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Actively investing in non niche network websites
I think that the website must have some new communities in "piquant" topics to survive (to become enough well-known and contributed in the next say, 50 years).
"piquant" topics would be in my opinion (just examples, no connection to existing site proposals):
- Cosmetics
- Chemistry
- Biology
- Finance
- Accounting
The last website added to the network is about tabletop games and barely has any posts in it (it doesn't have a pager); I think it was a too of a "niche" choice and the owners of the network should actively seek website ideas in fields that may be less interesting for them personally.
The aims for this post are to:
- Suggesting to community managers to consider replacing the current mechanism for community proposal (for example, allow just one person to start a community given relevant background in the field and in moderation)
- Suggesting to community members to further emphasis non niche topics so to prefer creating communities primarily on general audience topics
It isn't clear to me exactly why these particular communities would attract more users than others. For example we a …
3y ago
We don't just spin up communities about topics that interest us personally - all new communities go through the Site Pro …
3y ago
(Please note that at the time this answer was posted, revision 4 of the question was current. That revision of the quest …
3y ago
3 answers
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We don't just spin up communities about topics that interest us personally - all new communities go through the Site Proposal process here on Meta. The process includes making sure that there is a minimum number of people committed to using the proposed new community. If you believe that these topics would be well-received as proposals, then by all means post them as proposals.
In any case, please keep in mind that growth for growth's sake isn't our main goal. We want to support the needs and wants of the people using our network - not spinning up new communities that nobody is committed to on the hope that it'll attract users. Personally, despite being a relatively small group of people right now, I've found our TTRPG community quite useful.
We recognize that some of our communities are struggling for users, and the team is actively looking at ways to grow our user base in a reasonable way, such as promoting our existing communities to relevant audiences.
It isn't clear to me exactly why these particular communities would attract more users than others.
For example we already have Cooking, which is something that concerns everyone and which lots of people around the world are interested in (as evident from the massive amounts of never-ending cooking shows on TV). If I were to guess which of our existing sites that has the highest number of enthusiasts and professionals around the world as a potential target audience, cooking would definitely be one of the safest bets. People are also highly unlikely to stop eating food in the future.
Yet this site is very inactive with just a few posts per month. So evidently there is clearly no relation between the chosen topic and the number of users actively using the site. The problem is rather that not enough people with cooking interest has found the site. There can be numerous reasons why, but the choice of topic isn't one.
We have several communities which are struggling with low activity, so it seems at least to me that we should get more restrictive with starting up new communities, rather than the other way around.
If you ask me what we should focus on, it's rather things like search engine optimization and advertising. With Codidact having a bank account now, it gives us more options to do such things.
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(Please note that at the time this answer was posted, revision 4 of the question was current. That revision of the question, as the initial revision, had as its first paragraph "I think that the website must have about 5 more new communities in "piquant" topics to become more well-known and contributed." followed by a list of the below five subject areas.)
At least four out of your five suggested sites (by name) already have proposals.
- Cosmetics (I'm not aware of a proposal for anything like this)
- Chemistry proposal
- Biology proposal
- Finance proposal
- Accounting proposal
If you want to see such sites on Codidact, then you should focus your effort on those proposals rather than make people reiterate what has already been discussed there, only in a far less discoverable and far more entangled form.
1 comment thread
1 comment thread