Take a look at the list of users sorted by votes

Question

Shortcut here: https://pets.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Voters&filter=week

Data.se query to play with here: http://data.stackexchange.com/pets/revision/435675/555168/questions-with-x-amount-of-votes

---

Between Feb. 7th and Feb. 12th there has been one single person who has voted more than 10 times. And even then, at only about 3 votes per day.

From Feb 1st there have been 7 people who have votes more than 10 times. With 30 votes being the highest, and 12 votes the minimum, there's an average of 19 votes per person. Which is again, 3 upvotes per day.

To me, this seems to imply that lately there hasn't been anyone actively using the site, as the most activity has been 3 votes per day by a select few users. Assuming all other votes are coming from users who spend less time on the site, as they're voting less than 10 times in the span of two weeks.

If there's a problem with questions that are leading people not to vote on them then maybe that's something that should be addressed. If not, then I encourage people to vote as much as possible to drive interest in the site up.

If users (especially new users) aren't receiving any feedback, let alone positive feedback, then they will not want to continue participating in the site. Positive feedback encourages users to put forth the effort into providing good questions, and coming back to questions to add more information when needed.

Imagine the difference between the two:

1. Asking a question and getting 5-10 upvotes throughout the day.
2. Asking a question that maybe gets one upvote in a day or two.

Even if the first one doesn't get an answer to the question, it at least shows that there are people that have seen it.

The second is like posting in an old forum. No one is around to answer, and there's no reason to stick around and wait. It's in that person's best interest to find another site to ask their question.

Personally, I would rather see questions with downvotes rather than questions sitting with a score of 0. It at least shows activity on the site.

Something else to think about, is that just like people, Google looks at a site and checks if there's been any recent activity when it indexes search results. So if the activity on this site is low, it can become harder to attract people's attention from search results, as other more active sites will rise above it.

Of course I'm guilty of everything I've mentioned. But I'd like to get either a discussion going in order to fix whatever problems this site is having. Or to encourage people to vote so that a core user group can be built in order to grow the site and encourage activity.

Answer 1

I think we need to work on building a sense of community. We need to have more interactions in meta and in chat. Made we can form some kind of welcoming committee, one or two us at a time, who for a week or a month take up the task of welcoming new posters. Tell them about our chat room and invite them to work towards 20 rep so they can post in chat.

Just thinking out loud here: we would probably need another discussion to work out details. Maybe combine a moderator and non-moderator as a welcoming team. Maybe moderators rotate on a monthly schedule and non-moderators rotate on a weekly schedule.