Recently, I was asked about whether or not Bitcoin was ready to graduate, after looking at the site statistics it looks like it's ready, but there are some things holding the site back which I'd like to address.
When we review the health of a site, in terms of graduation, one of the first things we check is questions per day. Over the past six months, Bitcoin has been at or above the 10 question per day average we want to see.
That means the site is generating the number of questions we want for a healthy site, but looking closer it doesn't appear that it could support graduating.
A few things happen when a site graduates, the privilege levels increase and a moderator election takes place. At this time, I'm not sure Bitcoin could support either of these.
Raising the privilege levels means users will need more reputation in order to do things like access review queues, edit posts immediately, and cast close and reopen votes. The community currently has about 57 users with 2k+ reputation, of these users, only about half of them have been active on the site over the past 30 days. Not having enough users to help with keeping the site clean of the cruft means that it falls squarely on the shoulders of the few who remain and are active, which could be a large burden to bear.
In the past, we've learned that sites without a bigger middle class users suffer and cannot support elections. We don't want to prematurely graduate Bitcoin only to have it not be able to succeed.
As a result, we are delaying the graduation of Bitcoin until there are more potential moderator candidates and voters. We will review the site statistics every few so often to see if it can support graduation. In the meantime, there are a few things that you, the active user base, can do to help move this along:
Encourage users to participate. Whether that means you invite knowledgeable people to join the site and contribute. As I mentioned, Bitcoin is getting a lot of questions per day, and those questions are getting answered. This site needs users who are invested and want to continue to contribute. If you see a good question that needs an answer, and you know someone who can answer it, encourage them to sign up or ask them to answer.
Vote. Voting is important because it helps users earn privileges, but please continue to vote on the basis of content. This is just a reminder that useful posts should be upvoted.
What else can we do to get this site ready to graduate?
