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I've come across a closed SE site for startups with the claim it was not active enough during Beta.

se-business-closure

Comparing it to our site stats (as of Jan 05 2020) gives an unpleasant feeling.

enter image description here

Could we be moving towards the risk being not active enough by StackExhange standards with a subsequent closure during this year?

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    Thanks for this question Peter. I have the same concern as well. There are a lot of questions on SO and SF that should be migrated to DevOps, but the responses to the meta questions on SO and SF were not hopeful in my opinion. I think that we should contact some owners of SO and SF so that we could introduce some advertisements on their websites, but I do not no whether that is possible.
    – 030
    Jan 6, 2020 at 6:57
  • I think we can indeed ask SF/SO what so they think about migrating DevOps questions. I don't see exact duplicate because there is a big difference between "would ever become official" and "get closed because 5 questions per day is a too low activity". This is not even normalized to the size of the current user base neither the potential target group.
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 7:19
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    Currently, Stack Overflow has 1873 unanswered questions mentioning "DevOps".
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 7:29
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    That is interesting. Could you post a meta question on SO to request them to move them or to add an advertisement?
    – 030
    Jan 6, 2020 at 7:33
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    SO: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/392666/…
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 8:17
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    superuser: meta.superuser.com/questions/13933/unanswered-devops-questions
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 8:21
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    @030 please contribute to the SO thread. I was also going to ask a question at the general Meta whether the Beta metrics could be adjusted based on how much big is the community for a very special topic. See also this reddit post: reddit.com/r/devops/comments/ekkhsd/…
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 8:39
  • Thanks. I have added a comment and added two upvotes. Please let me know what you think.
    – 030
    Jan 6, 2020 at 8:45
  • @030 great, thank you! my first impressions and observations based on the feedback based on the other side are: 1) moderators of other sites expect direct communication with DevOps SE moderator like authorized persons eligible to take part in decision that a question is moved 2) if agreed, people can be scared to migrate questions manually, therefore we as DevOps people might need to provide some automation solutions.
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 8:57
  • 3) there could be an attitude like "these are our questions even if they are unanswered", here I think we can only capitalize on the topical focus benefits offered by specialized SE sites. 4) there is also a hard fact that a moderator can't move a question after 60 days; for unanswered question I still see a reason to do so, even more maybe, but this is a question to raise at the general Meta.
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 8:57
  • maybe 60 days in some case is justificated but our site does not deal only with questions "how do I make code snippet A to produce output B" which require sometimes days to think over and collect information so maybe a question can get too old but not already after 60 days. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136537/…
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 9:01
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    Hi, I saw your post on SO meta. I think one of the reasons for the "low activity" may be because this SE isn't talked about a lot. I think it needs more visibility. I personally have never heard of it, and I do quite a bit of devops on my off time.
    – kemicofa ghost
    Jan 6, 2020 at 9:43
  • @kemicofasupportsMonica thank you and welcome! I've been thinking about possibilites to make it more visible, but not found a good idea yet. devops.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/321/…
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 6, 2020 at 9:47
  • Closed Startups beta
    – 030
    Jan 6, 2020 at 13:22
  • 1
    @030 FYI - psychology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2102/…
    – Tamara Muryshkin
    Jan 7, 2020 at 18:19

1 Answer 1

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Don't take a 5 years old thing as indication for the present :)

Startups had a drop in activity at this time an noone to take care of it, hence its closure (as was its previous iteration, as explained here).

Quoting Robert Harvey (now no longer part of SE along with Shog9) from meta:

As discussed in: Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites, just about the only criteria remaining to keep a site open is having enough users (three minimum) willing to step up to Moderate♦ it.

In my opinion, Stack Overflow the company won't close something as long as it drives traffic to show ads as that's mostly the only thing they have interest in now, building communities and good quality knowledge bases is no longer their goal.

Late addition: I just seen This MSO question which seems to mean the company would like to combine this site along with others under StackOverflow "brand". My sad interpretation of their behavior in paragraph above would be confirmed if they close devops.se in favor of a devops-* tags in StackOverflow.

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