How could we improve participation?

Question

Seriously. This site has very low engagement. Even when it reached a beta stage I see very low activity. Please let's discuss how to get more people's attention.

Some time ago I participated in a spanish site named 52cartas.com which had pleeeenty of people, so there IS people outside. However the basic (default, even unintentional) strategy of simply staying up while people from other SE sites becomes aware of our existence is not efficient: Have you watched poker tournaments and player profiles? Few of them are IT people (potentially interested in visiting SE network). Even my poker mates! I am among the few IT experts among them.

I say there is a big share of players we are missing by default.

How can we improve the engagement? I think I said few of them in another post I'd like to remark, while adding new:

1. This one is dangerous and possibly not efficient, but recommending the site when playing online poker, is people chatting in the room, and the context arises: recommend them to visit poker.SE. I say dangerous because there's a blurry line of doers becoming spammers and no game server (and game type!) wants spammers.
2. If you have a poker-related website or blog, make sure you... spam... some references to poker.SE there to encourage participation.
3. Ensure the topics are wide enough in this community and there is a proper environment. This involves:
   • Make a fair and respectable application of the Good Subjective, Bad Subjective criterion. Most applications of this ruling lately in the whole SE network is crap and reading that document does not help when the closer's attitude was not actually an interpretation of the blog entry. I did not see this behavior in poker.SE but better to prevent than fix.
   • Always keep the topicness of this site as wide as possible. There is not so much regarding poker theory once a year or two of useful and non-duplicate contributions run in the site. After that, discussing how I played my hand, hoy Gus Hansen trained to have such devil's face, how did Doyle Brunson adapt his strategy after publishing his book... they not always fit the SE format but we should be careful and perhaps offer a good attitude a priori.
   • Despite a personal issue I had, I don't see a bad interacting environment here as I saw in other poker sites. Pleeeease we all must ensure the community is friendly and not become like other sites.
   • Upvote when good. Downvote when bad. Close when blatantly inappropriate. Be willing to review closed questions when they get a modification. This is never remarked enough across whole SE network.
4. THE CHAT IS almost NEVER USED - we should encourage people to use it. I visited it. It is no man's land. I would like to visit there and even be visited to, say, a good server allowing custon poker tables, heads ups, tournament invitations. This goes for moderators or people able: put a sticky note reminding people of using the chat. It is never used enough across whole SE.

I think I covered the points I can imagine now. What am I missing? What could we improve?

Answer 1

I can offer an outsider's perspective on this. For some background, I have been playing poker for over a decade, at times professionally. In this time, I have contributed to TwoPlusTwo and to poker discussions that take place on other platforms. I have a solid understanding of the rules, procedures, nuances, best practices and healthy habits, etc.

I am also a proponent of the Stack Exchange network. Needless to say, I was excited for the prospect of a poker site on SE and watched with anticipation through its proposal and staging phases.

For whatever reason, I didn't stick with it. Apparently not many people did. Maybe Paparazzi is correct that SE is not the optimal format for poker questions.

But by chance, I got a dose of what your community has to offer this week. There was a brief exchange on the /r/poker subreddit wherein someone expressed confusion between the no-limit 50% raise rule and the fixed-limit 50% raise rule.

The Reddit user cited this revision of the top-voted answer to this question which incorrectly interpreted and applied the TDA rule.

No problem, I'll submit an edit. That's what I did. Twice.

Both edits were rejected by Toby Booth who seemed to also misunderstand the wording of the rule. After my first edit was rejected by him, I alerted Toby to his misunderstanding on Twitter and in my second attempt at editing the answer. He again rejected it.

Then Toby argued with me and a poker pro on Twitter, willfully ignoring the wording of the rule and refusing to back down long after he realized he was wrong. At one point he called the wording of the rule subjective in an attempt to save face. It's not at all subjective. When confronted with the effect his conduct was having on the quality of this site, he deflected with the "internet tough guy" response.

This is insane behavior by one of your mods.

You have someone who is either incompetent or malicious submitting more reviews here than anyone else. No wonder nobody wants to participate.

And it's not as if the bar for poker Q&A is super high. The other options have never been great. But at least at TwoPlusTwo and Reddit we can be pretty confident that a single brat isn't able to suppress our corrections while propagating false information in a grab for internet points.

In this particular instance, I cared to the extent that an accepted answer was causing confusion in outside discussions, but I and other poker enthusiasts otherwise don't care about this site. We simply go elsewhere. That is a huge problem for you.

When /r/poker of all places is producing far better and more accurate Q&A content, you know the integrity of your community is tenuous and its outlook dismal.

Answer 2

Be more tolerant of answers you disagree with.

I would like to say I like the way the moderators are handling this site. I have dealt with other struggling sites where mods hammer me to improve a good answer to a perfect answer.

SE is not an optimal format for poker but still needs to stay true to SE.

Clean up questions with show cards and nice formatting.