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I was looking at the home page:

enter image description here

The timespan is about 8 hours, but no answers and votes; views are very low either.

But on its meta, there are good amounts of votes and answers.

Older than 8 hours ago you can see in the site, again little amounts of votes and answers.

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    The number of regular actively contributing users (aside from Mods) are incredibly low. I think I can count them on my fingers quite easily without missing anyone at all. As for the reason for low size and lower votes, you can try reading an ex-mod's answer here. Another user had also talked about it here. Until the size grows, views and vote count are not gonna go up.
    – Firelord Mod
    Commented Nov 13, 2020 at 18:31
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    There's this interesting question with sadly no answer. How can we spend some effort on improving our overall activity?. You are welcome to help us out, even by a suggestion there. :-)
    – Firelord Mod
    Commented Nov 13, 2020 at 18:34
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    I don't mean to be facetious, but I had a good answer, I really did, but just got bored writing it. I abandoned it. Also, I'm avoiding the site. It doesn't appear so, since I'm back once a day, and I read regularly. I just won't answer a question that clearly shows no effort to read what has gone before. This site was designed to be a reference used for self-help, but is being used poorly, without the effort of the "self-", leaving just the lazy "help". . . ."Gimme my answer!", "Got it!", "See ya!".
    – wbogacz
    Commented Nov 14, 2020 at 18:53
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    For me the main issue of the lack of votes is that many questions get automatically removed by Roomba (= Stack Exchange's automated question deletion script). See Decrease the required view count to prevent Roomba deletion when score = 0 on smaller sites. Commented Nov 16, 2020 at 13:01
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    Be the change you want to see is the only mantra I follow (I have raised similar concerns in elections in 2018)
    – beeshyams
    Commented Nov 16, 2020 at 16:28
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    As someone who upvotes good questions and answers, I am always surprised by how many people choose not to upvote good posts. It costs you nothing, it makes someone happy, and it helps the community. It's a win-win-win situation, and yet so few people choose to upvote good posts. I also regularly see community members answering questions, but not upvoting the question they are answering. If a question is worthy of me taking my time to answer it, I think the question is worthy of a simple upvote. Commented Nov 18, 2020 at 11:43

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I think, the Android SE is one of the hardest sites to earn rep. I believe it is no good. My answers in 2019/03 were created because I wanted to get to 200 on the site. The nearly complete lack of reaction (incl. lack of ups) were something what I nowhere on the SE experienced before that. I found also very hard to find answerable questions. Finally I gave up and got to 200 by edits.

The bad thing is that the site stabilized itself in a state, where its quality content is well-preserved, but on the price that it prevents its growth.

The good thing is that reaching a "critical mass", I do not close out an exponential growth in the future.

A major problem of Android, internet-wide, is the terrible amount of crap content. Anybody hunted for something in Android and also with an other technology, see this very characteristic difference. The overwhelming majority of Android content, what we can find by google searches, would be - well deservedly - quickly deleted on the Android SE.

This is an external property of the world in which we live, we can not change it, but we can adapt it. Be the change, suggested @beeshyams in a comment, and I think he is very right, so for you induvidually and also for us, collectively.

Having 15 rep, nothing avoids you to vote daily 40 posts up (please do not this on the price of decreasing the quality), and also the site can reach a critical mass, where it will be known for the googlers, that the probability of getting useful information in a google search result list, is high.

Having a well-going Android SE is our group interest. While we apply the rules for induvidual cases, we should not only see, which action matches best the site customs. We have a significant freedom, what exactly we do, and we should also consider, which possible action serves the best our group interest.

I think the community is not very healthy in this sense.

We should actively work on

  • To increase the chance of new users (particularly, answerers) to visit the site again. In all review/voting/edit/comment decision, we should consider this.
  • To tune the content (mostly, by edits) for the googlers of the future.

My experiences are mostly positive, if I had a question, and mostly negative if I had an answer (I work a lot on the answer, and then no upvote, no comment, nothing).

A remark: There is a CM stat (based on data not available for mortals), that new users don't really bother on their scores. They want reactions. Surprisingly, not always answers - if they get comments, or even edits, it is nearly so good. And the worst effect to their re-visit is, also surprisingly, not if their posts are downvoted, but if it remains un-reacted. So, beside your vote, always give them something (edit, comment) which can be created only by a human. Focus your efforts to the users looking higher qualified.

I would add to that: people with 3-digit rep, want upvotes. Motivate them with your ups. Never giving ups is not better than giving always. Reward them easily, but never reward for nothing. Trivial math is that you inject the maximal information in the system, if your voting decisions between upvote, abstain and downvote are distributed in the 1:1:1 ratio. We don't like answer downs, an in general we want to attract people, so my suggestion is this:

Vote about half of the posts up, abstain in half the cases, and give downs only in very obvious cases.


There is another problem what I see. This is the Count of question creation, closure and deletion events by month:

enter image description here

In my opinion, this stat clearly shows a site which is actively working on to prevent its own growth. I think you should dig into its reason, because this stat is simply deadly. Particularly the deletion spikes in 2016/10 and in early 2019 would deserve some investigation. Expelling users also prevents their future contributions to ever created, not only their posts, but also their votes.

Dear mods, voters, anybody caused these: if a post is bad, but salvageable, it is better to leave it in that state than deleting it. The deletion closes out the possibility of improving it ever.

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  • I think also the site self-determination ("android enthusiasts") is sub-optimal. It shows that it is an android user forum. This is not what we want to be. I think we want to be a diverse mixture of android gurus, phone hackers, app developers and simple rooted phone users, where you can get the answer for your old, long-standing questions which would not be even understood in most android sites.
    – peterh
    Commented Nov 20, 2020 at 11:26
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    I see also the site design as shooting ourself on the foot. It is blue. Wtf? An android site should be green. It is because the droid mascot is green. Everybody knows that. You don't need to be a professional designer to know that on the spot. I have simply no idea, what could have been in the head of the responsible person who created this blue design.
    – peterh
    Commented Nov 20, 2020 at 11:29
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Perhaps on the SE sites where active users don't vote enough, voting should be additionally encouraged beyond the existing "You seem to never vote" tiny popup. I don't know how it should look like, but maybe a logical appeal in addition to just stating that fact, like describing how small sites like this one would actually benefit from what would seem/feel like "disproportionate" voting compared to an average active SE/SO user's voting activity, and maybe show some comparative graphs. Because whatever we have right now is clearly not working well enough, and I think it wouldn't harm to try such an experiment. Just do something, is my idea.

Also consider creating unofficial subreddits or social network groups where a freeform discussion can be had in addition to links to this site for a strict Q&A type content. I'm sure both types of users can find something in other communities.

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