I've been discovering OpenData SE and although I kind of like the topic, my impression is that this SE is not doing great. I've been active on a few other SE sites for some time and one can really tell the difference. Apparently there's just not enough regular active members for the flow of questions (939 visits/day and 1.7 questions/day). Crucially there are very few votes being cast, and this is quite bad given that the SE model relies on votes.
I understand that for the question asking if the quality is low or it looks like there was not sufficient effort or time put into asking a question it can be downvoted.
I feel like by penalizing downvotes we are discouraging people from holding answers to higher standards.
Interested to hear you guys thoughts on this
So what I'd like to know is:
Why so few people vote?
Is it because there are not enough "avid members", too much turn-over, too many questions, questions being too specialized (or not enough)...?
What can be done about it? (if anything) More precisely, as a modest active member, what should I prioritize? For instance, I've seen other sites which encourage:
- Vote early and vote often: should I vote on questions/answers even if I don't feel very confident about the topic?
- voting to close out-of-scope/unclear questions early (and harshly) in order to force the user to clarify before (possibly) re-opening. But of course, that's not very welcoming.
- be more strict about duplicates: many beginners questions are variants of existing questions, should I vote to close as duplicate even if it's not exactly the same question?
- any other suggestion...?
