Yes, I'm off SE in principle. A) I don't want to produce free content for a company that doesn't seem to give a shit about that content. B) I got an industry offer and went back to project management, so I'm out of academia anyway.

CogSci basically is stagnant and possibly dying already, and has been for years. Every year between March and May, someone seems to get motivated to fix the declining metrics and starts up an effort to bring them back up. Then 3-5 people join in and start bringing it up.

Things go well while the initial momentum keeps a sort of focus on problem solving, but then they peter out when we start dealing with strategic issues like "what are we going to do with all the terrible questions based on fairy tale assumptions that drive away any reasonable expert user we might actually want". Repeat next year.

That's my two cents, don't spend it all at once

@ChristianHummeluhr Thanks for explaining and a terribly pity to see you running off that way. Sorry to hear SE treated you this way after all your efforts.

But repeated cycles of effort may be necessary to push things through. Previous efforts will have improved the quality now. A living site needs work. Same stuff ending up in meta is part of that. Further, unresponsiveness from SE does not necessarily mean unwillingness. Plus, this community appreciates your efforts, regardless of the SE factory behind it. Reconsider.

Previous efforts only improved the quality as a once-off thing. The efforts did not improve the process that brought about the original situation. We're still "debating" the same issues we were when I joined in 2013, with no resolution in sight on any of them, and no motion towards a final decision on any of them. The transparent lack of support from on high was simply the clincher for me--why struggle through that level of inertia when even SE itself doesn't seem to care overmuch?

A living site needs work, but like I said, I'm not sure this is really a living site.

The only thing that keeps it going is that we've had the same three moderators since inception. Perversely, however, I think it's also what keeps us stagnant. At this point it's only a matter of time until one of the moderators calls it quits for life reasons, or just getting bored, and then the site goes into terminal decline.

Jeremy sort of already did, I suppose.

@ChristianHummeluhr Jeremy did not, Josh did, but that is when the SE community team offered us Artem

I'm certain the same can happen again in case other mods step down.

In fact, there is potentially something to be said for a site with such an academic scope to accept more moderators, and thus be able to more quickly step our foot down to maintain quality.

That's likely something the SE community team is more wiling to discuss.

Another thing that can be done at this point is to formalize a stricter guideline for good vs. bad questions. I believe over the course of all these years we did get stricter and I'm not certain whether that is reflected on Meta.

Also, our stats keeps rising, ... steadily but they do.

@StevenJeuris - I think that @ChristianHummeluhr may have a valid point that the active members here don't seem to bother so much about graduation. I have one explicit supporter in my meta post and he's rather new here. Question then is - would you and @ArtemKaznatcheev be willing to mod-close potential close-worthy questions as brought forward by me?

I can't seem to ping Artem here

Something just urges me to kill that 80% and bring it up by 10%

Such a pity @ChristianHummeluhr won't come to the rescue.

Apart from that, I'm having a few oldies in my vizor that I'll try to answer. They're pretty hard to answer though, but they're good questions worthy of a decent answer

@StevenJeuris would you have the numbers of active members here? As in, folks that regularly access the review queues? If that is less than, say 5, my whole effort is futile without you mods jumping in

Imo, mods really shouldn't be the ones to kill a series of questions anyway. Not that I wouldn't welcome such a thing...

@Christiaan As inactive the main site is at times, the meta site is even less active. And yes, as I stated before, I (and Artem seemed to indicate the same) are willing to mod-close more aggressively. You can flag them in case you feel even less than three initial close votes is warranted. At times I already close question all by myself, mostly when they are clearly 'self-help', which we know by now need to be closed as quickly as possibly.

@Christiaan I still don't get why it is stuck at 80%. With your recent efforts (and visible stats) I would have expected it to go up already.

@Christiaan We have around 25 weekly active users. I can not see whether they access the review queue.

(or whether they can close vote)

The main thing that keeps rising are the repeated visits; active users (that post) not that much. However, I have seen more and more people posting that conduct actual research, as opposed to just the typical interested passers-by. With a bit of luck the site will thus seem attractive enough for them to stick around. Posting quality content will always have a positive effect in this regard.