As I am reading old questions, I realised this community exists for almost two years, but it is still in beta state.
Why isn't it moving to "normal" state? Are there some requirements to achieve this?
4
-
1Related: Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites– MastCommented Nov 30, 2016 at 12:53
-
1Two years that long to be in beta for an SE site. The site where I spend most of my time Music: Pratice & Theory took 5 years to graduate.– Dom ModCommented Nov 30, 2016 at 15:35
-
Almost two years? Um, I hate to break it to you, but you might want to prepare for a little more waiting. I hope you didn't read any of those old Area51 or Meta.SE posts that mentioned "90 days", a prediction off by at least a factor of 10 usually.– Major TomCommented Dec 28, 2016 at 13:16
-
Look on the bright side : you get certain privs at lower rep on a beta site. Compare music fans with SO– AngstCommented Mar 14, 2017 at 22:40
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
First things first: graduation has nothing to do with age. It has to do with maturity.
I'm an active member of the Code Review community. Code Review graduated roughly a year ago. That's about 4 years after it started. There was a long period of time with low activity and it took a major revival to get the site healthy. Even after getting healthy, it took a while to get graduated.
So, ignoring a lot of important details, there's 2 things important: health and maturity.
Maturity is roughly how well-known the site is. If nobody knows your site exists and there are next to none users with a decent reputation, there's no point in graduating. With graduation, among other things, the amount of reputation required for moderating tasks are lifted. To keep a running smoothly, you need a couple of 20k+, 10k+, 3k+ and 2k+ users. The last two are most important. Music Fans has 0 users above 5k reputation, 6 users above 2k. That's not even checking whether they're still active. While this is strictly speaking site health, I'd consider attracting those users and keeping them around as maturity.
Health is roughly the statistics provided by the Area 51 page:
That's a screenshot made today. Red is bad, orange is okayish and green is good. None of the statistics for Music Fans has reached green. That's bad.
So why hasn't Music Fans graduated yet?
Not enough users, not enough questions and not enough answers. Since Music Fans is a Question & Answer site, all 3 points are very, very important.
-
3I just wanted to add one other aspect of the site that needs more work is the review queues. The mods try and clear them out every once in a while, but there aren't many other users who participate in the queues even though we have quite a few active members who can go though them.– Dom ModCommented Nov 30, 2016 at 15:30
-
@Dom Maybe out of topic, but maybe the requested reputation for some tasks are a little high for a community with low people...– BebsCommented Nov 30, 2016 at 16:05
-
@Bebs even the first post queue which has only a requirement of 350 rep which isn't crazy to get is typically filled. There are active users with the required rep around, they just don't go through the queue– Dom ModCommented Nov 30, 2016 at 16:10
-
1@Dom, it is difficult to have... Important members seem to be extremely conservative on what deserves an upvote (upvoted questions above 5 are very rare these last weeks), review queue is frozen for some reason, some guys downvote or ask for close questions without commenting an advice...– BebsCommented Dec 4, 2016 at 19:12
I honestly think of this as a site that 'died'!
It started brightly, but with an intense meta discussion on what should be on- and off-topic. Many things were ruled 'off-topic' to the point where it may have choked the life out of the site a bit.
There was an attempt made to reboot the site: Should the site's scope be expanded to increase user engagement? - but following that, meaningful 'community-like' participation continued to decline... there was a point when pretty much all we had was the occasional unanswered identification question. I'd drop in occasionally to upvote reasonable questions that some close-vote / downvote-happy user had picked on.
I'm happy to see that the site has picked up a little recently. I still don't see much of a positive, supportive sense of community, and while a good question like The usage of the word "groove" is getting more close-votes than upvotes, I don't think the site is going to be interesting enough to attract many genuine music experts.
-
IMO, the opossite happened. We've lowered the conetent bar so much it's not worth participating. I used to ask questions regularly to try and jump start the community, but they kept getting poor answers that were upvoted and never got real answers. When I see good conetent I get hopeful that one day the site will go more in that direction, but that is pretty rare at this point.– Dom ModCommented Dec 4, 2016 at 19:29
-
1@Dom At the point just before the scope expansion discussion took place, though, when the content bar was still 'high' in theory, quality participation was already at a very low level IIRC. Still, It may well be that opening the scope hasn't done much to improve that.... it could have been 'too much, too late'.– user16Commented Dec 4, 2016 at 19:46
-
the mods here have pretty much backed off doing any major close/reopen/quality judgments before that. We are here to serve the community, but the community never really decided either way what it wants to be. While there has been comments and other posts advocating one thing or another the community never consistently reinforced what they wanted.– Dom ModCommented Dec 4, 2016 at 20:04
-
1@Dom as a newcomer I don't have your experience... but it looks like the important users in charge are still ruling but I don't see what is their purpose... it's like : "Hey what we are doing is good but we won't show you... and btw what other people is doing is lame and don't even deserve our consideration neither encouragements or comments."– BebsCommented Dec 4, 2016 at 20:43
-
@Bebs there are no ruling users. Anyone with 125 rep can down vote and anyone with 10 rep can up vote. The community is supposed to upvoted good, well researched content and down vote unuseful, incorrect content. In practice however this doesn't happen as simply as this statement. Please don't let a stray down vote completely shut you down from the site. If you link to it I can probably take a guess as why it happened.– Dom ModCommented Dec 4, 2016 at 21:00
-
1@Dom IMO the problems were already apparent early on, even before pro tem mods were appointed. I think there were plenty of individuals who had decided what they wanted the site to be, but weren't able to come together to form any kind of consensus.– user16Commented Dec 4, 2016 at 21:36
-
1@Bebs ultimately the 'users in charge' are the ones who actually participate... i.e. people like you (at the moment!)– user16Commented Dec 4, 2016 at 21:38