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Comments on How should Codidact "advertise" and gain community members?
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How should Codidact "advertise" and gain community members?
This came up a bit in my post to try to get a TRPG site going, but I think it's really a broader issue, not just to starting new communities but also to the ones that are already launched.
Just how should we go about trying to gather people, and generally get the word out about the existence of these Codidact communities? There are a handful of people that have been keeping an eye on it from the kerfuffle of Stack Exchange last fall, but I'm not convinced we really have enough people to grow outside of maybe those couple communities that decided to abandon Stack Exchange entirely, and I think it'd be helpful to ensure we even cover communities that Stack Exchange doesn't.
If you want to look at some history (and there may be better examples out there, I'm no "business major" in the slightest so this is just what I'm familiar with), I'm thinking of the post where Joel Spolsky announced Stack Overflow, which has this paragraph that I think is relevant:
Pattern-matching rules fired in my brain. The hardest thing about making a new Q&A site is not the programming—it’s the community. You need a large audience of great developers so you have the critical mass it takes to get started. Without critical mass, questions go unanswered and the site becomes a ghost town. I thought the combination of my audience (#15 on Bloglines) and Jeff’s (#89) would bring enough great developers into the site to reach critical mass on day one. So Jeff and I decided to go in together on this.
I'm willing at this point to be optimistic enough that at some point we'll hit that "critical mass" once enough Q&A is posted here, and then people will find their way here regularly by search engines while looking to an answer to some specific question, but I think it'll take a while to get there. In the meantime, do we need some sort of "advertising" strategy, where I'm not sure "advertising" is the best term (though maybe actually buying search keywords and social media ads is an approach if somebody wants to figure out funding for it)?
There are communities elsewhere (on Stack Exchange, Reddit, and various forums of all stripes out there on the net), but I'm not sure how to go about letting people there know about Codidact without it coming across as "spammy" and trying to "steal" their users from their community. Do we have a Spolsky & Atwood equivalent (for each site?), where a couple prominent people could be convinced to let their readers know about this place?
A related question is whether advertising Codidact as a whole even makes sense, or if we should focus on advertising cer …
4y ago
We have to build awareness through word of mouth. And that's not about Codidact in general, and isn't always even about …
4y ago
Have we considered some way of displaying questions from one site on another? It seems like the easiest people to con …
4y ago
Hello, I came from here from Ad on World-building Stack. Well, perhaps you could advertise on being more friendly here, …
4y ago
Re. > “That said, Meta Stack Overflow does have at least one Q&A discussing alternatives to Stack Overflow. There is …
4y ago
I think this is going to be site specific. It may take a while, but in the end, users will go to where questions get go …
4y ago
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I think this is going to be site specific. It may take a while, but in the end, users will go to where questions get good answers. It's like the Build it and they will come philosophy. I like to call it Answer and they will ask.
This process is slow, because it relies on word of mouth. That's exponential in the early stages. One advantage of Codidact is that there isn't a profit to be made, so there is no need to hurry. Of course the occasional mention in various places of expert answers available over on Codidact will greatly accelerate this process.
As Joel Spolsky pointed out in the paragraph you quoted, this all hinges on having a core group of experts that are willing to provide quality answers. At least that's necessary for technical subjects. There may be a very different dynamic for more social sites. Those are not what I'm talking about.
It's interesting that this very observation is what SE forgot as time went on. Perhaps they were blinded by the need to make a profit, where clicks are revenue, and masses provide clicks, so volume matters and quality doesn't. The flaw in this logic is that the masses are only there because of quality, despite how much they may bitch and moan at attempts to keep the quality high. Once the experts get disillusioned and leave, and quality falls, the masses also leave because they no longer get the good answer they came for.
Fortunately, the experts in a particular field are usually well known. To start a new site, you invite them personally. To keep them, you keep the place clean, and give the experts the power to help keep it clean, and have some system for giving them recognition in return for the high quality free answers. The few good answers initially will attract more questions, and you're up and running along the exponential curve.
Answer and they will ask.
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