What new things can be done to increase participation in MSE?

Question

There are concerns that MSE participants are a tiny and potentially unrepresentative subset of the community. What can we do to increase participation on MSE by users of other Stack Exchange sites, particularly for high value users?

I realize that since this is asked during the mess that there will be some that think this question has some hidden agenda, but there really isn't. To be clear, that means:

• This isn't your place to complain about our hosts.
  • Particularly, while "increasing participation isn't desirable" is an on-topic answer, "SE, Inc doesn't want to increase participation" is not.
• Things that used to be done but aren't any more are not on topic because they run the risk of turning the answers into an orchard of sour grapes.
• Any other negative thing I've overlooked.

Please be creative and have fun!

Answer 1

Executive decisions that users don't like

Arguably, the best thing to get users to participate in meta discussion is by getting them upset. If you're upset, you're more likely to complain and that elicits discussion.

Recent events have shown that the company making executive decisions that negatively impact users, or specific users get users to voice their discontent. Furthermore, it evokes discussion around:

• if actions were actually bad,

• how these actions can be prevented in the future,

• how these actions can be remedied, and

• coming together as a community.

Answer 2

Do we need to do this?

Thinking out loud, there's a lot of concern that the Meta community is fairly small, and that's...likely by design. Not a lot of people actually care about the meta-workings of these sites, and for some use cases, it's not required that they do.

For instance, someone looking for help solving an onerous math problem isn't really going to care about the Meta discussions surrounding that; they just want their problem solved.

The same is true of someone wanting to discuss the Masuda method for breeding shiny starters in Pokemon Sword. No one cares about the Meta-discussions around the network if all they care about a shiny Sobble.

So by default, Meta Stack Exchange is opt-in, and should be advertised as such. If you wish to participate, then do.

The issue that is trying to actually be addressed here is that Meta isn't representative of the community, or of the network. I suppose that requires a more fine-grained definition of "the community", since I see two halves - one half who is predicated on only using the Q&A platform, and another who is predicated on maintaining the Q&A platform. It's obvious that the half which wants to maintain it is the smaller half, but that doesn't discount its role or value.

My take on this: you're solving the wrong problem in the wrong way.

Answer 3

Do monthly post

That show status on what dev worked on, like Joe Friend used to do when he used to work there.

Give more feedback to old feature request or bountied items.

In example, having multiple years old feature request that got no official's feedback will burn any community to give any feedback. (and to state it, MSE is not alone in this boat or loophole, as I know some other business that are stuck with feedback hub that the community started to complains that request are not done)

Answer 4

Meta SE has various problems, and I believe that those problems need to be addressed before we try to attract more people to participate in Meta SE.

Jeff Atwood said almost 8 years ago: Listen to your community, but don't let them tell you what to do. We should expect SO Inc to listen to us, but we should not expect to dictate terms to them.

The network has grown enormously in those 8 years, and it appears that the Powers That Be no longer consider Meta SE to be an effective (or pleasant) way for the community and the company to communicate.

I tend to agree with that point. Part of the problem is that the Q&A format really doesn't work well on meta sites, and Meta SE has extra complications due to having its own rep. I feel that some kind of major structural change is required. One possibility is to replace (or supplement) the current (Q&A + comments) structure with a more conventional discussion forum, with proper threading.

Of course, a mere change of software won't make all the problems magically vanish, but I believe it would be a good start. With a new structure, hopefully we can build a place where staff aren't afraid to participate, and where the trust between the company and the community can slowly be rebuilt.

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It appears to me that one of the problems with the current structure is that it seems to encourage a pile-on avalanche effect on questions that propose something unpopular, (especially when posted by staff or CMs) and the constructive criticism can get buried in that avalanche.

Related to that is that discussions can get out of control in comments, and unless the comments get moved to chat early in the exchange mods have to resort to fairly heavy-handed pruning or mass deletion of comments, which can inflame resentment and prolong the disagreements.

Answer 5

Listen to the community

If the company would ask the community before a planned change, discuss the planned change with the community, listen to the community feedback on that planned change and then give a thorough explanation of the change once it's decided (one way or the other) and then again listen to the feedback on the change. I'm sure that would attract some more "high value users" as you like to call them.

This measure is kind of old, but also new in a way.

P.S.: Just a clarification. With listening, I didn't really mean the recent ideas of the company for some kind of panel but more the unconditional listening to everyone who has something to say. These ideas would be a different kind of feedback system from the one proposed in this answer.

Answer 6

Frédéric Hamidi invited me to share why I'm here now, and I can see the relevance. It's not actually as exciting as he suspects. One of my pet interests is how user interfaces affect the culture on web sites, and vice-versa. I've lurked intermittently here for longer than my 42 day counter would indicate; I just never wanted to say something before, so my previous read-only activity isn't recorded. I've definitely been more active here since I decided to hit "join", and a large part of the reason for that is because this site is designed to be addictive once you ask that first question.

I'm not sure what would have gotten me to post sooner; after all, I didn't speak up during the Welcome Wagon, which hit that UI-community nexus pretty hard as well. (My thoughts at the time were that SE did have a problem with setting up new users for success, and while it didn't look to me like the biggest issues were being addressed first, I was hopeful that it was a step in the right direction.)

There is a bit of a dependency issue. I probably would have been vocal here sooner if I was a more active participant on non-meta sites, but I have to admit that my first attempt at contributing something useful at SO¹ left me with a bitter enough taste that I only rarely wanted to do more on Stack Exchange sites other than the minimum necessary to be able to vote up answers that were useful.

I was raised that if you care about something you should care about its politics. If everyone had that attitude MSE would get a lot more traffic, even if a lot of it was read-only like I was. I do care about SE a lot, because I use SO a lot, even though I was just starting to warm up to contributing more than just upvotes there before this started blowing over.

My approach to encouraging participation in MSE would be to encourage people to care about the "big issues" here. It's not an easy thing to change a site's culture to value something more, and I don't have any easy answers, which is why I asked this question.

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1: This would have been almost a decade ago at this point. I wanted to contribute that the answer to a question worked on older versions of XStream, a then rapidly evolving Java library, but needed to be adapted for the latest version. I read through the help pages available then, which implied that the right way to address answers that were out of date was to suggest an edit. I suggested an edit that added the additional step needed for the latest version of the library, and it was rejected later without explanation. I now realize that the culturally correct thing to do would have been to write a new answer referring to the old one and explaining what to do with the new version, but then being not allowed to comment, having had my edit suggestion rejected, and the help pages discouraging additional answers that were small variations on an existing answer, I felt I was in a catch-22 and SO didn't seem like it really cared about keeping its information up to date, so I didn't bother to try again.

Answer 7

It's not about quantity - it's about quality

Someone reminded me that it's been a year since meta moderators were appointed. I had a few goals - trying to help meta be a useful space for communication between the community and the company, trying to get some of those conversations off the blog into meta and so on.

It's kinda tough seeing nearly a year's work getting wiped away in an instant.

Participation should be of the sort that are constructive and insightful. It should be more than just quantity. I'd certainly like to see more staff participation than we do (but that obviously needs a bit of work at this point), and a diversity of issues is always fun.

People getting upset and yelly doesn't really do any good. It makes it easier to ignore meta. It turns into an echo chamber of angry people. It's not sustainable without new controversies - and is generally unhealthy.

Good meta is targeted - it has goals, and tries to achieve them.

Answer 8

Maybe we do not need significantly more users to be active on Meta.SE more than we need the opinions of the average user to be heard?

Participating on Meta.SE requires a fair amount of time if you want your participation to be worth something, and not everyone is ready to spend that much time. I myself got more implicated since the October debacle, and even then I more often than not refrain from posting my views on the various subjects. And we cannot ignore the fact that the opinions expressed on Meta.SE might not always reflect those of the average user.

I also question the various "we listened to our community" statements made in the recent blog posts made by some SE employees. I'm not saying they are lying, but there have been many cases where the point of view they expressed went against the general consensus on Meta (10 points on question upvotes for instance). Who was consulted? Which group of users happily shared their opinions?

My proposal would be to have anonymous polls opened on various subjects, something akin to the Facebook pools, but in a better way if that makes sense. I have not thought it through, so my proposal is a rough one, but I could see polls being triggered by some "authorized" users (e.g. SE employees, mods, users with more than a certain reputation threshold) on subjects such as how some groups feel they are being treated on the network, global site redesign, new features, or any pertinent subject. Obviously, none of this would be binding in any sort of way (after all, SE owns this platform, so they can do what they want with it), but at least there would be a possible channel of communication between the general community and the staff.

The advantage I would see with those polls would be an easier way for the "general population" to make their opinion known, while not having to go on Meta.SE, which can be daunting for many. Additionally, the polls could keep some information on the voter (e.g. reputation, gold badges in some tags, account age) so we could observe tendencies in the votes (high reputation users prefer feature X while new users prefer feature Y). As I said, this is very rough, so any improvements would be more than welcomed.

Answer 9

Not a direct answer to your question as asked, but about "How to keep [meta] users from leaving" or "How to not decrease participation in MSE":

Encourage users to be more selective about which posts they interact with.

You may not be interested in all topics which are currently being discussed. I fully understand, and recommend to ignore those topics, if you can with the help of tag ignore feature. But where there are not distinct tags, simply glance over them and look for the posts you want to participate in.

If you have been paying attention, some longtime users have been editing and posting in purely technical questions about platform bugs, feature requests, tag cleanups, etc. The usual for meta. In normal times that would not illicit any reaction from me, but these days I can say I commend these people for continuing to support the global cause of maintaining a high quality Q&A experience available worldwide, despite the politics of the organization hosting our content.

Answer 10

I think the answer is clear.

More unicorns please

preferably ones that know how to draw red freehand circles.

Also, some waffles would be nice.

Seriously, we just need to let off some stress and have fun once in a while.

Answer 11

Participation in meta will always be something for a minority of users. That does not mean that it's not somewhat representative from the greater community. It's a vocal, self-selected minority that chooses to make itself heard and express their opinions and views about the rules, policies and well-being of the sites they participate in.

A slightly greater participation could be achieved, but the certain aspects of the "meta" should be updated / changed; since I believe they are no longer really fit for purpose.

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Voting

To work in the long term, there should also be a retooling of voting. Votes have overloaded meanings in Meta, where a custom has developed to vote up an down to signal "disagreement".

Which is relatively effective, if crude. But coupled with the facts that these sites have much lower post traffic relative to their userbase, and that (MSE excepted) votes do not affect reputation, vote counts can soar very highly or sink very deeply.

That not only can be really tough on newer meta users (and for old hands as well, even if they know how things can be), but makes scores less useful and expressive than on the main sites.

Also, communication with staff can get really weird with our voting system. For example, when answers to support questions get downvoted into oblivion because many in the community disagree with policies that are very likely not in the hands of the one answering the question.

Something different should be tried, since the simply voting mechanism that works so well in the main sites is rather lacking on the meta sites.

Specialization

Additionally, meta serves (or used to serve) more roles than one. It is used for community building and shaping. Community sourced support. A living record of how and why many of each site's policies came to be or not, and continued discussion of further policy evolution.

But as feature suggestion / bug tracking tool... it sucks. A specialized platform should be used for this. I think the company is well aware of it, and hopefully some day they'll get there and have a solution that's open enough, allows for a useful amount of community participation, permits to have some sort of transparency on the development roadmap... and it's not horrible. I can dream.

And for company wide announcements it's poor as well. Most users who visit a meta will visit their meta, not MSE. So publishing this kind of thing here is pointless. And on top of that, most announcements really do not benefit from the Q&A format. They are announcements, not questions. And "answers" serve little purpose there.

The blog is not nice either, because of how divorced it is from the community. The kind of thing they are publishing in the blog should probably happen in meta, but for that to be really possible and productive, changes need to be made to the supporting software.

Promotion

Easy: Promote it more, and more often.

Participation will always be minoritary, which makes sense. Logically, the vast majority of users will be interested in using the site, not in discussing how the site should be used, moderated and governed.

But when, for example, moderator elections are held, promotion of the event and the meta-related features are much more heavily involved, and thus I would imagine we see spikes in participation.

We used to have "hot in meta" that drove additional traffic to meta, but it was removed because of the perception of how things went on in meta. I believe it should be added back, but that also changes in the tooling for meta should be made to help have healthier interactions.

Answer 12

I read your question as: what we the community can do. So here are some basic ideas:

• We have our profiles. Right now, many folks use that place to explain "MonicaGate", and to list links we deem important. So why not use the profile space to invite curious readers to visit MSE (and/or the corresponding meta sites, like MSO)?! Write a few sentences, explain why MSE and the meta sites are important!
• Constantly mention MSE/MSO/etc. At some point I realized that it can be pointless (besides getting to a point of deep frustration) to convince new users about basic rules of the community. Nowadays, when that happens, I quickly disengage, instead I suggest to them that they can turn to MSO or MSE, to ask about the problem at hand right there.
• Whenever there is a good reason, link to matching MSO/MSE content. Like when folks are discussing "what to do about X", just go "turn here on MSO/MSE, that has been discussed there many times ..."

Long story short: lead by example. Show active non-meta users that knowing a bit about the meta site(s) helps them with their efforts. But to factor in some of the concerns: be aware what you are doing. I am not talking about blindly throwing links at people. Each post you respond to, in the end, comes from an individual. So identify what really matters, and if there is some meta link that clearly addresses the topic, provide that. With enough context for people to get it.

Beyond that, gamification could help:

• Make the first badge(s) you earn on MSE show up on all your other network profiles.
• Have your first upvotes on MSE go to other profiles, too.

But of course, such ideas require that SE Inc. helps implementing them. And these ideas are obviously more complicated, and a lot of thought would be required to come up with a really meaningful definition of what exactly should be done.

And sure: you can advertise also in other places, too! I get plenty of questions regarding stackoverflow and stackexchange on quora.com. Typically, the first sentence of my answer is: "You shouldn't be asking here. Turn to MSE/MSO/whatever-meta fits".

Finally, honestly: when new users show up here, treat them really really nice:

The new users most likely don't understand that a downvote might mean "I disagree with your content". They could quickly assume instead: "that content must be garbage".

Meaning: rather aim to increase the number of mortarboards, not the number of peer pressures. Rather comment, and say what you think, instead of adding the 5th downvote on a newbie post.

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_{Honestly: that is something that even me, as an experienced user struggle with: you put up something that you think "he, this should lighten up or help" (example: here), and then you end up with 20+ downvotes ... and rather few (initial) comments that tells you why people are in such a disagreement.}

Answer 13

There are concerns that MSE participants are a tiny and potentially unrepresentative subset of the community

These are not concerns, but flat out facts. The MSE community is a super minority of the sites.

What new things can be done to increase participation in MSE?

Nothing. Having per site metas with one "over meta" is a broken design, and the flaw is just more and more glaring over time. At this rate we aren't going to have any CM's left by the time it is fully realized.

I have been saying this for years, but MSE was a terrible waste of effort. It fractured the overall community and represented the peak of the software.

There are some 90k questions at MSE, of which roughly 60k came from mSO during the great migration in April... 2014.

In 5 years MSE has created the amount of questions SO sees in 3 days.

The meta for the second largest site on the exchange, Super User, has created 12 hours worth of questions in the past 5 years.

There is really only one way to bring the meta community together and increase participation, which is to merge the metas back. There is absolutely no reason for everyone to have 50 different discussions of the same topic when one response from Shog9 would have satisfied everyone's need to discuss.

Having separate metas leads to Community Management exhaustion. It is impossible for them to devote enough time to an issue for the community to be satisfied in all places. At the same time, each individual site meta is encouraged to have its own flavored discussion of the topic. What we have seen time and time again here, is that an issue will bubble up from one site's meta, heat up without being able to have enough attention to it, emerge as an out of control fire onto Meta Stack Exchange, and then spill back out all over the other per site metas. This is not only exhausting to control, it is impossible to maintain in the long term.

Having one meta allows for the discussions to have real meaning, as they will constitute a much larger population of participants. We require a group effort in order to move the community forward, and one meta accomplishes that goal.

Per site considerations would be available using tag based identification for situations which were truly unique to that exchange itself, but for those situations the entire community could still weigh in. While some meta users may not be experts in Pets, many are experts in the software use and scope which still strongly applies in most situations. As well, cultural issues are often best solved by a resounding coalition of meta users.

Community Manager and employee messaging would be greatly amplified as they would now have a direct route to the actual community. This would remove the need for the current hack in place, which is the blog. More and more messaging has moved to the blog, in an attempt to reach the entire community; more and more the community has felt they are being spoken to, and not spoken with.

A single meta saves us all time. Meta was created to take all of the wasted discussion about the software strewn about, and focus it in one place. Fracturing meta is self defeating for that purpose. Moreover, we need to spend less time talking about the software itself, the common meme for meta "Meta is Murder" comes from the point that discussing the software kills productivity. If one thing is clear from all of the statistics and metrics out there, it is that productivity has been in steady decline since the metas were split.