How do we change the policy of Ask Ubuntu if votes are low in Ask Ubuntu Meta?

Question

Since important policy decisions regarding Ask Ubuntu's scope are taken using voting in Ask Ubuntu Meta, it's important that as many people as possible participate in the discussion related to changing policies of Ask Ubuntu in Ask Ubuntu Meta (by voting/commenting/some other way). (Something related: What is considered a community consensus on Meta?)

I created some SEDE queries to get the total number of posts per year and the number of posts per year with a score more than 10 in Ask Ubuntu Meta. You can check the results here:

Year	Total	Score 10+	Score 10+ as % of total	Score 10-
2010	741	174	23.4818	567
2011	1285	255	19.8444	1030
2012	2148	323	15.0372	1825
2013	2090	382	18.2775	1708
2014	2094	261	12.4642	1833
2015	1325	207	15.6226	1118
2016	1473	342	23.2179	1131
2017	942	207	21.9745	735
2018	674	139	20.6231	535
2019	528	152	28.7879	376
2020	457	100	21.8818	357
2021	368	56	15.2174	312

Here are the above results as a graph to make things more clear:

[Credits to BeastOfCaerbannog for the nice graph! If you are interested to make the graph on your own, you can refer the code used by me: https://paste.debian.net/1236724/ (once again credits to BeastOfCaerbannog!)]

Note: The data might change a bit if the old posts get upvotes/downvotes.

There were days in Ask Ubuntu Meta when posts (which are not even related to policy decisions) had chances of getting more than 70 votes. [Example (excellent answer by Zanna)... Gone are those days!]

The recent policy change proposal just got approximately only 40 votes and this is sad to see. The 10 years anniversary post got more votes than it.

I might be judgemental to compare the state of Ask Ubuntu Meta just based on votes. But I feel that the active users of Ask Ubuntu Meta do know that other forms of interaction (like comments, answers) too have decreased substantially in the recent past.

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Thinking about votes in meta made me think about election statistics. The reason why I thought to look into election statistics is because I thought that voting can be considered as a metric to determine community participation in taking important decisions for the community (i.e., in this case, choosing a moderator).

I could not find any SEDE data about this (or I didn't search properly). So, I found the data manually from https://askubuntu.com/election.

Election year	Number of people who voted
2011	145
2012	180
2013	240
2014	680
2016	1006
2019	1185
2020	1499

Let's look at the data graphically:

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After looking into the data, these are the questions which I have:

• We can clearly see a huge growth in the number of people who voted in the election since the past few years. But votes in meta have decreased over the past few years. Does this indicate that there is no correlation between these two facts?

• There is a complaint being raised by some users regarding accepting the policy change as the votes were low. How do we deal with the issue of declining participation in Ask Ubuntu Meta? Should we perhaps have the featured tag for more than a month for posts regarding a policy change? Should we invite more people to meta? (and how do we invite them?)

• As of creating this post, I have never participated in an election. According to information shared by a fellow user, I got to know that notifications are sent to users regarding the election.

  So, wouldn't it be a good idea to send notifications to users regarding voting in policy change proposals in meta? Maybe the staff can help with that.

• Another issue could be the fact that meta is hard to find. So how can it be made more accessible? There have been some requests made in Meta Stack Exchange regarding this (which are worth checking out):

  • https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/367982
  • Rename "Feedback" to "Meta" in footer (Sorry for self promotion 😅)

Answer 1

Thanks for posting about this topic. I think it is a real problem that meta participation has declined, because if a smaller proportion of site users participate in meta, the site becomes less democratic.

As you mentioned in a comment, meta is not very discoverable. It became less discoverable in October 2017 with the implementation of the new top bar which, in my opinion, was a disaster for community moderation, because the meta and the review buttons that had been in the old top bar, encouraging people to participate in improving the site, disappeared.

I wanted to know whether meta participation had decreased relative to main site activity since the top bar was redesigned.

BeastOfCaerbannog kindly made this wonderful graph showing how the total numbers of posts on main and meta changed over time:

The last five years show a divergence, where activity on both sites declined, but meta activity declined more.

With regard to the question of how we change policy, I don't think that I have any fresh insights. That earlier question you linked to has answers that I more or less agree with. At least, I don't know a better way to reach a policy decision than through an open discussion on meta, where all and especially dissenting views are taken seriously and addressed. We can probably work on doing that better.

But your question leads to a more practical question: how do we let people know that meta exists, that they can come here to ask for change? Perhaps we can investigate whether other sites across the network have seen a decline in specifically meta participation and seek design improvements that could address it.

In the meantime, we can continue to feature important posts and perhaps try to take opportunities to mention meta in comments to let new users know about it.

Answer 2

People not voting on site policies and more generally not taking part in Meta means they accept how site policies are being managed, else they would engage and vote.

As far as specific questions to be featured, I think just requesting it in a comment on the question seems appropriate as mods are suspiciously omnipresent.