Why domain experts of our main site are mostly calm?

Question

One can see that there are two closed proposals of AI on area 51: 10 years ago, 7 years.

I Joined in our main site an year back. I asked only 25 questions and answered no questions. Because, the answers by expert or senior users are very well drafted and it may take sometime for me to study the topics in detail to answer.

I can experience a consistent support from nbro♦. And our main site has experts from several domain. For example, I believe that Neil Slater is a domain expert from reinforcement learning (since he answered for RL questions by me and several others).

I am getting great answers from several other users as well. But, I have a small concern regarding the moderation and activity by experts in our main site and feeling slight dissatisfaction.

Very few senior/expert members are providing answers, upvoting, editing etc., It may discourage new users to join and contribute as well.

My question: Why do many (domain) expert users remain silent or calm?

I feel that our main site can achieve really great stature if such expert users are not silent.

I am guessing the (any or some) following reasons:

1. They are contributing to other related sites like Cross validation, Data sciences, Stack overflow, Computer science.;

2. They are not impressed by the quality of questions asked by the users;

3. They are busy with their professional or personal activities;

Are my reasons true? If not, what may be the reason for such inactivity? Or am I going wrong anywhere?

Answer 1

You give three good reasons why many experienced users here are not very active or as active as you and I would like. Unfortunately, this is a problem that exists for a long time. There aren't and there haven't been many active experts on this site (from my perspective, without looking into the details/statistics, only 2-3 users regularly answer questions and almost nobody cares about editing posts to clarify them, although I've observed a small improvement in this area in the last weeks).

In my case, I am busier now than in the past two years because of my professional activity, so my activity on the site has gone down a little bit, although I try to visit the site every day and even several times a day, but, unfortunately, I am not able to edit as many posts as I used to in the past and to provide answers regularly, which sometimes require a little bit of time and effort. I've actually stopped contributing to other Stack Exchange sites in order to focus on this site, which, as you also noticed, requires more experts, in order to make new users more engaged.

I think that we haven't yet attracted many experts because experts in an AI topic are typically very busy (solving their problems in research, academia or industry), so typically you will not find many people that are doing active serious research on an AI topic here.

To attract more experts, we could advertise our site and talk about this site to people that are interested in AI. However, to attract more experts, I think it's very important to keep the quality of the site high. So, for instance, if you see a bad question/answer, you should downvote it. If you see a post that is not written clearly, either downvote it or, if you have time, edit it to improve its clarity and structure. I've been trying to do this for a long time. I've noticed a little bit of progress in terms of people providing answers, but not as much as I would like: a new user comes for a few weeks or months, another one goes for many months or forever. So, if you really believe in this site, as I do, stay around and try to help the community in whatever way you can :)

Answer 2

I think I can only really speak for myself, but for me it's very much simply just this one:

3. They are busy with their professional or personal activities;

I used to be much more active a while ago than I am now, and that decline in activity is very much solely because my energy goes towards other stuff. For me, I think it's also simply something that comes in... waves? Sometimes there's a period of time where I'm in the mood for spending a significant amount of my spare time on stackexchange sites, and sometimes I'm not. That's not due to anything about the site itself though.

For me, it's certainly not about preferring other stackexchange sites. In fact, usually when I'm active, I tend to be active on multiple of those sites at the same time. And when I'm not, I'm inactive in all of them at the same time.

Answer 3

I find the types of questions on the AI SE are often hard to answer. A lot of questions are about the latest ML/DL fad, where someone tries something out and gets stuck. And I don't have the time to wade through pages of error messages to diagnose something. As I do that in my job already, I also don't feel inclined to do that on here.

The questions I try to answer are mostly about 'old school' AI/NLP stuff, which has somewhat gone out of fashion in the public eye, but is still widely used in actual applications (because it works). But there are fewer and fewer of them.

At least it's not as bad as on some of the language SEs, where grammar fanatics downvote anything that doesn't comply with their favourite grammar rules they learned in school decades ago...

Answer 4

My question: Why do many (domain) expert users remain silent or calm?

1. SE value doesn't our time given than AI, CV and DS are ~90% duplicate of one another.
2. SE value doesn't our content: roomba, deletions, unexplained closures, unexplained downvotes, etc.

My question: Why contribute in that context?