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There are only like 273 questions excluding this one. Mean while, there are over 18,000,000 on SO. Why is it so lonely here? Is anybody home?

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  • $\begingroup$ Earth science may not be as popular as programming in general. On the other hand, about 10 million of the 18 million questions on SO are really bad quality, many of the others are mediocre. There is a danger that smaller communities may never really fly and the way out could be increasing the scope, for example allow scientific software usage questions maybe or fusing with another similar community. I personally would be happy if there was only a single natural sciences exchange. But then others may like it differently. $\endgroup$
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Feb 14, 2020 at 22:27

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You are on Earth Science Meta. This is the site to ask question about the site itself. Those are naturally fewer in number.

There are currently 5,008 question on the main Earth Science page. This is much less than on Stack Overflow. This is because the site is lesser known, newer, and covering a smaller topic. Earth Science will always be smaller than Stack Overflow. This is not a problem, as long as Earth Science gets a critical mass of users and a good signal to noise ratio.

Note that Stack Overflow has 41,486 question on meta vs. 18,912,994 on main, or about 0.2% meta vs. main questions. We have 274 meta questions vs. 5,008 main questions, or about 5.5% meta vs. main, so relatively speaking, our meta is much more active than the one on Stack Overflow. This is probably also normal because we are a smaller site.

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    $\begingroup$ If $N$ is the number of main-site questions, then SO has $9.5 \sqrt{N}$ meta questions and we have only $3.9 \sqrt{N}$. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Feb 7, 2020 at 23:43

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