Let's break up with "Graduation" and remove a bunch of "Beta" labels

I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who uses and moderates several low-activity beta sites. I agree that it can be, at times, a bit demoralizing to see some sites quickly graduate,¹ while others of us get left in the dust. At times, I feel a bit like Spirit, waiting for that call from NASA - except I know that there's no time at which I should expect my site to graduate.²

Let me take Astronomy, a site I think I know and understand pretty well, as an example. The Area 51 stats are a mixed bag - low questions per day (3.2), a decent percent answered (93%), a strong userbase, and decent views per day (3,150). I've been on Astronomy for three years now, roughly 75% of its age, and I've seen those stats remain the same. I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that they may never change. But there are some things that, once in a while, make me think that there's hope for graduation, or some sort of progression:

• We don't have any huge scope issues; those have been dealt with. Our boundaries with some other sites are fuzzy, yeah, but if a question's on-topic here, we'll keep it.
• We have a consistently populated community. People have come and gone, as people do, but that's not really a problem, because others have filled their shoes. A community should outlive its founders; if not, it's not at all healthy.
• Stuff that shouldn't stay around generally gets deleted or closed, as it should. We do have the caretakers that Ana talked about two and a half years ago as an important criterion for site survival.

I'm not trying to make a case for Astronomy to graduate; I'm just using it as an example because I know it really well. There are other sites I know not quite as well, but which I suspect have the same stats or better, and are also strong in the community, moderation and scope areas. Writers and History come to mind. The sites fail the 10 questions per day requirement, but they're really strong everywhere else. And they're getting good traffic³ - 10,000+ views per day for these last two - meaning that they're helping people, in another way.

So as, like Spirit, we the people of the small betas trudge on through the wasteland of Mars day-to-day existence, we sometimes wonder what we're aiming for. Is content rate all that we need to improve? Is that all we're doing wrong? We might not reach 10 questions per day within the next month, or year, or decade, but we're doing pretty darn well everywhere else. In fact, you might say that . . .

. . . we're stable. We're not stably producing 10 questions per day, but we're stable nonetheless. We're stable at 3, or 4, or 5, or 6 questions per day. I'm not gonna argue against the data that says that 10 questions per day indicates a stable site producing a healthy content . . . but I will argue that these sites have passed the initial trial. We can do it. We can maintain a level of questions per day for years on end, even as people come and go. I'd say that's pretty successful.

I'm going to state a claim. I hope it's wrong, but what I've seen fits the data: Not every topic is going to beget a site that gets 10 questions per day within any reasonable amount of time. Writers has been in beta for seven years, and it's not seeing a huge rise in question rate. And yet the site goes on, and it seems to still be doing okay, and it's stable (yes, it's stable!). But nobody would say that it should be closed down, right?

Let's say you have a niche topic - like, say the history of science and mathematics. There aren't a lot of people interested in that, right? Certainly not as many as are interested in the actual science and mathematics involved. To reach those 10 questions per day might mean that you need to get more people interested in the topic - and that could be a good thing. But it seems a little unreasonable to expect a site to do that to graduate. Satisfying the current people interested in the topic is a lot more important. If the people of professionally study the history of science and mathematics, and the people who read about it as enthusiasts, are happy with the site as a great resource to go to to ask questions and get answers, isn't that successful?

That site might be reaching a much smaller fraction of the humans on Earth than, say, [example site that's metaphorically on fire]. But it could be a healthier site if it's met all those other metrics. I'd rather have a low-traffic site that's healthy than a high-traffic site that still has some problems. Obviously, question rate is far, far from the only consideration for graduation. But it shouldn't be what holds a site back.

Time and again, we the people of the beta sites, thinking "Hey, this is what we really need to work on, and if we raise the question rate, maybe we'll graduate!", make a push to try to raise question rates, such as topic challenges. Sometimes they work for a bit - a week, a month - but many times, they eventually collapse, and we go back to our equilibrium question rate. And then we're left still stuck on Mars, wondering what we did wrong. I can say from experience that this sort of thing really, really stinks.

Let me say what I like, in particular, about this proposal:

• It gives some things to work for in the early days of each site. After private beta, a lot of people often leave a site. I've been in this group a lot. Sometimes, it's because I feel like I couldn't really contribute much to a site (Open Source was an example for me). Other times, life outside the Internet pops in, or I find that I need to put more time back into other sites. But for many cases, I just can't summon the urge to devote myself to a site that's going to be left in limbo for . . . how long?

  Maybe this is partly the immaturity and impatience of youth. Could be. I'm willing to own up to my faults. But it's not hard be demoralized when only one goal in site - and that's far off. That's what this proposal largely talks about. This is what I like about Phase 2: It's an acknowledgement that a site's solved some problems, and gotten through some growing pains. Did we solve scope issues? Have we gotten our close reasons straight? Do we have systems in place to guide new users (the help center, FAQs, etc.)? If so, it would be nice to have an official acknowledgement. If we don't hit 10 questions per day . . . we don't get that. Our work feels a bit unrecognized.

• I also like that the proposal breaks up the process into related chunks. I feel like there's a growing popularity of this sort of step-by-step option for beta sites - starting, or at least becoming more popular, after Ana's meta post. In this plan, the changes to the site come as needed, and make sense. Community ads and migration paths⁴ come as expected: when the scope's straightened out. When we do reach those golden 10 questions per day - and yes, they still have a role in this plan - we get the upgrades that come along with higher traffic (elected moderators, raised privilege levels, etc.). I also agree with keeping the site design for the very end, as a sort of ultimate reward.

• I also like that it involves the users and moderators taking the lead when it comes to figuring out if the site's ready. Catija suggested

  When they feel that they meet them, the moderators can ask the Team to review their request in the form of a meta post explaining why they’re ready to have the beta label removed.

  As a mod, I feel like I can always talk with a CM about something if I need to. Y'all do a fantastic job of being accessible to us mods. But the dialogue with the userbase as a whole sometimes isn't as great as it could be. In part, that's on us users. I picture a bunch of penguins standing around looking at each other and being a bit clueless about our site's health. Having an outside opinion from some of the best in the business helps a lot, obviously, and that's what currently decides whether a site's fit to graduate - and will still do so, in this model.

  But the decision becomes that of the userbase. It forces us to do our own self-evaluation,⁵ look at our problems and figure out if we've fixed them or not. That's . . . great. We're no longer Spirit; we have to actively and formally figure out if we think we can graduate. And if a community doesn't really care enough . . . then it won't necessarily graduate. And that's fair.

So, to summarize this long and jumbled journey of an answer:

• A lot of sites seem to mostly have their stuff together, and are sitting at low activity levels . . . but they're certainly stable.
• I'm betting that many will never end up reaching those levels of activity we all sort of aspire to.
• This proposal takes emphasis off of that criterion - although it does not remove it.
• Having these intermediate benchmarks is encouraging, as a user.
• These stages, and the process around them, seems like it might encourage discourse and discussion on growth issues by the community.

Maybe this is an optimistic vision of it all. It probably is. But hey, on Astronomy and Writers and History and so many more, it feels like we're stranded on Mars. This is a way off that planet, one that challenges and encourages us to build a better site and strive for goals, without setting unreasonable ones.

^{1 I've used, and now moderate, some of these sites, so don't think I'm jealous! Sites that graduate deserve celebration and some recognition.
2 The 90 days reference in that comic is coincidentally equal to the original 90 days (now since deprecated) of a beta site.
3 I think I'm an outlier in Stack Exchange, someone who came in from these small to middling sites, so my expectations for activity aren't, and never have been, comparable to those of some of the larger sites. So I have a different perspective than many folks.
4 I'm not a huge fan of the migration system, but it's here for now. That's a whole 'nother discussion.
5 The old ones are mostly gone, as of two years ago.}

I've been excited to respond to this question because it gets at one of the biggest deficiencies I see on the network. After the Area 51 process, there are precious few community achievements. Graduation stands as the one thing a site can look forward to after passing through private beta. Traditionally, graduation implied a commitment to keep the site on the network which was sealed with an investment in a professional design. More recently, we started graduating sites without also giving a design. This was mostly a stop-gap solution since our design team couldn't keep up with sites passing through our newly-minted heuristic.

Personally (and I should make clear this post is my opinion and not the conclusion of the Community team, though I bet we are mostly on the same page) I felt this was one step in the direction of giving sites bits of graduation as needed. But the trouble with separating design from the functional parts of graduation is that it's not easy to tell what stage a particular site might be in. You, as a loyal reader of meta, know that there's a difference between Code Golf and Biblical Hermeneutics because one has the word "beta" after it and the other doesn't. With some detective work, you could figure out what other aspects of graduation Code Golf has, but the average user would not even know most of those things exist.

One of the reasons I haven't responded to this question before now is that the symbols I thought of would be either too expensive (meaning, hiring more designers) or too impersonal. Removing the beta label might mean we are committed to your site, but it's not a very good symbol. It's a bit like having a wedding where the couple doesn't exchange rings, take picture or have a party afterward. Those symbols mean something. (And if your culture doesn't have wedding rings, I'd be willing to bet you have some other set of symbols that signal commitment.) Wedding rings work not because they are costly (though they usually are) but because they represent the specific relationship between two people.

This week we got a potential solution: standardized site themes. Obviously the priority will be to get sites with existing designs converted to customized themes. Because of loss aversion, I've been focusing on how those sites would become less unique. But the next step will be to start building designs for sites that have been patiently (or not so patiently) waiting for them. Because theming reduces the range of design elements to consider, that process should go much faster. Assuming that's true, custom design elements would be good symbols of our commitment to a site.

Graduation, of course, would be signaled with a full design visible to all visitors. Beta sites (however we define that) would retain the beta theme. In between, sites can accumulate incremental design changes. Perhaps the first order of business after a site exits beta is to decide on a color scheme. That way visitors will see at a glance that the site has a achieved something significant.

Other design elements like a background image and a logo could be tied to moderator elections and privilege level changes. These are somewhat weaker signals and it might paint designers into a corners, so to speak. So maybe we shouldn't try to be too rigid here.

I think it would be better to start with changing the beta header with a custom image, then to follow the four phases you listed.

Why?

Because I am a regular user of Gardening and Landscaping SE and from what I can tell the site has two options of reaching 10 questions per day or else to stay in beta forever:

Option 1: Convince much more people from Australia and New Zealand to use the site in order to counteract the low traffic coming in winter fron Northern hemisphere. Is this a doable approach?

Option 2: Convince more people worldwide to use the site. To achieve that, we need to be seen as an alternative to a dozen of other established sites that have at least a tree, a bunch of green leaves or some colorful flowers on their front page.

I dare anyone to give me a link to a site with a similar scope and more questions per day that doesn't have a plant somewhere on their home page. For people in the gardening habit, content means plants not a block of text covering 100% of the front page.

I will stick to GL no matter what, beta or not beta, tree or dull front page, but how many people do you know to not care about the appearance of a site?

I want to stress that I'm suggesting just an image on that light blue header, not full design.

While I like the idea of handing out a Phase 2 design and agree with most of your points regarding the advantages of that approach that doesn't address one very important thing the sites with the full design really have on beta sites. Site recognition.

That's why I think Alina's idea which I gladly up voted is a better first step towards moving beta pages forward. Giving beta sites which meet certain criteria—which might be as simple as making it half a year or a year without dying off—a site logo of their own. A logo that is in the overview, the tabs and the header of the site.

This might even be a preliminary logo and it's just a logo. Something that gives the site some better identification and recognition. Those two are things that very likely improve the sites chances to reach the other metrics to actually graduate, reach the next phase or however the process might look like then.

That single logo (yeah I know in some different dimensions and stuff) might not even have to be designed by the SE design team. Maybe the site's meta can come up with it. Maybe the 75k users of the Graphic Design SE can lend some expertise (or hold contests). If there were some guidelines about those preliminary logos I'd think the community could come up with great creations to give the more stable beta sites some better identification and brand recognition.