@RoryAlsop hi, not to drag this out, but, it seems that you are talking about events perhaps like the Open Source meetup my city has, which gets 30 people at the monthly meetings. There is an Open Source conference coming up in a month, and a related annual one that got 4000 attendees last year - in a city with more tech activity. Sure. But what about less mainstream topics? They just fizzle instead of creating a community. Kind of like SE topics.

I thought that the internet would be a way that people with less popular interests could meet and do things together. Not really. Without a critical mass and a lot of effort, it doesn't go. Even long standing groups can just poop out. It makes me wonder why churches can last so long? Oh yeah, popularity. Sports... Etc. My fav musical group, not so much.

@ScottRowe the internet cannot fix unpopular subjects. A niche subject that only has 30 fans globally will be unlikely to get physical meetups. If a long standing group is fizzling out it means you need to find a way to keep it interesting.

Also, while I have some bands I will see every chance I can get, I wouldn't go to a thing just to meet other fans... It's the band that interests me, not other fans

Thoughts about closing this question as primarily opinion based?

And prolly this too unless someone wants to edit it to be about general language choice rather than a specific language.

Hmmm. 666 days and now 666 questions. Are we being told something?

@BenI. thank you, yes, i've answered it =)

@Buffy That means we're over 4/3 now!

@heather And it's an excellent answer, too :)

@RoryAlsop As someone who has been around for awhile, do you have any predictions about this site?

@BenI. well, I don't have the internal statistics for this site. Let me grab the external ones to see what things look like

Thanks!

Hark is late to the party. That question was closed hours ago. :P

@BenI. Quantcast data goes back to around March 2017 for this site. Peak visits were bigger in that March to August 2017 time period, but the baseline visits have slowly increased, and certainly over the past 5 months there is a slow increase in visits and uniques

quantcast.com/measure/cseducators.stackexchange.com#/…

I don't have a login for quantcast

further down that page the Engagement score looks okay

You can set up a free one in 20 seconds

One of the things I have found being involved with 10 or 11 SE sites from start, is that things don't slowly accelerate. There is always slow increase, then a knee in the graph and increase is at a greater pace and so on. Each knee kickstarts more visits and activity

But it is good to help through things like: merch - I took a box of Security.SE t-shirts to a big security conference when Sec.SE was very young, and we got a big boost

And with Music.SE I sent a lot of emails and pings to friends of mine going to NAMM and other music conferences just to get them to link tweets to questions on the site

@RoryAlsop Did SE provide those while you were still in beta?

@BenI. those were quite early, but just out of beta if I recall correctly

So there is a lot you can do to give things a nudge. For CSE, the graph is quite periodic, as you'd expect with the academic year, so trying to get champions from major edu establishments would be great

do professors need assistance over summer vacation? get them coming here

I can't seem to get the quantcast email to confirm my account :P

But I see the steady increase you mentioned..

@RoryAlsop Can you expand on this a little? I'm not sure what you mean.

(I see the steady increase in the admin stats)

Slow but steady

@BenI. my expectation would have been that the graph of new visitors and posts would increase slowly but exponentially, curving up, but what I saw was generally straight lines with kinks as something changed, leaving another straight line at greater gradient etc

AH I see. From what I'm seeing in my own data, those often appear to be driven by big HNQs.

@BenI. For most of my sites I am quite against HNQ, as it does cause some issues, but for a small site it can be very valuable, yes

But what I don't understand is, why, when our traffic has been following the pattern you describe, would our posts/day not also be going up? The trendline has been down over the last year, not up.

Actually, never mind, I know the answer to that. That's because we had a small group of core, devoted power users who posted a lot, but eventually wandered off.

Work calls, I have to go. Thanks for the insights, Rory!

@BenI. no worries

@BenI. the ones that seem to do really well have a reasonable sized core so that when some wander, others have already taken their place

@BenI. not all who wander are lost, but they do tend to post less frequently. I switched from teaching to programming, and also, my thought is still that teaching programming is not really something that can be systematized. Was reading on Electronics SE about misconceptions of electricity... It seems similar. We have to learn in spite of the available information, not from it.