Do we run out of questions or?

Question

Beer.sx is quite active in the first days of its closed beta. But now, there is no new question in the last 4 days, and there is very low activity on the existing questions.

I can say I am novice in beer topics, I try to answer if I can and I try to richen my answer using web so it may help more people and it would become more satisfactory. But beyond that, I do not have much to ask.

So I am trying to figure out the problem. Do we ask all that a community can ask? I guess not. Beer can not be so narrow to fit all in topics in 212 questions. So the problem must be somewhere else. Maybe, choosing what is on-topic and what is not cause this.

So what is the main reason of this low activity? How can we overcome this?

Answer 1

To make things worse, low activity begets low activity. Today we're showing fewer than 100 visits/day. The obvious effect is that with lower activity people don't need to come around as much (nothing new to read/answer). But there's a less-obvious effect, possibly more important than that: lower activity increases the perception that the site will close, and if the site is going to close there's not much incentive to work to improve it (effort spent on posts will be lost, at least for most of them -- nowhere to migrate).

So not only do we need to figure out how to increase activity, but we need to do it before too many potential contributors wander away.

If this site is to exist alongside Homebrewing, I wonder if we should broaden the scope to wine, cider, and mead. Homebrewing is about making these beverages and maybe this site should be about consuming them -- all of them, not just beer. (We would need to adjust the site's name in that case.) Because this site was created it seems like there's a place for questions that are about beer but not about making beer; that's presumably just as true for wine et al.

(I was not involved in the Area 51 proposal for this site and I don't participate on Homebrewing. I came here because, yum, beer. If this discussion has already been held and resolved, I'm sorry and please point me to it.)

Answer 2

I think the answer lies in this question: What kinds of questions will keep Beer.SE active? (Relax the culture against brands and regional questions.)

The problem is: what's left to ask? I can no longer think of non-opinion-based questions to ask, and it seems most other people have run out too. So, although beer is not a narrow topic, factual questions that don't fit under homebrewing.SE may be.

I think the best answer might be to try to encourage more regional answers (which we decided were allowed in the above linked question). Unfortunately, we might not have the critical mass for that to work: if someone asks where to get beer X near Milwaukee, but no one from Milwaukee uses this site, it likely becomes a dead question.

Answer 3

Yes. This site is cool because I like beer, but it doesn't work. Especially with there being already a homebrew site where you basically ask almost any question you could ask here.