Maybe it's interesting to you since HN is your baby and it's fun to watch people use your creation in unexpected ways, but for us, it's lowering the value/utility.
One thing that I've found entertaining in my short time on this site is the surprising number of semi-hidden features. It's almost like the In-N-Out of tech sites. And now I know where to find the secret menu :). Thanks!
I think this could be a shorter course to the problem described by loginx above
>>My only concern is really that in the short/medium term, this could lead to a large influx of freeloaders from other communities, who may have no interest in "paying it forward", but mostly in dropping by for a quick freebie, while not contributing anything.<<
that's pretty cool. I know it would be a little crazy to implement but having the ability to build some special pages like this would be cool on a user level. Unless it's already there and I haven't seen it (Maybe something as simple as filters?).
Nice. Is this something you'd like to simply run its course? Given the nature of it, it would seem the better thing to do would be to split Ask and Offer into distinct pages, and offer both up on the header.
Gizmodo does something like this but with all content. Every post has tags and you can filter the stream by excluding certain tags (or only looking at certain tags). It's very nice. Maybe that could be done as a long term solution for all future problems like this.
I find it interesting that you are saying its lowering the value/utility of the community here, but in one of these "Offer HN" threads you requested help not too long ago