-12

Proposal: Greek Language

The next stage needs 'more questions with a score of 10 or more', a target more quickly reached if users transferred their upvotes from those questions with > 10 upvotes to those with <.

2

2 Answers 2

14

Why…? Did those questions suddenly become better? </tongue-in-cheek>

Telling people how to vote the earmark of a community who won't be able to find enough followers to move the proposal forward organically. This comes up a lot, but it usually ends up being a black mark on the viability of the proposal itself.

Think of it this way…

The requirement to move forward were derived empirically (← this is important) by studying previous proposals that went on to build healthy sites. Folks often blame Area 51 if the system is holding them back, but they are going through the same process the successful sites did. So the track reflects whether you actually have a sufficiently large and engaged community to move forward… or lets you know if you don't.

But if the goal is to simply pump up the numbers without actually attracting more users, you're only increasing the probability this site will never be built.

Folks don't understand that moving on too quickly is only setting you up to fail harder… later. You're just getting started. If the proposal is not ready, it is really easy to try again with a running start next time. But if you move on without that momentum, folks are going to get frustrated in the wasted effort that is to come.

And then they're just gone.

2
  • 2
    This makes sense as far as it goes, but it is contradicted by the Area 51 UI. Given the stated goals the questions shouldn't be present in vote order at all. That only encourages pile ups on a few questions rather than distributed voteing that might show general cohesion around a topic. Maybe the vote count display even needs to change. People repeatedly bring up strategic voting because the UI lends itself to missunderstanding how the tool works.
    – Caleb
    Jan 11, 2017 at 5:15
  • 1
    Or the UI could just cap votes at 10. People would more naturally spread out their votes without any strategic or manipulative voting. Jan 11, 2017 at 5:27
6

Definitely not

You should only vote on good defining questions, and if there is a lack of them, think of better defining questions.

You must log in to answer this question.