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What sort of things were overlooked by the community that caused this site to fall short?

Here's a screenshot of the original "Arduino.SE is closing" post

Also relevant: What should be the scope of the Arduino site? , What's wrong with EE?, Differences with EE

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The main issues were/are :

  • We had 40 questions on day one and about 5/day after that which is very low for a private beta.
  • Visits/day have been dropping since day one. (They have increased since yesterday)
  • We have had just 5 people sign up in the past 3 days, which means users have not been inviting others to participate which is critical to site success
  • The site has not been active as it could have been in terms of improving content and meta participation

I personally believe that the site should have been given a warning, and then some time to tackle these problems, however, that did not happen. Nonetheless, we created some excellent content, that will find a home on EE now.

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This is our screw-up, not yours. When we were debating whether to send this site into beta, I voiced some concern that there was a lot of overlap in the definition. After some debate internally, we decided to go ahead with the launch, thinking there would be enough interest in other Arduino topics to carry the site. We were wrong. However, I still think this site does demonstrate that there is a wealth of knowledge that hasn't necessarily found a place within EE.

I do feel that it is (at least partly) our screwup, but that's not the reason I'm quoting this.

Basically, being a subset scope-wise, we had much higher standards to live up to. It was uncertain if we would even have had a private beta, so once we had one, we should have put more effort into proving that it would work. Our questions/day were rather low -- on its own this should not have been a problem, as Chem.SE had similar stats in its private beta. However, we also had a very small group of answerers, and we had low views.

I don't know what we could have done. Some of us delayed answering to let others answer, but that didn't work much. (Also, on other private betas it is quite common to have 4-5 answers on good questions. Here we had just 1-2). I guess this was just a general problem with the community; only a few had immediate questions to ask. It could also be that Arduino.cc and Google manage to solve most Arduino questions one has, and the site just wouldn't have worked as a private beta.

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    I don't know that this was necessarily part of any screw up on anyone's part. This is all part of a process; a vetting of ideas. You work your way through the phases to see how far the idea can go. It's just that this particular idea wasn't meant to be. It got further than most.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 16:28
  • @RobertCartaino: Of course, but there probably were things we could have done better :)
    – Manishearth
    Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 21:16
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    I really am not sure how much EE would really accept these questions, as much as some argue they would...
    – ɥʇǝS
    Commented Apr 26, 2013 at 3:40

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