Post History

* Don't answer too many questions
* Avoid major tag gaps
* Keep the front page lively.

My armchair analysis is that the funnel for this site is like this:

1. User gets linked from internet search or elsewhere
    * Non-early adopters drop here because they don't want to bother clicking on some unknown site
2. User skims the first page to see if there's any questions that seem relevant to them
    * Many drop here because there's not enough questions for them or they're not interesting enough
    * Possibly some drop because the interface is too different from what they're used to
3. User checks activity 
    * Drops here because site is dead/too slow - not really much point in asking
    * I will refer to people who drop here as "askers"
4. User decides to help community grow by answering questions
    * Drops here because there's **few unanswered questions**, and they're all **too hard**
    * I will refer to people who drop here as "answerers"
5. User becomes dedicated early adopter

I think the biggest losses are happening in steps 3 and 4.

You cannot fix stage 3 by advertising because that acts on stage 1. But it can be improved by increasing activity.

Fundamentally, askers care about their question being answered; quickly, thoroughly and correctly. I don't think the number of answers is important. As an asker, once you've already gotten a good answer, more people answering doesn't really do anything for you, in fact it's kind of annoying when popular questions keep getting mediocre answers years after they're settled.

So what matters most to an asker is **activity**. As an asker, I glance at the most recently active question list and if I see words like "month" or "year" they're out. I don't want to wait a year to get an answer to my questions. I'll wait maybe a day, less if I'm impatient. For the sake of helping the site grow and being an early adopter, I can possibly swallow up to a week.

The action item here is that someone must patrol the site daily or weekly, and any time they see that the front page has old questions, they should go generate some activity until it doesn't. They can ask questions, answer, comment, edit typos, doesn't matter what they do so long as it bumps an old post and generates some evidence of activity. Of course genuine activity is better than fake bumping, but even that is much better than having old posts on the front page.

This patrol becomes a lot easier if there's many regulars to share the load. That brings us to step 4.

Answerers fundamentally want to answer questions. Activity is not that important to them, but there have to be questions they can answer. The problem is that the existing users of this site have already done a great job of answering just about everything, and what's left unanswered is obscure and difficult. So now we're boring and discouraging the answerer because there's nothing for him to do. 

The solution is for the regulars to leave a few easy questions unanswered. This will intrigue potential new answerers and convince them that there is something to do here after all. So for the regulars, the focus should be asking not-too-hard questions you know the answer to, but *not* answering them.

Additionally, I assume "accepted answer" is deliberately not implemented. Fair enough but it creates a problem. Answering questions with 0 answers is "easy", because almost any answer is better than no answer. But if there's none of those, you can go try to look at answered questions and see if you can give a better answer. But it's hard to tell at a glance which of the 1 answer questions is "done", and which one is still looking for a better answer.

As the answerers grow, they will increase organic activity, which then attracts askers, who organically ask more questions, which attracts more answerers.

Lastly, I think you don't want to miss out on any major subgroups of the audience by giving them the impression that their interest is out of scope because it's rarely asked. My solution would be to look at major tags on bigger sites and their relative proportion as a target. For example, `linux:bash:debian` is 35k:25k:15k there, but 6:8:9 here. Somebody should post a bunch more `linux` questions, and a few more `bash` questions.

Also, some things that are going well, and should be continued like this:
* Lightweight site design - other sites have a lot of pointless JS/bloat
* No overmoderation
* Allow subjective/recommendation questions if not badly written (in the early days of "other sites" this drove a lot of the traffic)
* Keep the sites broad, sometimes merge multiple topics into one