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yeet we are such cool kids

Good:

  • User base is still growing.
  • Visits per day stable (even in this slower season)

Meh:

  • Percent of questions answered is stable/stagnant
  • Questions per day stable but slouching (with some seasonality)
  • Answer ratio stable (it's like, alright man)

Free us from the beta! Let us be with the big kids! xd (I suppose as well, please feel free to discuss the results if desired.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Do we need to satisfy all these requirements to escape Beta? $\endgroup$
    – Mathematician
    Sep 12, 2017 at 19:33
  • $\begingroup$ From previous discussions, the most important metric is questions per day. I don't think all of them are absolutely mandatory. $\endgroup$
    – Kitsune Cavalry Mod
    Sep 12, 2017 at 19:34

2 Answers 2

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Thanks for picking up the torch.

Questions per day is certainly affected by seasonality of academic year.

Percentage of Questions answered does not worry me so much: the "90%" target is not realistic for a discipline like Economics. See what happens over at Cross Validated, which is nevertheless a very vibrant site. I certainly would like to see it reaching and staying at 80%. Again here, some seasonality may be at play.

What I do not like is the Answer ratio that is persistently below "2" (again 2.5 average for a discipline like Economics is too ambitious).

...what I really do not like and it is not included in the KPI's above but it is easily checked by going to Users/Voters on the main site, is the number of people who vote:

Up to now, during 2017 (7 and a half months), only 71 users casted a vote, less than $1/3$ of the number of "avid users" (= +200 rep)

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    $\begingroup$ To clarify, those 71 users are based on questions/answer up/down votes? That sounds awful. Any idea about other sites? $\endgroup$
    – luchonacho
    Aug 16, 2017 at 17:54
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    $\begingroup$ I think our culture is in a weird place, where often we feel like it is appropriate to abstain from voting on a lot of questions. Sometimes you feel like something doesn't really deserve an upvote, but a downvote is excessively harsh. Of course, these observations I feel like have been made before. $\endgroup$
    – Kitsune Cavalry Mod
    Aug 16, 2017 at 18:41
  • $\begingroup$ That said, it doesn't explain why general voting at large is so small, so, xd $\endgroup$
    – Kitsune Cavalry Mod
    Aug 16, 2017 at 18:41
  • $\begingroup$ The list of 71 voters this year appears to be truncated at > 10 votes. $\endgroup$
    – Adam Bailey
    Aug 17, 2017 at 11:35
  • $\begingroup$ Exploring some accounts I see that several of those +200 users hardly visit or interact with the site. Several look like "one-hit-wonder" users, or like having an intense but quick affair with the site, many months ago. Maybe the "real avid users" are much less (not something to mention SE). $\endgroup$
    – luchonacho
    Aug 17, 2017 at 17:50
  • $\begingroup$ @luchonacho We are still thin on contributors, that's certain. A lot of traffic to lookup an existing thread, but on the other fronts we are relying on a few good persons. $\endgroup$
    – Alecos Papadopoulos
    Aug 17, 2017 at 17:53
  • $\begingroup$ Mmm, we should promote the site more. I did an attempt in econjobrumors but I mainly got insults in return. $\endgroup$
    – luchonacho
    Aug 17, 2017 at 17:58
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I've joined Economics StackExchange very recently, and personally I like to read the questions, vote and answer, as a way to maintain the connection to my bachelor studies in Economics, which I finished in 2011. Working in Business for so long, I missed a place where it is simple to read, answer and discuss economics, not just one-way reading interesting books or The Economist.

I'm writting this as an idea on where to get more members: besides academia, look at alumni from economics courses, or people who are interested and know a lot.

Another point is the answers rate: again, my personal experience is that I don't look at all the fields, for instance I skip several questions on models due to lack of memory and patience to review, but am very active answering questions more related to money supply or real world / management issues. This is something that might divide the community: the more theoretical, model driven vs. the more journalism like economists. What do you think about this?

One thing that I found strange at the beginning (dont take it as a criticism) was that practically all questions were edited by 2-3 people (luchonacho, denesp and alecos), which felt like strong moderation.

But my key point to the thread would be: with 3 years of beta and a large community of visitors, make it a real website ;)

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    $\begingroup$ I think the community both enjoys the theoretical, math side of things, and the more intuition or assumption based questions. It offers something for all types of people. Both kinds of questions can be abused of course, but luckily we have solid users with a strong overlap in dealing with both areas. $\endgroup$
    – Kitsune Cavalry Mod
    Aug 18, 2017 at 17:58
  • $\begingroup$ As for people editing questions, sometimes they are just as simple as grammar, spelling, tags, etc. and sometimes they are completely rewording questions that are almost incoherent. It can be a boring process. The important part especially for the latter edits is that we have many users that help elucidate what edits a question needs (through questions, adding reasonable interpretations of the question) and then a few people who we trust to consistently edit then do so. $\endgroup$
    – Kitsune Cavalry Mod
    Aug 18, 2017 at 18:03
  • $\begingroup$ I fully understand it about the editing, and have done some myself too - just mentioned as a field where we need to increase our efforts, to get more moderators :) $\endgroup$
    – JoaoBotelho
    Aug 23, 2017 at 14:53

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