@ChristianHummeluhr But please enlighten me with your frustrations.

:)

I'll be off to the sack, but am happy to comment tomorrow.

The close-votes seem to be hanging in mid-air.

I have often noted that 5 votes is a lot at CogSci.

@ChristianHummeluhr - basically 5 is too much for a small site like this?

Anyway - I think you did a good job.

I think I favorited an oldie or two and will see what i can do.

in the end answering them is always better than removing 'em

@AliceD I came around here about two years ago, when there was slightly more activity. Even then, I think close votes tended to linger.

I'm mostly frustrated that the community 'leaders' don't really do anything that normal users can't do. Meta questions come and go and often (in the past, anyway) racked up good score, but no one ever seems to say "okay, it seems people think we should do this." At the same time, it's hard to speak out because those people are the only thing holding the place together, and they fundamentally don't seem interested in ... anything, I guess.

The problem is that, however admirable the efforts have been, it's just objectively not enough. There were about 120 unanswered questions two years ago and %Answered at 88. We generate more views, presumably from search engines, but we don't retain users that can answer questions. Even that core of highly dedicated people are obviously fading and have been largely inactive in a non-moderating capacity for very long.

I think it's because we have too much crap, basically. Good intentions are all well and nice, but (as many people have impotently noted on Meta) people who are qualified to answer have extremely limited time. If there's too much crap, then it won't be useful for them, and they won't stick around unless they are motivated by community building. No other science SE would accept half the questions that are rotting away in the backlog.

Similarly, I think it's admirable to say that it's better to answer than to close, but I disagree. Your time is valuable and scarce, and there are many good questions in the queue.

It's frustrating to see CogSci die in slow motion, because it could've been a legitimately great resoure on par with Biology instead of its oxygen-starved birth twin.

(I don't mean to take a dump on Jeromy and the other core guys because they've done much much more than me for this site, just focusing on the frustrating aspects here.)

I actually stopped coming here for a year+, but I checked in on a whim and saw some new people that looked worthwhile, then thought I would help try to keep the ball rolling.

Just to end on a slightly constructive note, I think if we could get 5-6 people coordinated on a strategy that's more like Biology than the softie we've been playing the past three years, we could clean the place up quickly. With low quality questions gone and a small energized core of people posting high quality questions/answer, finding a good question would be easy, so we'd be able to retain people because it would have ongoing value to them.