@AlekFröhlich I agree that having higher-quality lists would be helpful. Stack Exchange may (or may not) be the best place for that. You made good points above, but here are the counterpoints: meta.stackexchange.com/a/98366/137452

I see

I would guess that the need for strict policies stems from the fact that one big-list could incentivize further big-lists

That is, newbies may see big-lists as on-topic (and as questions even more important than the common SE questions, since they tend to get more upvotes)

That could lead a SE site astray

On another note, though, one might argue that it brings the SE community together (in a forum-ish fashion)

This could be good in our case, were we have few active users

Bounties also look promising as a way to incentivize more users to be active; don't you think?

@AlekFröhlich I don't think the reputation of the poster is all that useful though... it's a very subjective issue. I like goodreads reviews but not really of cookbooks

@AlekFröhlich I agree with the post Nic linked to about there being no way to tell which answer is good with such questions. Answers are by default ordered by votes. If it's just a list people will maybe read the first few answers and maybe upvote those, so the oldest answers will end up with the most upvotes regardless of how good newer ones might be. That's a problem with all questions but it's worse the more possible answers there are and the more subjective people's preferences are likely to be

product recommendation questions also tend to attract spam

(but lately I've been more bothered about people's overzealous attitude to removing posts (and punishing their authors) that have the slightest hint of self-promotion than by spam itself)

but this site has so few questions and participants that any reasonably on topic question is a relief haha

@AlekFröhlich my experience is that bounties don't really work, partly because they don't get enough prominence since recent redesigns

Putting a bounty on a subjective question like that seems likely to be fruitless :(

also, when you're just starting out on the site, it's really hard to earn that first bit of rep to get super useful basic privileges like voting up and down, commenting everywhere etc

I would refund your bounty if I could

@AlekFröhlich your post could indeed be good in that way (as well as in other ways) because probably many people will feel they have something to offer :)

Btw I don't recommend making it "community wiki" - that feature doesn't serve much purpose since suggested edits were introduced

One idea that I've been pondering lately is whether big-list questions should be given a home on the meta site. And/or maybe they should be limited to a certain rate (monthly? quarterly?) and the community selects the next big-list question with voting. And maybe it could be featured on the main site for a while. Not sure yet if any of that is a good idea, but I've been thinking about it.