When chatting in Tavern on the Meta, someone said this:
10K views, no votes on question or answer. Typical for Android site.
That message really hit me by heart.
It's a grassland full of grass, but no tall grass. It's a forest full of trees, but no apples. It's a site where people from all around the world come to ask, but only a few people are answering and voting, and nothing else. The questions get posted, and get answered from the few of us, left at a net score of zero or one, and so do the answers. Despite our traffic ranking top 10 among all SE sites, we get far fewer up/down votes on posts, and far fewer comments and discussion. We have 7k+ Tumbleweed badges with no more than 190k questions, while Stack Overflow has less than 950k that badge among >45M questions. We get more than one T badge for every 30 Q, and this ratio is increased by half on SO. Meta Stack Exchange has less than 600 Tumbleweeds among 300k questions (it's hyperactive).
Most people with 2k+ reputation, as well as a few below 2k, have been very active on this site for a long time. You are undoubtably the firm supporters of this site. But look, we have only 79 users with 2k+ rep, and 1,726 users with 200+, among 152k users. Only 1.16% of all users are getting avid. Compared to Stack Overflow, 387k out of 8.2M has 200+ rep, with a net "avid rate" of 4.71%, 40x as we have.
As eldarerathis pointed out in comments, discussion about site promotion has been a topic since 2011, when this site had just guaduated from Beta. The Community Manager Shog9 wanted us to maintain a sustainable growth.
Everyone that has been active are still active, but we aren't quite reliable. The number of us is too few. We attract a lot of users every day, but we can't maintain a sustainable growth of avid users. In long run this could be a problem. So, do, or shall we, put some effort to make this site look more active, so we have a real activity that catches up with our traffic?
