A healthy community requires both activity and people. The Incubator Q&A category is the place to build activity (and Meta is the place to flesh out issues that come up in doing so), but we'd also like to have a way to gauge interest. What replaces the "I'm interested" entries from the old system?

As an experiment, we've added the following three reaction types for proposal descriptions:

• Active user: I will participate actively in this community, both here in the incubator and after launch.

• Casual browser: I will browse activity in this community and participate occasionally, both here in the incubator and after launch.

• Subject matter expert: I have expertise in topics covered by this site.

What's "active"? This is somewhat subjective, but, broadly speaking, we'd expect active users of a community to visit more days than not, look for questions to answer, and ask questions. Obviously this depends on other people -- there need to be questions to answer -- but these first two are about intentions. Do you expect to visit and participate most days? That's active. Are you interested enough that you'll keep coming back and looking around, but less frequently? That's casual browsing.

The last one is a different dimension. Having at least a few experts can make a big difference in helping a community to grow, particularly if they're also active. If you consider yourself to have expertise in some aspect of the proposed community, please let us know.

As I said, these reactions are an experiment. If we need to tweak them or add more, we can do that. Please try it out and let us know if you have ideas for improvements. If, over time, you find your feelings changing, no worries -- you can retract or change your reactions at any time.

posted 10 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Monica Cellio‭ staff

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