2

I deleted my original "Push more questions" drive, just to jump the gun but users replied with

quality is needed not quantity

Where are all these high quality questions for the last two days?!??

  • Total questions: 76
  • Total users: 163

There were only
3 questions asked today.
2 questions asked yesterday.

Only 40 users asked questions out of 163 available out of the 216 users committed.

From the Area51 FAQ

Commit! When a proposal enters the "Commitment" phase, we will present a petition for the site's creation. Interested users are asked to digitally "sign" the proposal with their full name to help assure that site will have an active community in those critical early days. While your full name is never shown, you may add an optional comment which is displayed alongside your username in the list of committers. To ensure that commitment is taken seriously, you may only commit to three sites at any one time.

Are we taking commitment seriously? Or should we just close this site?

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  • 1
    The "last two days" were the weekend; the entire SE network slows down a lot on the weekends. It's not a symptom of people "not taking the site seriously."
    – Laura
    Dec 5, 2011 at 16:39
  • Do you have data to back that up? @Laura How am I supposed to know this?
    – phwd
    Dec 5, 2011 at 17:31
  • You can tell by the shape of the graphs on Quantcast, which is publicly available. Every five days, there's a 2-day dip, no matter which metric you look at. quantcast.com/stackexchange.com#traffic
    – Laura
    Dec 5, 2011 at 18:16
  • According to the Area51 stats - the number of questions isn't unduly low, and we are only a private beta. I don't think we need to worry unduly about that yet.
    – iandotkelly Mod
    Dec 6, 2011 at 0:35
  • Seems the number of questions asked daily is now increasing again.
    – Mnementh
    Dec 6, 2011 at 11:52

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
6

I think most commited users asked their questions spared for this beta on the first days. Now we some drought on new questions as it is hard to come up with new. I think new users have fresh questions, so as the beta goes public this number will go up again. I think the private beta is more for defining the scope of the questions that should be asked. But only three questions a day don't define a scope. So we should come up with some more I think.

4

Taking this site seriously means asking questions when the need arises, not just to create activity.

I think the number of questions is good for the subject. What we need is more users.

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    +1 for quality questions rather than artificially creating activity. Just because this site now exists doesn't mean we have a deadline on posting all of the questions about all of the movies ever up until this point.
    – Laura
    Dec 5, 2011 at 16:41
  • Every site needs more users but you committed to the site. Commitment started 12 months ago. Why didn't people promote for more users then? It's a weak argument to say what we need are more users when private beta is about the users we currently have. Right before today I had high doubts of this site even leaving private beta. The text is in bold. Active community, not just quality questions.
    – phwd
    Dec 5, 2011 at 17:27
  • As Mnementh says more questions gives more chance to create the scope and if we aren't creating the scope what are we actually doing in private beta???
    – phwd
    Dec 5, 2011 at 17:32
  • @Laura wrong, we are artificially creating activity. That activity comes from the questions in the definition phase. I didn't sit down and magically think of those 10 questions I asked. I sat down and said "hmm, let's see if these questions will work to shape the scope"
    – phwd
    Dec 5, 2011 at 17:35
  • @Pubby If you truly think the site needs more users in order to define its scope and create enough good content to set an example for when it goes public...invite more movie experts. There's a big yellow box on the home page that says "Invite Fellow Experts," which is there for precisely that purpose. Type in an email address, and maybe a personal message, and invite away. Alonzo is correct, however; the majority of activity should be coming from the people who committed to the proposal.
    – Laura
    Dec 5, 2011 at 18:19
  • 1
    @Alonzo I'm confused. Are you or aren't you creating artificial activity? Did you just think up all of those questions during private beta, or have they been stockpiled from the Area51 process? Good questions are hard to come up with, so if people didn't have them ready (from Area51, or just off the top of their heads) when the site went into private beta, you can't just command people to come up with questions. I do agree that people who have committed should be more active...but you can't force it.
    – Laura
    Dec 5, 2011 at 18:23
  • Yeah I did confuse myself there reading it over. The questions from Area51 should be the questions that we are getting from this site. Since those questions are what defined the Movies proposal. Good questions are hard to come by thus I sit down and artificially create some. Where artificially means I didn't ideally want to know the answer. I just looked at a scene and thought how can I make this into a question. These questions aren't items that have been bothering me for months (except the army reserve question, that's not artificial).
    – phwd
    Dec 5, 2011 at 18:33
  • I don't want to force users to be more active, but if you sign a petition you might as well abide by it. @Laura (Anyway, thanks for discussing it with me, I understand your side a lot more now).
    – phwd
    Dec 5, 2011 at 18:34

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