Continuing the discussion from We were told stuff would happen soon but its 6+ months later:
Well 100 days of code talks about it a lot (every lesson). And a lot of people did 100 DoC. So Idk why it’s not more known.
Tbh a lot of mainsite is younger people just having fun. I doubt they really care what happens so long as it still works. Ask users express their opinions, sometimes to the point of getting banned.
I agree that the little forum thing is too hidden. It is buried with a bunch of stuff most people never look at. I never did. I came here because I contacted the mods via a Repl on mainsite and was pointed to this forum.
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That explains why a large number of new users post on those topics more than anything else.
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Also many people post questions and never respond to answers. Ask is growing but somehow it is so unknown still. Nevertheless, the Ask community being smaller lets everyone get to know everyone else better. I’ve seen several groups of TL3s rotate through, but you always get to know people here. It was a nice community.
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most ppl ask questions that’s why it’s unknown. they ask → leave. very poor retention
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(Personal thoughts, not official)
I would assume for one big reason, but first some vocabulary: Replit has a few general “cohorts” of users. Students, hobbyists, and “pro” developers are the biggest ones. Students and hobbyists you can assume the meaning, it’s the same as everyone elses’. “Pro” developers are generally paying users who use Replit not as a learning tool but a place to build large fleshed-out projects or test conceptual ideas. These users will come to Replit and spin up an LLM application without considering a large project they need to share.
People who do 100 DoC, generally speaking, are students and they often end up here. The majority of users on Replit Ask are students for this reason.
Hobbyists sometimes venture to Replit Ask, sometimes post to community, but usually they just spin up projects for personal use on Replit and that’s that. They might be testing something or sharing something, they might find a subscription valuable or unnecessary. They might find the community worthwhile or not.
Pro developers almost exclusively use Replit for the platform, not the community. They have a community at work, on social media, they might even stroll up to our office in CA or NY if they want to talk to us. There are other avenues to communicating with Pro developers.
It’s less that Replit Ask is unknown, more that Replit Ask was made to serve a function and gradually it started to veer away from that function, an effect of this being a lack of diversity. Same scenario happened on the Friends of Replit Discord server.
From my understanding there aren’t any active efforts to replace Replit Ask or make any changes to it’s userbase. We’re just using the best channels we have to communicate with our different demographics.
(Also I don’t think others feel comfortable communicating in the lynch mob that Ask forum posts can sometimes become, I get scared or overwhelmed at times 
)
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It makes sense that Replit employees would feel that way, since we can be brutally honest with our feedback at times.
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Well, I am a hobiyist and student, I do both. I did 100DoC, but I came here not for help from 100DoC. Tbh idk how I even came here.
If there ware ads, i would not be very happy, but I wouldn’t complain either.
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I guess I’m a hobbyist! While I did originally join Replit as a student, 100DoC wasn’t out yet. I learned all I needed to and these days only make a couple of projects for myself, as I really am not as fond of learning/programming as much as I used to be.
I focus on the community not to post and promote my projects, but rather to help people so they don’t have a mental breakdown looking through random StackOverflow threads.
Now, I already know as a fact that the numbers I will use to represent this are not what they actually are, but let’s think about this like the following, which kind of corresponds to what Ray said.
Students are 100% guaranteed to end up on Ask at some point.
Hobbyists are 50/50, and Pro developers are 0%.
Only 50% of users will actually end up on Ask for some period of time. Considering many of these users only show up to Ask a Question before never returning again, I would say less than 5% of users that have been on Ask are still active. 2.5% of Replit users will become active Ask users.
That doesn’t even seem right, and while my numbers are probably super off, it does lead me to believe that not as many students actually come on Ask as people may think. I know that there are not many Pro developers from my knowledge, and I feel that hobbyists are what make up most of the active Ask userbase.
With the following into consideration, let’s try calculating what percentage of Replit users will become active Ask users.
Students, probably 50/50 honestly. I would think most of the students watching 100DoC are young programmers looking to show off to their friends.
Hobbyists, probably won’t even find Ask. They probably won’t watch 100DoC and they will most likely only discover Ask in three ways. (1. issue with replit, support directs them here, 2. google some random coding problem and Ask is one of the top choices, 3. they notice the small ask button on the homepage and check it out) In this case, maybe 20% or so will discover Ask.
Pro developers, I have seen almost none on Ask, so let’s say 10%.
That’s 1% of users that discover Ask. And considering that only around 5% of those users actually stay active, 0.05% of Replit users become active Ask users.
That means for every 2,000 Replit users, there is only 1 Active Ask user.
That seems sad, but realistic to me.
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Ha, no way. More like every million Replit users.
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Honestly, I kind of want to figure this out with actual data.
Problem: What percentage of Replit users will become active Replit Ask users?
I would need to know the following:
- Total number of Replit users
- How many active Ask users (people that post on a set basis that can be decided later)
Once the data is found, simply use the following equation to calculate the total number of active Ask users (represented in JavaScript):
let replitUsers = ???
let activeAskUsers = ???
return `${activeAskUsers / replitUsers * 100}%`
Does anyone have a way of collecting this data, or have a reasonable idea of what these data points might be?
Also, what should we consider an “active Replit Ask user”? Someone who replies on a daily basis or hops in every week or so for a quick post?
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GQL? Maybe from a mod or staff?
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It looks like the ids are incremented numbers.
Note: it seems a new user is created every 5 seconds
So I think there are around 24.615.000 Replit users when I am writing this words rn.
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For the number of active Replit users I found this article Repl.it Case Study | Google Cloud
“We just exceeded 1 million coders a month”
And I suppose that activeAskUsers < activeReplitUsers
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Who would have guessed…
Some people may have known Ask, but don’t go there because they don’t need help, or aren’t interested.
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This can reflect the number of active ask users https://ask.replit.com/badges/122/contributor-april-2023, although if I don’t know who is considered as a contributor 
EDIT:
Replit Ask has 27593 users
Thus
let replitUsers = 24615000;
let askUsers = 27953;
let activeReplitUsers = 1000000;
let activeAskUsers = 1000;
27953 / 24615000 * 100 = 0.114 %
→ 0.114% of Replit users have an Ask account
1000 / 27953 * 100 = 3.58 %
→ 3.58% of Ask users are considered as “contributors”
1000 / 1000000 * 100 = 0.1
→ 1% of active Replit users are Ask “contributors”
1000 / 24615000 * 100 = 4.063 * 10^-3
→ 0.004063% of Replit users are Ask “contributors”
Please correct me if any of my calculations are incorrect 
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Some approximations of official Ask data (these numbers are very rounded and were not calculated, these are just to give you guys a vague idea), we have roughly 150 signups per day, 25 engaged users per day, 200 posts per day, and over 90% of our users are TL0.
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Yes, of course, these are only approximations since we don’t have official data, but I think they may reflect part of the reality.
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That’s interesting, because I somehow came when I saw ‘forum’ on the bottom-left of the Replit homescreen.
That’s also how I saw the Scratch forums from Scratch.
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