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I am familiar with other Stack Exchange sites that are out of beta and don't see a lot of difference. I think we get more elected moderators and they get special spam fighting powers and a cape but aside from that what changes....

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    I'm glad you asked this. I'm looking forward to the answer(s). Without any real benefits, I'd rather stay as we are. Privileges and levels of ability to be useful are higher for graduated sites. For instance, at Cooking and others you need 2,000 rep to edit questions, 3,000 to cast open and close votes, 10,000 to access mod queues, It's hard to get that much rep, so I'm concerned that users like me, who spend most of my time doing those things, might be discouraged and less interested in the site.
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Nov 1, 2016 at 16:15
  • There's a good description of the changes at meta.stackexchange.com/a/257648/146318. I'll write up an answer later.
    – Niall C. Mod
    Nov 1, 2016 at 18:52

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This is only a partial answer, but as I see it, the changes that come with graduation mostly benefit a site with high activity levels, and dealing with high volumes of material. As we are, many of the changes would not even be beneficial. And as we are, graduation is not going to happen. We would need marked advances in activity.

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From the link that Niall gave this comment from D.W. does not quote a source but it is thought provoking:

I'd like to add one more feature to your list. Today, sites in beta can be shut down at any time, and all their content disappears (well, there's an export, but it won't show up in search). For graduated sites, there's an implicit promise that this won't happen: Stack Exchange will continue hosting the archive of questions & answers. For me, I buy into the mission of SE as building an archive of high-quality content. If there's a significant risk that all my contributions might disappear at any time, that's a deterrent to contributing; knowing that won't happen would be a nice benefit

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    I think it's safe to say (from experience) that sites which have been active enough not to get shut down in a year or two, won't get shut down in the future, because they've earned their stay. Some sites naturally can't attract many new questions simply because there's only so much you can ask about a particular topic, so unless something new appears constantly, it's unrealistic to expect a site to keep getting more and more new unique questions.
    – user1306322
    Nov 8, 2016 at 9:39

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