cup of sugar.</p>

<p>One thing that I have oblique (pun intended) view into here is that this site, I think, returns very great value to the technical community.  I will see someone who acts "newbish" asking several questions on a topic, and a few months later will see a published article on the topic.  The person who published ins't always the "newb", but I suspect they were encouraged to go down the road they did because of the newb's question.  I would bet that between 10% and 25% of tough questions here result in things like masters theses, PhD dissertations, and other peer-reviewed/published work and software packages that result in substantial improvement in the field.  Seriously - I think you should apply for an NSF grant on the topic.  I think that CV could be responsible for several hundreds to thousands of meaningful steps forward in statistics, the field that is most applied outside of directly engineering a product.  </p>

<p>The "Nobel Prize" syndrome causes folks who found buried treasure in their backyard to go try to climb mount impossible.  I think that all treasure is buried in backyards.  I think that one of the things that CV does is help folks figure out how to look around where they are and find the unknown and fun, and that is where buried treasure is always found.</p>

<p>I have never successfully used chat here.  I think that it missed its window.  Around 10 years ago it would have been the only way to go.  Now, unless it is a longer-term conversation, perhaps like on the back-side of Wikipedia pages, I don't know if it is ever going to gain traction.  Is it really such a bad thing if it doesn't catch on?  </p>
