14

We are in extreme inactivity. Reviews rarely pop up and we aren't doing anything really, anxious to get something done on this site.

Right now, we have a question rate of one every two days. On top of that, only 28 views a day on average. For a young site like this one, something like this is quite damaging to this site's future and success for graduation. I, personally, do not want to sit around for a miracle.

So, what can we do to get more people into this site other than more ads?

For motivation: We will miss our T-shirts and stickers for top user swag

3
  • Thanks for bringing this up, I think this is definitely a necessary topic we need to have a serious discussion about.
    – fi12
    Commented Jul 26, 2016 at 15:36
  • if this in-activeness goes on, what would happen to this site?
    – Ooker
    Commented Jul 31, 2016 at 4:55
  • 2
    It seems that many early questions were flagged as "primarily opinion-based" and "too broad" from the get-go which I think discouraged users from asking questions. Language learning (and language in general) is fundamentally a subjective endeavor and imprecise. I think that that is a major contributing factor. Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 18:55

2 Answers 2

11

This is a difficult question. The site has competition from

  • language-specific StackExchange sites (German Language, Chinese Language, English Language Learners, etc.),
  • many websites and blogs about language learning (see the small sample here),
  • other communities that focus on language learning, e.g. Fluentli,
  • other communities that focus on language teaching, e.g. ESL/ELL at the A to Z Teacher Stuff Forums,
  • YouTube (many blogs and websites about language learning also have a YouTube channel).

I have checked some other beta sites, such as Chess and German Language, which have similar questions, but I found no suggestions, except for promotion on related SE sites.

So what can we do?

  • Go to YouTube channels and mention Language Learning in comments - where relevant?
  • Contact some high-profile polyglots so they blog about our SE sites, or even start contributing to it?
  • Tweet about the site? (I haven't see many tweets about. It's hard to say if it would help a lot. Update: the blog post A Recipe to Promote your Site recommends sharing links to great questions or answers.)
  • Write questions that might attract lots of responses and views, similar to The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List on Stack Overflow. Would "the definitive list of language learning books" or "the definitive list of language learning techniques" work?
  • Rewarding the best answers of the previous quarter, as suggested on Latin Language Meta, e.g. Rewarding the best answers of the second quarter of 2017.
3
  • 2
    "the definitive list of language learning technique" - I like that one. We should have that question protected and an answer in community wiki though.
    – Kolappan N
    Commented Jul 29, 2016 at 18:18
  • @KolappanNathan It's a topic that I would be willing to work on, but it would require a lot of work before it may be called "definitive" ;-)
    – Tsundoku Mod
    Commented Aug 4, 2016 at 21:54
  • 1
    Sure, take your time. After creating it post the link in the answer . The community will improve it. And if this question recieves a lot of traffic then we can discuss some other questions like the suggestion.
    – Kolappan N
    Commented Aug 5, 2016 at 17:38
11

I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: the best thing we can possibly do for our site is to ask questions. Why, you ask? Let me explain.

Asking well written, on-topic questions consistently over a long period of time can

  1. get us much closer to hitting that necessary 10 questions/day marker, and thus, much closer to graduation.
  2. increase the chance that a particular hot question on our site will be displayed on the Hot Network Questions bar, increasing the chance we get traffic from other SE sites.
  3. help us more accurately determine what the scope of our site does and does not include.
  4. can help some users reach 25k rep and over (which is helpful for graduation so that it's not just moderators who have access to most moderation tools)

In other words, there are countless positives to asking questions and very few negatives.

Asking questions isn't the only thing we should do, however. Once our advertisements start rolling out to related language SE sites, we should expect to see visitors from other sites here. In addition, we might even have some questions migrated from other sites to LL, which could bring the OP and some of the answerers to our site as well. Both of these things take time to put into place and to reap the benefits from.

All in all, keep asking questions and promote our site wherever possible (in a nonintrusive way, mind you!)

Rome wasn't built in a day, and we won't graduate in a day either. Stay patient and positive and we'll get there.

6
  • I would say more of the 20k rep mark. Barely anyone was at 25k when Puzzling SE graduated Commented Aug 2, 2016 at 17:48
  • @PythonMaster That's the gist I was going for.
    – fi12
    Commented Aug 2, 2016 at 17:48
  • 1
    Compared to last year, we have around 70-80 visits per day (a big improvement) but activity is low again (after some more active months). Voting is low and the response to bounties is disappointing. So how can we increase both voting and response writing? (Low voting takes the fun out of writing answers.)
    – Tsundoku Mod
    Commented Jul 12, 2017 at 10:18
  • @ChristopheStrobbe It seems that people find the content on our site useful enough to visit it often, but don't actually feel compelled to participate.
    – fi12
    Commented Jul 12, 2017 at 16:09
  • That sounds like a good summary of the issue.
    – Tsundoku Mod
    Commented Jul 12, 2017 at 17:40
  • @AnthonyPham I think we need another three years before anyone reaches 20k reps. At the moment, no one has reached 5k reps yet, after 499 days in beta.
    – Tsundoku Mod
    Commented Aug 18, 2017 at 11:20

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