Our site is turning into a ghost town. Thoughts on Why?

Question

The title says it all

Our site is literally full of tumbleweeds

I know there is a demand for a site such as ours

It has the potential to become the site for Korean language Q and A

During both the proposal and commitment phases, although it looked like the site was doomed, we managed to survive and pull through

And yet, here we are, from 50 something questions per day during the private beta to an embarrassing less than 1

Any thoughts on how to bring our site back up?

Answer 1

While agreeing with @Chenmunka's answer 100%, I'd like to add a few more thoughts.

1. Our site is literally full of tumbleweeds.

I don't agree with this statement. Italian Language SE has 0.9 questions per day which has 2.4K users while Korean Language Stack Exchange (Korean SE) has the same number of questions per day (as of today, it is 0.9 questions per day) with only 385 users. Portuguese has 1.0 questions per day, Russian has 1.1, Latin 2.0, Spanish 2.3, Chinese 3 with 9.6K users, French 4.2 with 10K users, German 4.7 with 17K users (I excluded English and Japanese).

What more can you expect? Korean SE is the newest and has the lowest user base among all the SE language sites.

2. During both the proposal and commitment phases, although it looked like the site was doomed, we managed to survive and pull through.

To have managed and pulled through the proposal and commitment phases has nothing to do with surviving the beta phase in the future. There are some sites that have been closed without succeeding in graduating from beta. We can never know what would happen to Korean SE. Based on this Mets SE post, Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites, Korean SE could be closed

if a public beta site does not produce consistently helpful content, and lacks the caretakers needed for flags and spam to get handled and our Be Nice policy to be upheld.

In other words, we need to (1) produce consistently helpful content, (2) take care of flags and spam and (3) uphold Be Nice policy.

3. And yet, here we are, from 50 something questions per day during the private beta to an embarrassing less than 1.

We've never had 50 something questions per day. The total number of questions is only 230 (as of now) for 59 days. I don't think it is a dismal or discouraging number.

To do list:

1. Korean SE needs more active members who can ask quality questions and answer them with proper research and reference. It is relying on a very small number of users, especially in asking questions. If they stop asking, that might be the end of this site.

2. It needs to pay more attention to low-quality questions and answers. Members should upvote when a post is useful and helpful with research and downvote when a post is not. There are some questions and answers that have been blindly upvoted even though they don't show any research effort or proper reference. Sadly enough, there are some questions that don't even belong on Korean SE. We need to differentiate Korean SE from other general reference Korean Q&A sites. Quality comes first before quantity. There are many Korean-related sites. How can Korean SE compete with them if we can't show the difference in quality?

3. It needs more dedicated leadership who can well-manage the site. Who will lead this site?

I don't expect Korean SE will suddenly be swamped with questions in the foreseeable future no matter what we do now and I believe it will have the same path as other language sites in terms of number of questions and visits per day as the Korean language itself is not as popular as other languages.

4. Any thoughts on how to bring our site back up?

(1) Ask and answer good questions.

(2) Respond to your comments.

(3) Edit a post which needs editing.

(4) Upvote good posts and vote to close, flag, downvote when you find a low-quality post.

It all boils down to your voluntary participation and how you contribute. Korean SE needs more members who can lead by example. What have you done so far?

Answer 2

I think the key stats there are : 0.8 questions per day, 100% answered. We have a core of users who stand ready to give great answers if people ask them!

Of course in time if the user base grows and word of the site spreads, the number of questions per day should climb naturally.

If we want to cultivate that aspect a bit, we can. For example:

• Any good questions about the Korean language that occur to any of us, even if we can get the answer elsewhere first, ask here!
• Any things that took us a while to understand when learning - consider asking the question here (and even answering it yourself!)
• Any good questions on other sites that have been answered less than optimally - consider asking a similar question here (though blatant content ripping doesn't help anyone)

I think there's plenty to be positive about here - we're up to 400 users now, with more joining daily, and I feel the quality of content here is way up on our definition questions.

We're also getting a fair number of views of each question (relative to the size of our user base), so it's not just a case of a few users interacting and not reaching a wider audience.

Answer 3

I've followed a few startup beta sites now and sooner or later a question like this is asked on every one of them.

Every new site has a rush of activity at its launch, then it dies down a bit.
Then it starts to build up again as the core users keep posting good questions and answers and new users are drawn in.

We are at the lull.

A couple of things to bear in mind:

• All sites are a bit quiet at this time of year as it is the northern hemisphere summer holiday season. Traffic traditionally drops a little.
• There are eight sites at the moment with a lower questions per day figure. All of these sites are much older than this one.

The trick is not to be dispirited. If the posts keep coming the users will keep coming and the snowball will start to roll.

Answer 4

As Chenmunka says, one of the biggest things that you can do as a user, is community participation, which includes moderation, up/downvoting, visiting the review queues, etc.

Along with this, you can ask yourselves questions about what you want the site to actually be and the purpose. This will start generating good questions (Yes, you can ask questions and answer them yourself), generating good tag content/definitions, keeping good content fresh, etc.

One of the things that you can ask yourself is how do you engage everyone? From the native Korean speakers, to the intermediate/advanced speakers, to the complete novice? For example, I know a few basic vocabulary words related to martial arts, and I can count to twenty. Hardly enough to survive on. I'd like to learn, so how do you engage me, when I don't even know what questions to ask?

Active participation, sharing links to questions/answers, inviting people that you know are interested, all of these things will keep the site healthy and thriving.

Also, once you have moderators appointed, you can look at defining your help/about sections to be tailored to the site, and really start defining what you want the site to be other than "That Korean place"

Answer 5

The answers given so far have focused on things that can be done on Korean Language SE itself. That is fine. However, there are other things that can be done:

• Create an ad for the site that you can post on other Stack Exchange sites. (We have a meta question for ads on Language Learning SE.)
• On Language Learning SE, we're even thinking of creating a YouTube video about the site.
• People with a Twitter account can tweet questions that are likely to make people curious about the site.
• You can leave comments with links to Korean Language SE questions in the comments to YouTube videos that are about the same question. (But only where they are really relevant; link spam is bad advertising.)

Don't give up! Be creative about ways to promote Korean Language SE elsewhere.