Daily Tildes discussion - suggestions for promoting the site?
As promised, I've done a fair amount of updating of the Docs pages now. There were various small tweaks, but the major changes were the addition of the "Future Mechanics" page to explain a bit about plans for the "trust system" (which we also discussed here), as well as mostly rewriting the "Overall Goals" page so that it covers different topics than the announcement post.
I've asked this as a bit of a side question in a few other places already, but haven't really heard much, so I'm going to make it the focus today: where do you think we should try to promote Tildes to get more (good) users?
I think posting on reddit is a given, but I'd like to hear suggestions for which specific subreddits you think would be good places to try.
I tried a post on Hacker News this morning, but it did about as well as my posts there usually do—it had one upvote after an hour, so I deleted it and will try again some other time.
Outside of those, if you think there are any news sites, blogs, etc. that would be interested in the site and its goals, I could send a message to any of those as well. Michael Eades made a post about it on his blog last week which was great to see and has brought in a few people.
Edit: oh also, I've given all the existing users 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone that you want to invite please feel free. They're available on this page, linked from the sidebar on your user page.
Some ideas we have discussed earlier, which I am just posting for posterity:
Reposting to Hacker News (if you can ever manage to get any attention there). It's a fickle beast so you may have to try a few times before it gets noticed.
Posting to Reddit, but focusing primarily on continuing to get in touch with moderators there rather than getting general attention. E.g. A post on /r/modtalk, reaching out to mod teams on their discord servers, etc. Hopefully it will spread naturally from there.
Reaching out to Tech Journalists and Tech bloggers (e.g. Medium.com writers) who have recently written about privacy/social media/etc and shown to have a decent understanding of the issues you're attempting to address with ~.
Selling yourself a bit more as a former admin of reddit and the creator of automoderator (an essential tool on that site). I know it's niche but for those that recognize your contributions to reddit it can be a big asset especially in convincing users you will actually be focusing on implementing useful tools to assist the communities here.
But I think the biggest thing is giving the definitive thumbs up on allowing those of us already here to talk about and promote ~ publicly (but not spam it), since right now we're still in an unsure holding pattern which is making us hesitant to say anything at all.
I am curious to see what other ideas other people have though.. since that's about all we could come up with so far. :/
p.s. The new overall goals and future mechanics sections are great; Way more positive and easier to sell people on the site with.
I like that.
I feel like that could be a big thing. I'm not gonna lie - when Deimos messaged me about this, I was excited because of who he is and because of my opinion about him (don't tell him, I don't want him to get an ego). I know I'm not the only one who would think that way.
I've been talking low-key about ~ for a while; I've handed out an invite, but just the one so far. I'm definitely looking to hand out more, hopefully soon. I'd be happy to tweet about it and talk about it and reddit about it if it is okay to do so
I think at this point, just consider it totally free to talk about it or promote it as much as you want to. I've put it out a few places where it could be seen and end up spreading, and like I mentioned in the post it's already been posted about on at least one blog that seems to have a pretty decent-size readership.
I'll likely post about it in some reddit mod discords/slacks/etc. sometime in the next few days anyway, if it doesn't happen on its own. And from there, all bets will probably be off anyway.
Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!
I’m surprised hacker news didn’t eat it up, it fits the “sick of reddit” stereotype that I’d associate with the main target group. Maybe you have to put some juicer wording in the headline? I dunno.
Otherwise, I’d say targeting individual people who have a blog or something seems like a great strategy. People passionate about the privacy/no-advertising angle? I’m bad at following people, so I don’t have a list or anything, but someone probably has.
IMO the issue is getting past the new section of HN... it's very very fast moving, not well monitored by users and pretty poorly executed. So it's not so much that the announcement wasn't well received but more that it didn't even get noticed in the first place.
Yeah, like @cfabbro says it's mostly just a timing/luck thing. Very few people seem to look at the "new" section on HN so it seems to rely almost entirely on if you happen to catch a few people's attention to get it into one of the main pages where a lot of others will see it.
I've submitted lots of things to HN that I know are news/articles that would do well there, but they still often only end up getting zero or one votes and going nowhere. Then I check later and someone else submitted the same thing, and it's on the top of the front page.
It'd be nice to find a way to solve that new-queue-ghost-town problem here on tildes sometime. Just having hot/popular/new pages won't cut it, because people never change their views and help out. Somehow the new stuff has to get sprinkled into whatever other views people are using by default (mix in 1-2 new per 25 hot/popular or something).
Yeah, I'm thinking about adding (and probably making the default) a sort like "most recent activity" that will behave like a forum, where posts go back to the top if they get commented on. I think that might work well until the overall activity starts increasing.
@deimos mentioned using a "recent activity" front page sort with a forum "bump" type mechanic triggered by new comments in threads on ~ ... there are some potential issues with it but I think it's not a bad idea to encourage commenting. I suggested maybe mixing it with the new sort and perhaps reserving the tops 4 spots or so with "recent activity" topics while the newly posted topics go under that. And of course negating OP activity from triggering the bump so it doesn't get abused.
Hacker News is more for-profit startup is my pet theory; anything that smells of "helping people just because" without all the trappings of VC funds will get downvoted.
All that's required is the same that's required of growing/promoting a new subreddit: link it in the relevant discussion. When you see posts about reddit / redesign / alternatives just link to tildes in those threads (and don't oversell it with paragraphs of gushing nonsense). There is always a comment thread in every post like that bemoaning the lack of reddit alternatives, and it's always highly upvoted. Just link the blog there.
If you want it to take off fast, then make it publicly visible so that people can at least see some content/life. If you want it to take off slow, run the private alpha until you're ready for takeoff.
I think we should at the least, make the ~tildes community's content visible.
I agree with this. The biggest reason people don't create new subreddits is because of lack of content and interaction. New sites are the same.
How much growth are you looking for? Would a few key people sending out invites be a good start?
I'm sure that reddit is a good place to start, and I think that there are a plethora of valid subreddits that have good discussion we could target, as well as people that we could specifically talk to that we could encourage to join us here. Even something as simple as getting some people to talk about it with their moderator teams could be beneficial.
I'm not really a facebook guy, but I think there are facebook groups that could be targeted.
Discord is a newer way to find people. There's no real persistence, which is potentially a problem, and the fast pace and required effort may render it inefficient, but I feel like the quality of people that we get could be higher that way.
You could gamify invites with information on profiles. Something like:
aphoenix
So you could see at a glance what sort of effect one person is having on the community.
I don't know what the long term goal of that would be though... when you remove invitations, that may end up being meaningless, so I'm not sure how useful it would be to implement in the mean time.
It also opens up things like:
Which we could figure out from the trust system.
I don't know how I feel about gamifying the invite system. I would rather users only extend invites to people they know would be a good fit with the site and can behave themselves. Encouraging sending out as many as possible is not the best way to do that, IMO. Hell, I have only sent out 3 invites to date and I am about as hyped for this site and want to see it succeed as much as it is humanly possible to be.
I think that if the system is gamified, it has to get tied into the "trust" idea.
You don't just want to spam invites - you want to invite people that work out. It's not about the quantity that you invite, but the quality.
I think in terms of pure growth I don't want to go too fast, especially before a lot of these tools and functions are in place. Keeping a fairly steady stream of people coming in is good though, because otherwise it's going to be really difficult to get the activity going. People will always check in (and probably post a bit) when they first get invited; it's getting them to keep coming back that's difficult, and we need to hit a certain level of activity before that'll really happen consistently.
But even if the actual invite rate isn't super high, I still would like to at least get the site "known about". I think it would be good for people to know that it exists and is being worked on, even if they can't necessarily get access right away.
And from a more personal perspective, I do need to try to figure out if this is going to be feasible to keep treating as a job for much longer. People have been very generous with donations already, but at some point I'm going to have to decide if it looks like I'll be able to get enough support to keep working exclusively on Tildes, or if I'll need to find another source of income (maybe just temporarily, and maybe not full-time, but something). My wife's been extremely patient so far, but I can't keep leeching off her forever.
"My wife's been extremely patient so far, but I can't keep leeching off her forever."
Not with that attitude
Oh hey look, I already count myself as a team member.
I guess I had better get the code open-sourced pretty soon, so that you really can be.
I'm inviting some of the r/science mod team as well.
try Help A Reporter Out, they have multiple requests for tech news related to startups and things, I'm sure there's a journalist or reporter who's interested in an interview with an anti-Facebook, anti-Twitter, anti-Reddit.
Just to let you know, I joined a couple days ago and saw that I have 3 invites available. Dunno if it's intended or not. Just reporting it :)
Yes, that's intentional. I gave everyone 3 today.