Request for Feedback: How is the Ethereum beta performing for you so far?

Question

I'm not trying to go through a full self-evaluation process here, but, however, I feel after the first six months of Ethereum Stack Exchange beta, we should discuss the status of this site and the the overall performance and the content quality.

I'll start with some statistics, since the numbers are looking pretty good so far.

• We are constantly recieving 10 and more questions per day on a weekly average. There are drops in activity during friday-sunday periods, however, the other weekdays are a much more active. On a five week moving average, we have never been below 10 questions per day.
• We already have a solid user base after a rather short amount of time, 2 users with more than 10k reputation, 10 users above 3k, 16 with more than 2k and around 190 active users with at least 200 reputation.
• We are recieving quite a lot attention from search engines and have more than 2500 unique visitors every day. Roughly <20% questions get closed sooner or later, <5% get deleted.

However, these numbers are not mirroring quality and community health in general. For example, the activity on our meta site remains very low. Also, it's hard to evaluate the quality of the content compared to other resources on the internet (documentation, forums, reddit, etc.).

So, I would like to ask you: How is the Ethereum beta performing for you so far? If you ask a lot of questions: Are you getting good answers? Does it take a lot of time to get an answer? Are you recieving enough answers?

Try to highlight positive aspects, but also negative indicators; and try to suggest solutions for low activity or quality. Thanks.

Answer 1

Positive aspects:

1. we generally have some really interesting questions showing up every week

2. a healthy and fair competition among the ambitioned top contributors

3. quality assurance works greatly (most of the time).

Negative aspects, mainly software related:

1. No room for discussions, either you move to the chat or you stop after 6 comments. It's strange that we don't have a good medium to group-discuss technical details. Reddit and Quora doesn't work either for that.
2. Also I still did'nt find out how to have a privat chat with an answerer or a questioner?
3. sometimes the "whisper" chat window appears on the left but not always. then you have to go down to the footer find "chat", search the "wisper" channel.

Answer 2

I just joined and posted few questions. I am satisfied with the responses so far. They are quick and the members tries to explain it as best as possible.

I also find the Related sidebar quite helpful.

I agree with Roland Koffler's comment

Why do you think that Meta needs more activity? Ideally Meta should require no activity, because all things are running smooth.

I believe that with enough time, Ethereum will is valuable resource like reddit

Answer 3

Agree with Roland Kofler' s answer. Negative aspects i consider are,

1. Asking help for trading related things.
2. Asking help for building or explaining something from bottom up. But i understands that this happened with any new technology, but this is too much complicated to explain in an answer. Other than it goes into a blog level of answer. Hope SE Documentation can do any good on this regard.
3. The DAO burned ethereum.

And yes, interesting questions are happening and people know how to deal with it.