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?

posted almost 4 years ago

CC0

4y ago

Peter Cooper Jr.‭

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