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My own experience is that I've started joining Q&A sites mostly to post questions. Though, I kept asking more questions.

Therefore I wonder that we have quite many members, and still growing, but the question rate is going down.

Why is so? Would be great to get your feedback!

  • How comes you have joined DevOps SE?
  • Do you have currently no DevOps questions?
  • Would you like to ask more questions?

Further reading from academic research findings by Slag et al., 2015 - "One-day flies on StackOverflow: why the vast majority of stackoverflow users only posts once":

StackOverflow (SO) is a popular question and answers (Q&A) platform related to software development. An interesting characteristic of SO is that about half of its users makes only one contribution to the platform in total.

In this work, we study this group of users, which we call one-day flies, and we investigate why they do not continue to contribute to the platform. By achieving this understanding we can find ways to enable users to become more active.

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  • The real reason why the question rate has gone down over the past few weeks, is because of the massive close votes in the past month or so. And that in turn has caused a lot of questions to be considered as abandonded and hence automatically deleted ( read more: devops.stackexchange.com/help/roomba ... ). And because of all that ... the question rated dropped ...
    – Pierre.Vriens Mod
    Jan 7, 2020 at 16:22
  • @Pierre.Vriens do you mean, existing users are kind of scared to ask "wrong" questions? if so, is there a way to improve? after all, we keep getting new users.
    – Ta Mu
    Jan 7, 2020 at 16:50
  • I'm here for the association bonus 😉
    – 0xC0000022L
    Dec 29, 2020 at 0:21

2 Answers 2

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I just joined this SE... and I'll give a frank answer here:

I joined up looking for DevOps. What I found are questions and answers on tooling.

Looking at the current first page I see questions regarding..

  • Prometheus, Kibana
  • Jenkins, Github
  • Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes
  • AWS, Azure

--> Those are just tools/technologies/stacks...

I'm not saying that they don't have a place here, but there are plenty of other places (many also on other SEs) where people can solve their technical difficulties. I see little added benefit of creating yet another separate SE for this.

Personally I would be interested in methodological questions, culture questions, questions on management of change, DevOps mindset, applying DevOps techniques to various parts of the value stream, to various businesses, etc.

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  • hi and welcome! thank you for sharing. Yeah probably such questions are tough to lay out and answer in Q&A format beyond exchanging opinions. Nevertheless would be great if more such questions appear.
    – Ta Mu
    Nov 2, 2020 at 14:56
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My main motivation to join StackExchange sites is just this: I want to be able to upvote good answers.

Usually, I only ask a question when I

  • thoroughly searched for an answer,
  • feel that I'm clear on the general context and thus able to ask a concise question
  • desperately need this answer, but
  • still have ample time to write a question and wait for answers
  • think it likely that I'll receive a helpful answer.

Maybe I should be less shy about asking questions, I don't know.

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