@FranckDernoncourt yes to all of the above

@JonathanReez Meta.SE: Does removing hot network questions on a SE site increase participation (= more views, more answers, more comments, more votes) on this SE site?. That'd be interesting if anyone has done some analysis on it. No idea on my side since I don't know the HNQ algo.

@FranckDernoncourt I think the right question is why the feature was added in the first place: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/325060/…

My observation is that question of "racy" nature (sex, drugs, crime) attract a lot of attention but little follow up participation. More boring questions might get less clicks but the clicks they do get tend to attract insightful answers and improve long term participation.

You also need to consider that the best traffic source for Travel.SE is Google searches and few people would explicitly search for controversial sex/drugs+travel stuff. Most people just search for mundane every day problems.

you can confirm this on Data.SE by sorting Travel.SE questions by their upvotes/views ratio - Qs without a lot of upvotes but a lot of views are things like: travel.stackexchange.com/questions/11066/…