@Secespitus about privilege levels (most recently) and graduation in general: I'm suggesting a tactical move. They won't give us the big thing we want, but they claimed to be aiming to decouple things -- elections, site design, privilege levels, maybe community ads, etc. I'm suggesting we try making the case for each individual thing as it comes up. We can make a strong case for increased privilege levels; let's do it and push.

Will they ignore us? Maybe, but the "clamour" post on MSE had a score of 150 last I looked, so we're getting support from outside our community. My hope is that one or both of two things will happen: (a) they'll start paying attention to all that support, and/or (b) they'll at least do some specific things to make our lives easier, giving both sides a "win".

If the community sees some progress, even if it's not all we want, that might counteract some of the discouragement. If SE can give us something even without "giving in" on graduation, they have a path forward for other sites in the same boat and they get to check the "helped Writing at least some" box.

I don't know if it will work. I'd like to try. I can't do it with the voting the meta post currently has, but it's a new question so it hasn't gotten a lot of attention yet so that's fine. If it comes, we can push for privilege levels. This doesn't mean we should give up on the offensive "beta" label, but let's not block on that either.

I can definitely see where you are coming from and I'll gladly support you and everyone else who wants to try by weighing in, writing long answers about why it's necessary, voting, ... But I very much doubt quite a lot of your assumptions.

1) They are reducing attention to meta currently. Making a big call-for-action won't make them like meta more, it will probably only reinforce their point that meta is only a burden for their employees.

2) They are doing nothing for all the people on StackOverflow to make their lifes easier. And they are a very big group on the network with a (comparatively) lot of impact outside of the network. They don't want a win-win situation - they want a WIN situation for themselves and don't care about the other side in that regard.

3) I don't think it's about "giving in" - it's just not anywhere on the priority list.

4) They don't have a "help Writing at least some" box and they can't even use it to appease to the bigger part of the network. We are too small and everyone is completely focused on the Big Three, especially SO.

I removed my comments by the way and upvoted your answer so that we can start getting some attention to the movement.

Your pessimism is well-founded, and I'm not optimistic either. I'm not suggesting that we invest the effort in a big push or anything; it's more that, serendipitously, somebody else already invested that effort to make a good meta proposal, so the additional work is to support it and try to get SE to consider it. Community members who agree with the proposal just need to vote. If the votes happen, I'll escalate the request.

Either way, it's in public -- if SE grants the request, they start to restore some lost goodwill from the way they've treated our request to graduate or at least remove an offensive label. If they don't respond or if they say no, that's one more piece of public evidence (rather than just feelings) that they don't care about some of their sites, which other sites can take under advisement.

So far the community doesn't seem to be too interested in getting higher reputation thresholds, but yeah, we'll see how this plays out.

Yeah, the question's only a few hours old and has 28 views; we'll see what happens.