@DutchCat – I guess I see this as stripping off a layer. I think if you were trained to ask questions that would generate discussions, but which FIRST needed to be answered in a Yes/No format, I would say you’re simply living under a constraint that doesn’t exist here, but there is no explicit rule AGAINST formatting your questions in that way. I think it’s more a matter of “can the question ONLY be answered in a Y/N” (bad question) vs. “can the question be answered as a Y/N, or can it be answered in some other way, or if it DOES require a Y/N response, does it welcome an explaination of that Y/N” (good question). In your example, I’m assuming you would have phrased the speed of light question as “Can you tell me why…”, people would have answered Y if they thought they could, and they would provide answers explaining their understanding if they chose to do so. Nothing different here, except most people won’t bother to answer “no”, they’ll simply not answer the question. The idea that the question might get missed by people who could answer it is largely a condidtion dependent on how well you choose the topics, because we all put our interests and Fluther lets us know if there are questions which meet our topic interests. We can also look at newly posted questions if we are looking for more questions than Fluther suggests to us, and we can add topics of interest to our profile if we feel we are missing relevant questions. But this being an intellectually curious community, if someone saw a question phrased as “can you tell me….”, if they had an opinion, or facts which were relevant to that question, chances are they would share. Again, using your example, yes, you can find all sorts of essays, scientific papers, etc. to “answer” the question, but the goal here is to tap the collective, see what we think and what ideas we have to share. I say it’s the same goal, just less formal, without that added requirement. I don’t think if you were to continue to ask questions generally the way you were used to asking them, you would run afoul of the rules I guess is my bottom line, and I think you will get used to the culture quickly and start to see how other people phrase their questions.