That's an interesting point you raise about people who were interested a year ago not necessarily still being engaged. This makes me wonder if it might be useful for reactions to have different behaviour here than on other communities.

For example, a "casual user" reaction could disappear a month after it is added, and an "active user" reaction could disappear a week after it is added. This way the number of reactions shows how many people are currently engaged to the extent they claim.

• I will only show in the "casual user" count if I drop in at least once a month to add the reaction again.
• I will only show in the "active user" count if I add the reaction each week.
• If I add both reactions, and then I don't get around to visiting the site for a couple of weeks, I will still show in the "casual user" count but not the "active user" count (until I visit and react again).

I understand this is a burden to keep applying reactions, but it seems like a more up to date measure of how strongly people feel about getting the community going, and how enduring that feeling is.

Here's my idea for a solution: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289288

Thanks for expanding the idea. I've added an answer there with an alternative idea that it made me think of, but maybe parts of both could be used in parallel.

I think that if you launch a site idea and there is not an immediate burst of interest and activity, with lots of people posting Q&A or meta discussions, then that will probably still be the case some 6-12 months later. So rather than speaking just about reactions decaying, perhaps the whole site proposal should decay and get moved to some "freezer" containing things that never kicked off. What was said during the failed launch is still of interest for future readers though, in case someone wishes to renew the idea or avoid repeating the same mistakes etc.

Why would you move it to a freezer? That seems user-hostile.

Having the proposal at all is valuable, even if it never graduates into an actual site, because then people can still ask and answer questions in the incubator. Since the distribution of activity is always that most sites have less, we can expect that most proposals will never have enough users to justify creating a site. But that doesn't mean you should lock down the proposal and prevent those users from having their discussion.

IMO "stale" proposal should just be allowed to be stale. Maybe the proposals list can be sorted by last activity in the proposal tag, to help with people browse it.

I like this idea of sorting the proposals list by last activity in the proposal tag. It seems a good compromise between freezing and staying at the top of the list when inactive.

matthewsnyder‭ Right now we already have far more proposals than the total number of users working with actively supporting any proposal. The purpose of this Incubator thing shouldn't be a place where people drop a new wild idea every week then leave - that's not constructive or helpful. So it would be nice if those wild brainstorming zero activity proposals are moved somewhere where they aren't disruptive to the few proposals that are actually having some activity.