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Hint: moving your vote from a +10 question to a lower-scored one helps. A question needs 10 users to go from 0 to 10, but one user can bring 5 questions from 9 to 10 easily.
...so I'd suggest balancing this somewhat. Be more demanding of questions, but less strict about followers. Say, 5 followers, 10 questions in 5 days. Especially that most beta sites die from lack of questions, not users.
@RobertCartaino: My point is the 5 questions requirement is light and easy to meet - I'd say trivial to meet as the creator can post all five. The 5 followers is disproportionately hard by comparison, especially that followers rarely show up immediately (I can tell I'm visiting 'new proposals' of Area51 maybe once in two weeks to hunt for interesting ones. So even if I love a proposal, I won't be in the initial 5 followers 4 out of 5 times.) Often a proposal will go with scarce few followers for weeks, then explode in popularity once one of followers advertizes it with the target community...
I agree about "how to beat them" but I wouldn't discard "particular games", especially with their peculiaities. I'd say e.g. "How to replace the battery in my Legend of Zelda cartridge" should be on-topic. (these weren't meant to be replaceable, so it requires quite a bit of tinkering).
One way to prove a proposal is needed: Take some good proposed questions and ask them on sites this proposal is supposedly a duplicate of. If they fail to provide any sensible answers, that's a sure-fire sign the proposed sites don't provide a good replacement for the proposal. And vice versa, if the answers are good, that means the proposal is not needed.
