"I want to be in places where I can be myself, which might include chuckling at the same old jokes or discussing how much my job sucks. The more SO/SE is a place where I cannot be myself, the less desirable a place it is for me to be."
There's nothing stopping you from being your whole self on chat, but it's the relentless focus on signal that makes Stack Overflow what's wholly Stack Overflow.
You can't just build communities by randomly amassing people together. Communities need to have a common goal; in our case it's the building of the best goddamn Q&A sites we can possibly make out of the SE engine. That's what leads us to be "all business" on the site while wholly goofing off on chat :)
Well, that's your goal, for a very specific definition of "best". But as you can see from the feedback here, you're driving off otherwise qualified people who had different goals, or different notions of "best".
There's nothing stopping you from being your whole self on chat, but it's the relentless focus on signal that makes Stack Overflow what's wholly Stack Overflow.
You can't just build communities by randomly amassing people together. Communities need to have a common goal; in our case it's the building of the best goddamn Q&A sites we can possibly make out of the SE engine. That's what leads us to be "all business" on the site while wholly goofing off on chat :)