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How would you rate HR at this moment?

  1. Is the community active enough?

  2. What problems may we encounter in the long run?

  3. What do you especially like/dislike about this site?

3 Answers 3

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  1. Is the community active enough?

~150 questions at two weeks isn't too bad. We have an active community.

It could be better though - we need to figure out our scope. I'm worried that people are being timid about posting here because they don't know what our scope is - quite frankly, I don't either. We need a definitive scope, something we can agree on and start enforcing.

  1. What problems may we encounter in the long run?

Just like Software Recommendations, we can't let quality slip. That's the fastest way for the site to turn into a spam pit. If we keep quality up, and get experts to participate, we'll do fine.

Assuming we get the scope right.

  1. What do you especially like/dislike about this site?

Like: We have great people participating, people who know what they're talking about. I've gotten good recommendations for the questions I've asked, and haven't once seen anyone being nasty.

Dislike: Back to the scope again - I'm not sure what I can ask about. Some things are clearly on topic, candy bars are clearly off topic, but what about a monitor stand? We need to figure these things out.

I'd say the biggest issue facing this site is that the meta posts that originally tried to decide our scope fizzled out, and people are afraid to ask another one because it might be close as a duplicate. I'm wondering if the best thing to do is to declare that people can ask the same thing again, and we debate everything again.

Just a thought.

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    Compared to the SR and WR(yet to come), this site is less vulnerable to spam. So, the quality can be maintained with lesser effort. But, once it is done, then there is nothing like it. It already proved to be useful and is active enough till now. So, so far so good.
    – Dawny33
    Sep 22, 2015 at 18:31
  • +1 I don't have any experience in hardware: I just buy whatever is cheap and on sale usually. As a result, I don't tend to answer questions. Making things worse, I'm nervous to ask because I'm nervous that it will likely be closed because even I, myself, don't know what to ask and whether it's even on-topic. I see questions about furniture that are closed, and others that seem perfectly fine.
    – Zizouz212
    Sep 23, 2015 at 1:17
  • About the meta posts, I don't think that they are much of a factor. We screwed up, everyone screws up, we just happened to screw up early on. The root of my unwillingness to post doesn't come from meta, but from seeing the main site look messy with scope itself. See posts closed, and then others that are open is extremely contradictory and confusing. It's just like the saying: you get what you make. If we make confusion, and inconsistency, it won't work well for us later on. This bugs me because I won't likely fulfill a commitment now, because I don't know what I should, or even can do.
    – Zizouz212
    Sep 23, 2015 at 1:18
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Needs more voting on answers. This may imply a need for more expertise, I'm not sure.

Answers here require a lot of effort. But right now only 35 answers are scored higher than 6 - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in the private beta people should be voting as we figure out what is good/bad/etc.

Conversely, 64 questions are voted 6+.

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Is the community active enough?

At 12 days old, we have 147 questions and 180 answers. We have 5 users with more than 500 rep and several more within a handful of upvotes.

We have an active Meta that is working on various issues. The biggest being scope. We have users working on cleaning tags already, expressing their ideas about scope and our disagreements haven't caused anyone to hate one another (at least to my knowledge).

Overall, I'm pleased activity. I'm happy with the discussions we've had on Meta.

What problems may we encounter in the long run?

Scope and quality. We are working through the scope thing and I think we'll get it figured out eventually. We may just need more eyes on the questions and participants on the site at this point. Many of us have added our opinions. I also think that we have a pretty good idea where we are headed, but there are bumps in the road that we still need to watch out for. The biggest one right now is: Is a scope of "product recommendations" + "pre-purchase inquiries" agreeable?

Quality-wise, some of our answers aren't the highest quality. Answers aren't following some of the guidelines we've laid out in What is required for an answer to be 'high quality'?

Examples:

There are more, but those are three I had bookmarked for another meta post. I figured I'd mention them here. Each of these read, to me, as if the user providing the answer entered a search string into Google and pasted a short blob back here. They don't read as personal recommendations.

What do you especially like/dislike about this site?

I like reading about the various hardware products others use. I've received good answers to the questions I've asked. I'm also happy with the lack of answers on questions we don't have a recommendation for. I'm happy that we aren't just Googling (most of the time) for the imaginary unicorn points.

Along with the scope, which Undo mentioned as being murky in areas, I dislike the lack of accepted answers. I am guilty of not accepting answers too, though. I don't feel comfortable accepting a hardware recommendation until I can test the hardware. Unfortunately, testing hardware isn't nearly as simple as testing a chunk of code or a new piece of software.

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