Why we're stuck growing

Question

So, I was wandering the site last days, weeks, months. I've seen many questions regarding building or managing communities, I've seen many answers which are helpful, I've seen the same users over and over again. But somewhen we suddenly stopped growing, well, we didn't shrink, too. It's like we are on a constant level now.

At times, some questions are asked but currently it's at a low score of 0.2% per day which makes a question every five days. It's somewhat 'depressing' to see how this community is suffering from the lack of content. I often come here since I enjoy building up communities from scratch. However, lately I've been less active due this lack of content, it somehow makes me feel sad. I saw this site in way better conditions, right now the sites isn't degenerating but decaying.

We're a bunch of administrators, moderators, community managers, and so on, yet, we can't manage to get this site growing. We tried to make us more visible to other SE-communities by providing and showing ads. We thought about the problems by holding discussion about the things going on. However, the situation didn't improve. The meta post I linked had better stats than we have now.

@MonicaCellio said:

This site started out as Moderators.SE and then broadened its scope a few months into beta. I think we are still recovering from that; the original scope was too narrow and failed to attract (or keep) enough people, and the broader scope hasn't "gotten out there" yet.

I don't think so. We still cover the original scope since we are about building communities. Therefore we should have the same mass of content as before and the additional we gained by broaden our scope. But we don't have this content, actually we have less content.

@AnnonomousPenguin stated:

Our biggest problem is that we do have such a limited audience.

I can't agree with this, too. I did some research and found a subreddit on redit called 'Modhelp'. (They have even more subreddits, just google it.) Well, I guess they slightly have more content than we do. Of course, I can't compare Reddit with StackExchange since Reddit is widely known. We do have a limited audience on StackExchange. Why?

• We can't really compete with The Workplace. This community is way bigger than ours and also established. Because the workplace is a kind of a community, too, we can't compete with them. They get questions because they have more experts over there. Our scope crosses with theirs so that many users are unsure where to ask and simply prefer to ask on The Workplace. The rate to get a qualified answer is higher since there are more users.
• Well, most people come to SE to discuss about their subject. Community Building is on the rise, nevertheless not a real subject yet. Therefore most people go easy on it. I often, and I'm sure you too, came across people stating building up a community is easy. It always makes me laugh if I see them failing. I usually recommend them to ask here then. But people still think, even after failure, that they just had a bad day. Community Building isn't recognized as a real topic that matters.
• Most problems can be discussed on the particular site itself by starting a discussion on Meta. There's no need to ask us since everything can be solved on the site itself.

Although we have a limited audience on StackExchange itself, we didn't think about the opportunity to promote us on bigger sites like the mentioned subreddit. We are deeply focused on SE. We do topic challenges but honestly, are they even worth the work right now? We could barely fulfill the last challenge by having one question regarding the topic in question.

We tried (don't know the current situation here -- sorry) to submit ads to other communities which are more or less suitable for our search of users. Well, why should anybody switch from The Workplace to Community Building?

We close questions which seem to be interesting for people. Yes, not everything is in our scope, yes, not everything as specific as we would like it to be. However, can we risk it to close questions which even were favorites from some users? The questions are that one and that one.

Then there's something that made me a little bit upset. A few days ago, @Phillip asked a question. He asked about a theoretical community. It was put on hold because it was too broad on the first sight. I decided to write a comment to point out the necessary points I'm interested in. He answered those and I voted to reopen that question again because I had enough information to give an answer. However, it disappeared then. I don't know if it was removed by himself or by moderators. But in both cases: Why did that even happen?

If he deleted it on his own, we clearly weren't as professional as we're supposed to be. I asked for detail, nobody else did. But as I voted to reopen, nobody else did. Why? I asked for the additional information and he happily provided it, if you need any further, you should ask so you can get the question back into the scope again, right? Maybe he wasn't interested in the content itself, too.

However, I'm really sad about the current situation because I know that we could easily get more content. We are community managers, and we are good at it. If we weren't, we wouldn't have so much reputation from so less questions. If we cooperated with sites outside of SE, we could maybe increase our general stats of contribution. Isn't this what we try to achieve? We want to grow! I want to give advice to fellow community builders since I often had problems. But right now, we're not really at it. We became kind of lazy.

There's always the point that we shouldn't force growth. Quality content is more worth than lots of content. Nevertheless, can we afford it shrinking on a lower level of contribution in order to keep up high quality content? That's what we do right now.

There's always room for improvement. We're stuck growing. The level of contribution is low, the content is a rarely seen Pokémon, new users are diamonds found in dark caves.

Should we try to get out of this, or let it hang there a little bit longer to see what it brings? Are we okay with the low rate of contribution or are we not?

I'm really interested in this discussion since I value this community. Can we pull the trigger and get back on the contributing track?

Answer 1

There's a lot here. I'll try to hit most of your comments.

We can't really compete with The Workplace. This community is way bigger than ours and also established. Because the workplace is a kind of a community, too, we can't compete with them. They get questions because they have more experts over there. Our scope crosses with theirs so that many users are unsure where to ask and simply prefer to ask on The Workplace. The rate to get a qualified answer is higher since there are more users.

I'm not active on Workplace, though I have visited it many times via the Hot Questions posts that appear on the sidebar. The questions have been interesting and educational. One thing I've noticed in those questions (and after a quick glance through their tour) is that they focus on issues within the professional environment, not on building communities. There are certainly areas that could overlap, especially with one of the items in our scope being:

Questions about both online and offline communities

"Communities" is very broad. I live in a community. I work in a different community. Within the work community their are various sub communities (IT, HR, Marketing, Engineering, etc. etc.) and within those there are even more sub communities (Engineers for valve mechanisms on an engine, engineers for fuel pumps, engineers for the entire engine product, Software developers, Server administrators, database administrators, etc. etc.). I have recreational activities in several communities.

"Communities" are groups of people that a feel connected to one another, because of common circumstances (work, same activity, similar geographic dwelling) and similar outlooks (let's all not get fired today, let's all go ride our bikes on Saturday, it seems odd that these last few years the river has been flooding our streets in April let's do something about it). The "Work" community is the area that I see an overlap possibly occurring.

Despite this small amount of overlap, I do not think Community Building could just be absorbed into Workplace and fit in. So much more of our content is about building these communities or managing these communities.

Well, most people come to SE to discuss about their subject. Community Building is on the rise, nevertheless not a real subject yet. [...] Community Building isn't recognized as a real topic that matters.

"Yet" is hopefully the key word. The field is growing. The ultimate goal would be to lay down the ground work now to attract those new community leaders that get hired in the coming years. To do that, we definitely need the content though.

Most problems can be discussed on the particular site itself by starting a discussion on Meta. There's no need to ask us since everything can be solved on the site itself.

Perhaps we can use this to our advantage though. Certain types of situations are relatively uncommon on Stack Exchange. When they pop up on a child-meta they are dealt with there and then mostly fade away. The reason I say that is because child metas are more rarely visited by drive by users. Those that DO visit, probably don't search as frequently for an obscure topic. Thus, that information fades until an "old timer" brings it back up or a moderator on another site has an issue that triggers a memory of some even from years ago.

Why don't we encourage generic versions of Meta drama to be questions here? An exact copy/paste of a Meta question wouldn't be appropriate (to specific to a single site or group of people), but we can boil it down to a generic version of events. One generic question that we've had since almost the beginning is about how to handle minority opinions so they aren't stomped out by the majority.

Other questions are common across child metas. Are the answers different on each? Perhaps (seriously, I don't know, I haven't wandered through all 130+ metas). But, if it's a common questions on the child metas, it's probably a common question in the community building world at large. Where is our copy of the question?

Although we have a limited audience on StackExchange itself, we didn't think about the opportunity to promote us on bigger sites like the mentioned subreddit. We are deeply focused on SE.

Yes we are. I agree that this is a flaw. Some non-spammy name dropping around the larger communities wouldn't hurt things around here. We've had discussions about the Stack Exchange bias and about encouraging questions about other networks. My take away from those is that more questions related to more types of communities is a good thing.

Then there's something that made me a little bit upset. A few days ago, @Phillip asked a question. He asked about a theoretical community. It was put on hold because it was too broad on the first sight. I decided to write a comment to point out the necessary points I'm interested in. He answered those and I voted to reopen that question again because I had enough information to give an answer. However, it disappeared then. I don't know if it was removed by himself or by moderators. But in both cases: Why did that even happen?

The user deleted the question almost exactly 24 hours after making edits based on your comment. Moderator involvement in the deletion didn't occur. I did cast the last close vote about 3 hours before the question was edited to include more information. It was put on hold two days after it was asked and one day after your comments for clarification. It was closed as unclear. The original question was very broad.

The item entered the reopen queue. From there it was voted on and the consensus was to leave it closed.

Should we try to get out of this, or let it hang there a little bit longer to see what it brings? Are we okay with the low rate of contribution or are we not?

I am all for more quality questions. Recruiting new members is important, but if I learned anything from April Fools day this year it's that you need the quality questions to get quality answers to get quality users.

What can we, the small community that is here now, do to provide quality questions? Those questions can be a springboard into other communities or may simply turn up in someone's Google search for the same issues. Our questions that have hit the Hot Questions list have drawn in traffic and answers from users around the network. My idea about wandering around the child metas may not be a bad idea.

Answer 2

Specifically regarding other platforms from your top post and some of the comments:

Concerning Platform Questions:

I think there is absolutely a question of perceived value of this site by users of other platforms, and that is working against us. I don't have a link handy, but I've brought up this site before in reddit threads while it was still "Moderators" and the users that replied to me didn't see the point when they could just go to on-platform Q&A places like /r/modhelp. There's certainly merit to that point. Why should they leave their platform when there are experts there? This problem persists even with our scope change, there are plenty of subreddits to discuss and Q&A about meta community issues.

It is a bit of a catch 22, because I feel that the best way to address these concerns is probably help is simply to grow our collection of quality questions/answers. But it isn't so simple, right? Who is going to ask those questions if end users feel that they could be answered better elsewhere?

For my part, I've posted questions that describe community building situations I've experienced on Reddit. I've found that is hard to post a lot of them without creating really contrived questions, a few were closed very early on for that reason. I expect that they would also be of dubious value to prospective users if they saw that it was just one guy asking the lion's share of questions for a given topic.

Concerning Technical Questions:

Perhaps another issue that hasn't been brought up yet in this discussion is that we've decided that questions that describe a community building issue, but have an answer that is purely a platform-specific technical solution, aren't really welcome here. Would that be worth revisiting in light of the current question drought? We have user testimony that suggests this is interrupting participation. There isn't really anything inherently wrong with that class of question, and we wouldn't be the first SE site to have scopes that are sufficiently similar so that a question is appropriate on more than one site.

Slightly broadening our scope in this respect would help to build our local knowledge-base on platform-specific issues. Even if they are of a technical bent... I think the key distinction that lands a question as on-topic for us is that the technical solution solves some problem that has been presented as a community issue.

Potential pain-points/things to work through:

• We could work to encourage questions that miss that mark by editing instead of closing. Especially the first few questions of this nature that get asked, we should treat them like they were asked in private beta and work to clean them up, making sure that they really do work on our site.
• This Meta.SE answer has some good discussion on the potential for "cross-site duplicates" and when they are okay/not-okay.
• Add WebApps as a migration route? There are cases where a platform question will just be cut-and-dry off-topic for us, and we should be able to kick those off to the right Q&A site without frustrating the asker too much.

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Hopefully with changes like these or others proposed, we can improve our reputation as a site worth asking community building questions at.

Answer 3

Then there's something that made me a little bit upset. A few days ago, @Phillip asked a question. He asked about a theoretical community. It was put on hold because it was too broad on the first sight. I decided to write a comment to point out the necessary points I'm interested in. He answered those and I voted to reopen that question again because I had enough information to give an answer. However, it disappeared then. I don't know if it was removed by himself or by moderators. But in both cases: Why did that even happen?

If he deleted it on his own, we clearly weren't as professional as we're supposed to be. I asked for detail, nobody else did.

But, six other people (including me) upvoted your comment. There is no point in duplicating content right next to each other... basically six people agreed with you.

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However, can we risk it to close questions which even were favorites from some users?

Note: you can favorite your own question. I don't know if that's what happened or not, but it should be noted. The same applies for voting:

People upvote questions for all kinds of reasons. They might think it's interesting. They might want to give the asker reputation (yes this happens). They might think it's a good question for the beta. Or they might have just seen a kitten and are really happy.

The point is, people vote however they like for whatever reason. Score is absolutely not to be taken as a strict indicator of quality.

Closing, on the other hand, is a more concrete process. There are close reasons. If a question fits one of these reasons, by all means close it.

Don't take into account score when voting to close or leave open a question. Just look at the content and make your decision from there based on current guidelines.

-- https://earthscience.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/111/should-we-close-questions-with-many-upvotes

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Our biggest problem is that we do have such a limited audience.

--Me

What I meant by this: Our limited audience is because we have a refined set of target users that we're trying to appeal to. This in fact is why we do have such high quality, but I think we might be trying to be too perfect, which is hindering us. More on this later.

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However, I'm really sad about the current situation because I know that we could easily get more content. We are community managers, and we are good at it. If we weren't, we wouldn't have so much reputation from so less questions. If we cooperated with sites outside of SE, we could maybe increase our general stats of contribution. Isn't this what we try to achieve? We want to grow! I want to give advice to fellow community builders since I often had problems. But right now, we're not really at it. We became kind of lazy.

I do agree with you... I think that we have tried various methods but not seen quantitative results. For example, the ads that took several hours to complete brought a total of 94 clicks when displayed on two different graduated sites.

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Taking a step back: Like mentioned countless times in this thread, quality is our ticket to success. We cannot survive without having some of the highest quality content of the site.

However, I do think we still have a perceived scope issue, not an actual scope issue. Despite our name change, our questions are primarily from leaders for online communities. A community can be composed of as little as two or three people and doesn't necessarily have a defined leader or a set environment (e.g. an online forum or blog site). It's a collection of people brought together by a common goal. It's your kid's soccer team (football if you're not in the US), it's that book club that you go to once a month, it's that music department at some college. The thing is, the word "community" essentially is a grandiose name for a "people group" :). Everyone is part of dozens of communities, whether they know it or not.

Where people come together, there is always conflict, opposition, and roadblocks that set communities back; that's where we come in. I think we're going the wrong way with all of this advertising--trying to attract people based on the fact that they are a leader when, in fact, we're missing the point of communities: the people. Leaders really don't matter without the people that they lead. Even with our new advertising, I still feel like we're trying to appeal to a minority group when hoping to get people from the majority group. We need to figure out how to make this site friendly and accessible to everyone, no matter their role in the community or what type of community they're a part of.