The Axon Terminal - 2012-04-25

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4:56 PM

Scary:

Blog - Stack Exchange: When a Site Grows Quiet

Shog9 on April 25, 2012

In the lifecycle of a Stack Exchange site, we’ve long held the philosophy that “it takes as long as it takes” to build a sustainable community:

The simple answer is, it takes as long as it takes. We’ll wait. If a site needs more activity, go out and evangelize it. As long as your site shows steady progress and continues to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions, it will march on.

But when a site struggles to maintain any semblance of steady progress — when it’s struggling to garner an audience, a healthy core of experts, and a steady stre …

(we're not getting shut down, some other sites are though)

2 hours later…

7:20 PM

heh, I just came in here to post that myself @Ben

This week is still crazy. Next week should be more reasonably paced for me so maybe then I can hook up with Aarthi to ask for help promoting our site

Now, I am not too concerned because the blog post says:

> In the lifecycle of a Stack Exchange site, we’ve long held the philosophy that “it takes as long as it takes” to build a sustainable community. [...] But when a site struggles to maintain any semblance of steady progress — when it’s struggling to garner an audience, a healthy core of experts, and a steady stream of questions — it becomes increasingly unlikely that the site will find a core audience to sustain it

We do still have steady progress

progress is nowhere near where I want it but we do have about 1-3 new questions per day

I was about to ask if we did have any steady progress

I haven't been watching that closely

at least a couple new users per day, 1-3 new questions per day average...

Also, Astronomy was in beta for 300+ days

Economics, 197... Literature, 260... Firearms, 176... Healthcare IT, 196... Theoretical Physics, 226

Now Firearms is a bit scary as we're nearing our 100 day mark

But, no question, our stats need serious work:

98

Cognitive Sciences – cogsci.stackexchange.com

Beta Q&A site for practitioners and research professionals of the cognitive sciences

Currently in public beta.

As I have said before, my most serious concern about this is lack of experts

I feel that's why our answered%, avid users, and answer ratio are all so low

And that is mentioned specifically in the blog...

in fact we're remarkably similar to Theoretical Physics in our stats.

7:39 PM

We're a much wider field with many more people interested though, TP is pretty limited

Yeah

Which is not good news for us :-(

7:56 PM

We just haven't found our audience...TP probably just didn't have an audience

Artem Kaznatcheev

8:15 PM

This is frightening. However, we should not respond with a knee-jerk reaction. It is tempting to use the closure of TP.SE and the other sites as an argument for lowering standards to allow more questions, but I still don't think that is a viable case in the long term. Remember, econ.SE was closed as well... and that site probably has an internet-interest base that is also significant (kind of how the brain-stuff interest base on the internet is huge) but the site was still closed.

What can we learn from both TP.SE and econ.SE?

8:35 PM

Off topic:

2

Q: How to deal with pressure in academic contests?

I have noticed that in computer programming competitions teams have a hard time coping with pressure. There are a series of programming contests all with the same format. At the most important competition (called the "World Finals") teams seem to perform significantly worse than in any other comp...

(Why the hell does that have 3 upvotes)

Artem Kaznatcheev

@BenBrocka I have voted to close as off-topic, I did not downvote because I feel I downvote too often...

Oh, just noticed it is a 1 rep user...still, what on earth.

8:54 PM

1

A: When will we get latex mathematics support (i.e., MathJax)?

Mathjax has been enabled on cogsci. If you find any issues please report them here on meta.

@BenBrocka good point!

Artem Kaznatcheev

@BenBrocka Hoooray!

@ArtemKaznatcheev Yes. This is the way to approach it! Not "OMG LET'S PANIC!!!!" but "How can we do better than the sites which were closed?"

No, let's panic and set things on fire

Seems like the most productive way to go about it

Artem Kaznatcheev

Mmmm, fire reminds me of bacon, and bacon is tasty

8:57 PM

@BenBrocka Closed

@BenBrocka oh you pyromaniac you :-p

Artem Kaznatcheev

@JoshGitlin With that question closed it means we haven't received a question in 4 days... this doesn't sound good.

@jeromyanglim You should probably Accept Geoff's answer and you may want to add featured

@ArtemKaznatcheev this is true

@JoshGitlin You can add featured now, I would. It's a significant feature change

I want it to be featured but I want the first answer to state we have it now

otherwise it looks like a discussion which is featured

Also, related to closure @Artem and @Ben: blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/04/when-a-site-grows-quiet/…

> when the Area 51 page is mostly red and orange, that’s concerning

:-(

Artem Kaznatcheev

@JoshGitlin How does our site-analytics look?

9:04 PM

Okay. Not great

2 hours ago, by Josh Gitlin

at least a couple new users per day, 1-3 new questions per day average...

Artem Kaznatcheev

@JoshGitlin what is our rate of question closure?

Not sure what the rate is. The average is less than 0.5 question closure per day

it was nearly 1 / day before. It's way down

The real question is the %

Artem Kaznatcheev

What is the precise average for new questions then? 1-3 is much less precise than 0.5... are we closing half the new questions?

Well I'm specifically being semi vague as this tool says in big bright color at the top, "analytics data is intended for moderators only; please don't share the specifics of this data in public"

:-)

But that said I am not sure how top get our % of closed questions

Also, rats: I just went to try and set upa time to talk to Aarthi about improving our stats and just missed her.

I will see what resources are available to us. If we can get a wider audience we can probably boost our stats way up. We'll see!

9:12 PM

But hell, I'd rather get questions and close them than not get questions.

13 of the last 100 questions were closed, not counting any deletions or reopenings if any

Artem Kaznatcheev

Our first MathJaxified answer: cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/139/29

@ArtemKaznatcheev awesome, thanks for the edit. I don't know how to use MathJax so I'm no help with that

@ArtemKaznatcheev nice

For comparison, UX has 26 out of 100

Not our best week for closes though (as in that's fairly high), and we're aggressive about closing dupes (which aren't a problem here yet)

@BenBrocka No deletions sinc April 8th

My concern still is the lack of experts...

9:17 PM

I think Programmers has been beating everyone on close %s

lmao no surprise

My concern is the lack of content to bring people in and keep them reading

@BenBrocka Yup. I agree with this

I wouldn't worry about the unanswered rate; if anything they're puzzles for experts to solve. Problem is there's not all that many of them and not nearly enough breadth to cover the interests of everyone that should be looking at the site

Yeah. We need to promote ourselves more

Everyone who wants to help our site grow should be sure to read the blog post about how to promote your site

3

I'd love to see SE give us some funds to help

But we need to prove to them that we're worth it!

Artem Kaznatcheev

9:25 PM

@JoshGitlin How would money help us promote ourselves?

Google adwords. Presence at a Cog Sci conference. Drawing attention, marketing, etc

Basically everything the blog post says :-)

Artem Kaznatcheev

If we somehow convinced the overlords that our site is about research, then we could probably get funding for cogsci.SE pizza-lunches and fellowships, like many of the research-related sites got towards the end of last year

Yeah, that's the spirit

Artem Kaznatcheev

but I am not sure how that turned out in the end. I was thinking of applying for fellowships from cstheory.SE and ling.SE, but the amount of money was not worth the effort of writing up good proposals and then spending my time working on those projects... but that is mostly because I am lazy.

Yeah, and as is we really just need more content. More members adding more content...

9:30 PM

Wow, computational-modeling has 11 followers

We're showing our CS roots :P

I haven't asked a question in over amonth. I'll do my part... will drum up some new content :-D

9:59 PM

Guys, I don't mean to scare you, but I have a gut feeling we are actually on Shog9's radar for a future round of closings. We really need more users in order to proove that we can get a target audience who's willing and able to use a Stack Exchange site.

Artem Kaznatcheev

10:12 PM

@JoshGitlin are there some reasons behind your gut?

um... not really

Basically his blog post is saying the problem with those sites that were closed was they were too fringe for the actual audience that uses Stack Exchange sites

And we need more users, possibly because we are too fringe for the actual audience that uses Stack Exchange sites

but I could just be overly worried

@BenBrocka You called?

Pffft, ignore him, he's a troublemaker :-)

How are you @Steven?

@JoshGitlin Give me those posters I can hang up!

Good point, with all the crazyness with work I totally forgot!

I'll ask our lead designer for assistance tomorrow

10:20 PM

@JoshGitlin Oh god ... the whole point of sites like this is it's an experiment whether or not we can attract a different audience. Closing them for that reason would be ... er .. stupid?

I may be misreading! :-)

Check our mod room @StevenJeuris :-)

I'm fine by the way. Thank you. Quite busy as usual. :)

Glad to hear it

10:41 PM

OK, I gotta jet, catch you guys later!

@JoshGitlin Cya!

jet as in airplane? Or that's just a regular word for 'to go'?

Artem Kaznatcheev

@StevenJeuris @Josh drives a jet-fighter to work

11:03 PM

@ArtemKaznatcheev Oh .. that does explain it.

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