Changes to the Area 51 Process v3.0

Question

For anyone who follows this site, you may have noticed that Area 51 has been churning out progressively weaker site proposals and more anemic site launches, about a third of which fail in private beta.

There is nothing inherently wrong with most of these subjects; it's just that we've largely tapped the audience of Area 51 who no longer provide enough momentum to build these sites FOR you. When a proposal takes 1-2 years to accrete enough passers-by to finally launch, it's not unusual to see less than half the committed users showing up at all.

I need to create a lifeline for Area 51 if we want to continue providing this service for avid communities with the means to build these sites. It would be nice if our site-creation process allowed us to experiment with more impromptu site ideas, but the current system is not sustainable in the old format.

Going forward, we generally expect proposal authors to have the means to see their site ideas through. If you are accustomed to throwing up proposal after proposal hoping somebody ELSE will build your site, Area 51 is not the place to START your community search.

Got a Community Needing Q&A? — Stack Exchange Can Help

If you have access to a healthy, enthusiastic community needing a Stack Exchange site, Area 51 is where you propose it.

Effective April 27th, 2018, we are implementing the following thresholds to focus on communities with the means to see this process through to a healthy site launch:

• [UNCHANGED] Proposal authors have three (3) days to complete the minimum submission requirements (5 followers, 5 example questions)
• A proposal has four (4) months to complete the Definition phase, and an additional four (4) months to complete Commitment
• Abandoned proposals exhibiting NO activity for seven (7) consecutive days are subject to closure

If you have an engaged community ready to build a site, these milestones should not be difficult to complete. If we find that four months is not enough time for avid communities to organize their efforts, we'll make adjustments.

These changes are intended to allow Area 51 to focus on more-productive efforts and to stop luring unsuspecting users into activities with insufficient support to see them through. It's so easy to spot these futile efforts. If you’re organizing a community ready to build your site, then these changes should not present any problem at all.

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Note: This is a general announcement. Please bring any specific discussions or comments about your site back to your proposal page.

Answer 1

I think it's interesting that Robert's post above focus so much on communities - the idea that a site proposal should be made with an existing community in mind is new to me, and none of the site launches I've been part of really had a true community before the site launched.

Fundamentally this is a problem because nothing in Area 51 is set up to foster community development. On launched sites communities develop through the Q&A process. But Area 51 is deliberately not a place where questions actually get answered. And you can't really use the Area 51 Discussion Zone to build a community either.

I know development resources for Area 51 are extremely limited, but I do have one idea which probably wouldn't take too long to implement: what about creating a chat room for each proposal, and then linking to that prominently on the proposal page? And when you create a proposal, it should be recommended to add one or two news feeds to the chat room related to the proposal topic.

Answer 2

Going through the proposal process quickly appears to be a good signal that a proposed site is viable (because failed proposals evaporate, I don't have statistics on how many failed in private beta after making the 4/4 deadline, but I don't recall there being very many). However, the opposite situation of taking a while to go through the process doesn't appear to be reliable.

If you apply the current criteria retroactively to the last five years of proposals, only about a quarter of current sites (in beta or graduated) would be around. Specifically, we'd have the following graduated sites:

• Bitcoin
• Arduino
• Emacs
• Sofware Recommendations
• English Language Learners
• Magento
• Network Engineering

and the following beta sites:

• Stellar
• iota
• Augur
• Bioinformatics
• Sitecore
• Monero
• Retrocomputing
• elementary OS
• Open Source
• Vi and Vim
• Craft CMS

In short, what you're doing here is quickly eliminating non-viable proposals at the cost of rejecting about three-quarters of all viable proposals (sites such as Aviation, Biology, Chemistry, and The Workplace would all have failed under the new system). Is this the desired outcome?

Answer 3

In short, this undermines anything other than technology sites.

And perhaps that's the point, given the structure of how Stack Overflow currently makes money.

The site offers a great opportunity to sciences. The collaborative structure, the protocol keeping questions and answers on topic and useful, and the efforts to circumvent elitism all foster interaction helpful to the scientific fields and encourages interaction with the broader community in a way few places do.

But heavy-handed choices like these reflect a larger lack of passion and commitment SE has towards such topics. Indeed, most of the science communities (and anything non-technology) wouldn't be around under these new rules. Science sites indeed may not always bring in the traffic levels sites on topics like technology do... but their importance to the lives of everyone is great.

If you really wanted to address problems, you'd invite broader input rather than making choices like these abruptly.

Honestly, I'd venture that traffic on Area51 as a whole is down, not just the supporters to new communities. (Of course it's tough to check that given that requests like this one were not seen important) If so, maybe that's a sign that fewer and fewer users are even aware of sites or proposals that might be of great interest to them, as they're usually only found via the long communities list. It doesn't help that Area51 may not be very intuitive to newer users (it certainly wasn't to me) or that the Hot questions list has settings that hinder smaller sites most (such as the time criteria).

It's ironic that the site's Blog post the same week was on how StackExchange can be a more welcoming place.

You speak of how you don't want to lure unsuspecting users into wasting their time? Perhaps don't change rules without adequate warning so people haven't wasted months of efforts trying to help sites that fell just short in the previous run.

You make it unnecessarily difficult to search details because you delete old proposals, but would think quite a few current sites took multiple attempts before getting started. But this change doesn't appear to do anything to stop silly proposals or make it clear such proposals won't work to unsuspecting users, it only seems to quietly shut the door harder on the proposals that have had a bit of energy to them in the past.

If the goal is improvement, then there's plenty of room for it. Perhaps a social media sharing bar on proposals like the one on Beta sites, perhaps clearer presentation of required milestones for people getting involved in proposals, perhaps expanding the featured site to show up with the Hot Questions list not just on the SE main page, but within communities/questions as well.

In the end, StackExchange's very success hasn't come from users "who have the means to see their site ideas through", but instead from its format that encourages anyone with questions to reach out to the knowledge of others. If communities centered around folks who bring in their own wide networks of connections, our traffic wouldn't be so Google-heavy.

When all is said and done, the message here really seems to really be: don't even bother. So be it.

Answer 4

Translated to English, this proposal is saying "StackExchange doesn't want to participate in building new communities". The community needs to be ready and Area51 doesn't want to be the tool for people to build a new community.

But this is not the way StackExchange flourished. It has successfully build a communities of people around various topics.

I think Area51 should do the opposite and facilitate people getting together in a community, helping them to get together and launch the site together. Provide them space to connect. Currently, it is perhaps too heavyweight and conceptual for this purpose, especially for non-SE users, not enough WYSIWYG, not enough instant. Perhaps letting people actually ask and answer questions, like on an actual site, would help much more to build community instantly. In a natural and user friendly way. It seems that Area51 has a lot to improve in this regard, but instead of facing it, it's saying "we are not the place to build a community". I know, it's easier, you get rid of the bulk of lame proposals, the same way you get rid of lame questions, but this is throwing baby with the bathwater. It's the easy way, but not the highest potential way.

Answer 5

This is a reasonable policy to apply to Area51 (although it was done rather abruptly).

But Stack Exchange should provide some other process or mechanism to create beta sites that have a good probability of turning into avid and active SE communities even though at the outset they lack a coherent community of at least 200 people to advance them through this more demanding Area51 process.

There are a number of obvious topics of broad interest that exist now as successful SE sites that I would not expect to have formed under this new policy. Some of them – especially the earlier ones – did not form through Area51 at all. Others did, even though it turns out that the core "community" of users that sustains them is far less than 200. (Law.SE is one I know intimately that is a good example of the latter.)

Answer 6

There is some problem with the new approach: I have seen some sites proposed under the new rules advancing to the commitment phase. In the commitment phase they fall short on the criterion "100 committers with 200+ rep on any other site"—so there is still the need of an already existing community of experienced stackexchange users. A completely new community has no chance to succeed.

Answer 7

Hopefully these changes will help, but I am skeptical. The real issue is addressed in https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/?cb=1.

Most new proposals mean gaining non-SE users. For many, the benefits of SE's QA model do not outweigh the costs of learning a new platform (particularly for older experts) nor the emotional costs of SE's condescending user base.

After all, someone can spend hours on a question or answer only to have it downvoted away without anyone bothering to take the time to explain why. This doesn't promote learning. It promotes frustration and rage-quitting.

After all, people spend their free time here. Who wants to be made to feel bad for their efforts in their free time?

Answer 8

Hmm, just an observation, but it turns out my hypothetical scenario in the comments actually ended up being true.

This proposal was closed for being just three commitments short of the required 200. Does this mean that the proposal is non-viable? Also, how did you choose the number four months, instead of, say, three or six?

Just asking.

Answer 9

From Closing a Proposal After 4 Months in Definition or Commitment:

Do you have a community ready to build your site?

We generally expect proposal authors to have access to a community to help build your site. Area 51 cannot find that community FOR you.

If so, then I think we should have a community wiki guideline for authors to find such community, and an example proposal to explain to that community why they should go to Area51.

Answer 10

I think this is a good step forward. I am guilty writing a few proposals just because I think they are a good ideal, just to see that they are not. I think a lot of people get into a proposal, get passionate about it than sort of lose sight of if it is really something that is needed or will work.

I was disappointed to see a proposal I had been following closed when I came on today, but that is what it is. The particular proposal was on it's third maybe fourth try. Hard to say why it failed, might of been the example questions where to broad, or to focused, or it just didn't seem like an good way to approach the topic to people already involved in the topic someplace else.

I think what they are doing now will lead to better communities that will be able to get out of beta better. Having said that I would love to see proposals that are making good numbers of commitment's, but low numbers with committers that have 200 points or more go forward to beta. I think they will be able to work out the SE part of things. I don't think just because there are lot of experienced se users not interested in a topic, it indicates the topic is not viable.

Answer 11

I really support this change. I've seen a pretty direct correlation between the length of time it takes for a proposal to meet the bars for private beta and whether it does well as a site in the long run. One of the sites I moderate, Arts & Crafts was a very slow burn, nearly running out of time in both phases. We made it through private beta but the site is still quite low-volume.

I attribute that to a lack of an enthusiastic base community for the site who were willing to create content. We have good answered stats and decent answer ratio but we get very few questions, which are an essential part of the process.

Considering this change, and the focus on bringing the community with you, I wonder if it doesn't make sense to lower the network reputation requirement (100+ users with 200+ reputation) for a successful commitment phase in some cases. If a group bands together to suggest a new site for the network and, in a short period of time, has gotten through the proposal phase and has 200+ users committed, does it make sense to roadblock them by requiring 100 of these users to have 200 rep on the network?

Perhaps a rebalancing or a sliding scale... for example

• 100/200 200+ users
• 75/300 200+ users
• 50/500 200+ users

So, if a proposal has 100 committers who have 200+ rep, and they have 200 total committers, they're good to go, same as usual

If a proposal gets up to 300 committed users, they only need 75 users with 200+ reputation.

If a proposal gets up to 500 committed users, they only need 50 with 200+ reputation.

This would never remove the requirement - we can make 50 the bare minimum - but if they can really get 500 interested users and just happen to be a subject that very few existing users have interest in, they may just have what it takes.

It's worth noting that meeting these goals in short periods of time (<4 months) would be extremely rare. One of the few times I've seen it happen recently was with the eosio proposal, which would have made it to private beta about a month and a half sooner than it did if this was enacted. From the beginning, this seemed like an inevitable site because it had the support of someone willing to drum up committers. Whether the site succeeds or not is yet to be seen, as it hasn't started private beta but it will be interesting to see.

This seems like a good carrot to counter the painful stick of cutting the accrual time by two thirds.

Risks:

• There's already a slight issue with users creating fake accounts just to get their proposal through A51. Y'all are good at catching this, so hopefully it wouldn't be an issue.

• This is, admittedly somewhat complex to explain... so it could cause some confusion... but it's already somewhat confusing to people and the exact requirements are hidden behind a click button reveal.