I am periodically checking the beta tracking page for our Cardano SE proposal. Avid users is climbing but I have no idea how it compares to other betas.
I have set a personal goal of 1 question per day or more over the course of the beta. I won't be asking junk questions just to meet that goal.
What other way(s) could we encourage more participation in the closed Beta?
Participants in the private beta can invite other experts in. The "invite fellow experts" section in the right-hand column of any question allows you to invite people to join before the beta becomes public. It only requires their email address.
If you wish to invite others to this site, please use this link:
https://cardano.stackexchange.com/users/login?ssrc=beta
(at first, I thought only people that committed can join the private beta, but it seems like this link works for all)
"but I have no idea how it compares to other betas."
That A51 stats compare well with other sites that entered Private Beta in recent times (which is not very many sites: Matter Modeling and Drones were the only two other sites to entire Private Beta in the last 22 months).
Our stats are as follows, after 7 days and a few hours:
Questions/day: 13.8
Answered: 93%
Avid users: 33
Total users: 1009
Answer ratio: 1.7
Visits/day: 375
After around 7 days and a few hours, Drones had the following stats:
Questions/day: 21.5 (↑ a lot more than Cardano)
Answered: 99% (↑ a lot more than Cardano, but we were at 99% recently too)
Avid users: 32 (↑ much better than Cardano as a ratio of total users)
Total users: 413 (⬇️not as many as Cardano)
Answer ratio: 1.9 (↑ more than Cardano)
Visits/day: 215 (⬇️not as many as Cardano)
After around 7 days and a few hours, Matter Modeling had the following:
Questions/day: 16 (↑ more than Cardano)
Answered: 70% (⬇️ not as much as Cardano)
Avid users: 35 (↑ much better than Cardano as a ratio of total users*)
Total users: 321 (⬇️ not as many as Cardano)
Answer ratio: 1.5 (⬇️ not as much as Cardano)
Visits/day: 342 (⬇️ not as much as Cardano)
But don't look too much into questions/day at this very early stage: Drones is now at 0.6 and has been under 1 question/day for most of the year, whereas MM is now at 2.8 and has been larger than 2 questions/day for most of the year.
The part that's most concerning is the lack of VOTING.
Only one of the top three most active users is in the top three for voting, and only 50% of the top 10 most active users are in the list of people who have voted at least 10 times.
In fact there's only 25 users that have voted at least 10 times, which is in my opinion abysmally low for a site with 33 "avid" users.
When users spend a lot of time writing a well-formed question or answer and it gets 0 votes, or only a few, it is rare to see them come back.
It's easy to underestimate how many hours people might spend on writing even a 2 paragraph post that has a couple hyperlinks to external references that the user found. Let me quote user gIS from Quantum Computing SE who wrote this on Meta:
"I would just like to remark that upvoting, in my opinion, should not be meant as some sort of "reward" to be given to exceptional answers (which is what bounties are for).
Personally, I ask myself a very simple question to decide whether I should upvote a question or answer: do I believe that this question/answer should be on this site? It's not really about the quality of the post, but more about indicating whether I think that this post is a good fit for the site. How good the post actually is will still be reflected in the upvotes, because a more useful post will be found by more people which will therefore hopefully vote it up more.
Consequently, I believe that upvotes should be given generously and without too much overthinking. On a practical level, this also encourages participation to the site, as many people like to see that their post was appreciated by others, and will therefore be more likely to stick around more when this happens."
I've not invested as much time as I wished in the first lessons of the Plutus Pioneer Program. I plan to do so this week, and keep up with the course, so my current point of view is maybe biased.
However, personally, I'm not a huge fan of the discord format for asking questions: they are all intertwined one another both questions and answers: It is really good to have an overview of all issues raised, and ways to solve. But that's not my cup of tea.
It is just a suggestion: maybe the discord format is totally sufficient for the Plutus Pioneer Program.
Can we contact the authors of the original example questions and ask them to submit them to the beta?
