SEO for niche topics
Hi All,
As yet another reddit transplant (YART) I've been watching the drama on that other platform and reflecting on what the most important aspects of successful online discussions are for me.
One of the things that I value(d) most about reddit was the ability to use the keyword reddit in DuckDuckGo or Google searches to help me find more relevant and helpful content about a variety of niche subjects. So far, it seems to me like Tildes has some potential to fill this role based on its emphasis of thoughtful text content. Also, these types of searches add credibility to a site when random internet browsers stumble across a thread discussing their exact question.
One thought that I had along these lines was that people who care about this type of thing could make a concerted effort to transport content from reddit and other sites to be shared here. I don't think it would be appropriate to just copy and paste text without adding at least a bit of original thoughts or context. However, I often find myself researching niche products or ideas to such an extent that I could write up a nice summary of all my findings. A post like that could be a nice crash course to others or a fun way to introduce people to ideas they didn't know about.
Would people here be interested in consciously doing this type of thing? We could all make nice amalgamations of information we think is important as we independently research topics and post them here to boost discussion and boost Tildes threads in web search results.
Do you think that is because the focus of this community is different, or because the size of this community is different?
One thing that I think is very cool is this idea that once tags become very popular they might become their own group. To me that indicates that things will probably get more specific as the community expands.
This was my impression too. I think that is why I am interested in this idea of seeing if others are interested in trying to spur on discussions about niche topics they are interested in.
For example, I am teaching myself some web development stuff. Maybe at the end I could write a step-by-step guide or provide other resources that I would have wanted to see when I started the project. If it helps someone, great! If it spurs on a discussion, great! But it might also signal to people that there is someone else interested in that type of stuff which is the beginning of creating a larger community around that topic
Ahh, I think I'm understanding better now. I can totally see how super niche questions about firmware would be a bit out of place in ~hobbies right now. Maybe it is too early to go that far. However, what do you think about making some of the higher-level niche stuff to get those balls rolling a bit more?
I don't know much about 3D printing, but if this is something you like why not start a topic in ~hobbies where you explain something about your lighting and triggering setup for making time lapse videos? You could end the topic by posing a question you think is relevant to generate the type(s) of discussion(s) you would like to see.
Maybe it would flop due to lack of interest, or maybe it could help to build a library of information and eventually a community based on the
printing.3dtag.With that said, I should probably go figure out how I want to put this idea into practice myself to see if it works.
Both, but mostly B). If you barely have 100 people talking about the new iPhone, what hope is there of talking about a more niche android smartphone?
The current vibe here focuses on the most general as well, despite support for sub groups to happen in the future (which was recently asked about: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/167q/thoughts_on_making_tildes_groups_more_independent#comments), which I'm all for. But I also understand why a small site doesn't want to spread itself too thin.
Thanks for sharing that link! I hadn’t seen that. It seems very relevant to this discussion and encourages me more to think up some topic I could post about to see how this goes.
I know the community is small and so engagement might be low, but I also kinda like the idea of many people making passionate posts about stuff they are interested in but haven’t shared on here yet
Your audience should be the people who actually have accounts on Tildes now, not random people who use an external search engine sometime later. If it improves their search results, that's a side effect.
But if you want to dump a lot of links about a niche topic due to some personal research project, that's great. I recommend starting a single text topic about it (like a megathread) to avoid annoying people, and say a little about each link in its own comment. This will help your own search results later. You can encourage others to help, too.
It helps to explain things so people will know what you're talking about. Any time you do this you're also leading a discussion.
I use the Tildes search box to search Tildes. Also, you can search your own comments from your profile page. I haven't had much need to use external search.
Those are all good considerations. I think your idea of a mega thread for posting links is interesting. I hadn’t thought of using this platform as a repository in that way, but it could be a neat thing to try.
I was more imagining I would combine and summarize information from elsewhere with some good references, but try to keep enough content on here that you don’t need the links to get the most important info. It is more work, but I think that is better for archiving and searching
I don't quite understand what you're thinking of doing, but you could also summarize your research using a different website and post a link to it here, or you could write a text post with a bunch of links in markdown if you prefer. If it's just one topic then it's easy to ignore.
Some drawbacks of posting about something in a very specialized niche is that you might not generate a lot of discussion, or it might be from an outsider's perspective and not very helpful. But if you're okay with that then sharing specialized information can be interesting.
I think I am okay with it not getting much interest to start. Or, maybe someone will find there are more interested people than they thought.
I actually think that this this post isn’t too different than than what I have in mind. The OP provided a wealth of information on a specific subject and also opened up a question to the larger community. This example seems to have been quite popular! I don’t expect most of these types of posts to generate much interest, but I think this example is pretty close to what I would try doing.
I'm also very new here, but from what I've observed of the "vibe" I'm not sure that Tildes would necessarily be served by the sort of drive-by search-result-driven traffic that would come from trying to replace Reddit in this way.
This place seems to be much more about engaging in interesting discussions - and given that it's still an invite-only alpha, I don't get the impression that The Powers That Be are overly concerned about boosting external search results.
Yeah, I know growth is controlled here. I really like the idea of the thoughtful philosophy behind it.
I guess I just see some types of discussions as being a part of creating useful content on a variety of topics. Maybe this SEO boost idea isn't the best fit for now, but the fact that the site is public to view means that this could become relevant at some point
Let's not run before we can crawl.
What you've observed about Reddit being the end-point of searches has come about after a decade of usage, with thousands of subreddits hosting millions of discussions with millions of users.
Meanwhile, Tildes has about 20 groups and less than 20,000 users. It's a bit early for us to be considering this place to be the be-all and end-all of people's quests for information.
That will come inevitably, as Tildes grows, as the userbase increases, and as our scope of discussions widens. Give it time. Have patience, young grasshopper.
Haha, that gave me a good chuckle! I completely understand, except I don’t think it hurts to look ahead just a little bit.
I was recently trying to figure out how to use Vite with Wordpress and I had a hard time finding easy resources to explain things to me. If I write up a nice article-like post explaining the thing I couldn’t easily find an answer to, then there is a small chance the next person who comes along could find the info easier and maybe discover Tildes in the process. If some number of people made similar efforts on topics they care about that could be an interesting start to this long process.
A little bit, yes. A decade in the future, though? :P
Cool. So write your article, post it on Tildes, wait for search engines to index the page, and then watch as millions of people flock to your helpful Tildes topic!
Even if those millions of searchers don't find your topic on Tildes, you've still provided a bit of help to the three other people on Tildes who might be having the same problem as you.
Those millions of people can still find your article in 2033 via their Google hypervirtualsupersearch.
Are you a psychohistorian? I’d love to know the most probable implementations for Google hypervirtualsupersearches now so I can start preparing!
I'm not a psychohistorian, but I am an amateur historian who's a bit psycho! ;)
I make no claim to be able to predict the future, even mathematically. I can only predict the past; that's as far as my prognostication skill will extend.
I am also feeling the desire to keep that access to shared knowledge, but kind of feel like it's not going to be possible to avoid reddit completely when doing searches like that. I am ditching reddit in general, but still want to appreciate and acknowledge the users who post such valuable and well thought out responses there. It took reddit many years to build that facet of itself. There are niche communities all over, and this can certainly be a place for users to post in depth tutorials, knowledge banks, etc, but transporting content doesn't feel right to me. Feels... exhausting. I like to hope that we yarts will acclimate, and then become a source for such shared knowledge here. I love to geek out about stuff I'm good at and stuff I know well, and am totally on board for a geek out information project, but not the transporting part.. I would still click a reddit link if someone posted it here, or if it appeared in a super specific thing I was researching. p.s. - y'all ever wanna troubleshoot your weed grow, I got you ;)
Haha when you put it like that, it definitely isn’t appealing. I think this is more of what I was going for:
I think transporting was mainly just a way for me to think about taking knowledge I have accumulated and redistributing it on this platform. I definitely wouldn’t want to spend a weekend just migrating content for migration’s sake. The geek out mode is definitely more of what I’m interested in!
I came here to get away from reddit. I feel like what you're looking for is another reddit. Is that the case or am I mistaken?
I wouldn't want this place to be large and loud enough to have the kind of specific answers you're talking about. It wouldn't be the same place, it would lose the intimacy that I came here for.
I don't think I'm looking for a new reddit since I really like Tildes' focus on more intimate discussions. However, I think it would be great to have discussions like this that are more centered around the niche things that I am interested in. I'm guessing others might like that too.
For example, one of the things that really excited my about reddit was finding communities like r/myog where people would share information and have discussions about making custom outdoor gear. Those type of communities often had separate forums (like Backpacking Light) too, so what I thought was super cool about reddit was the ability to seamlessly combine multiple interests like that on one website so you could browse through everything together.
Would that type of thing lead to less intimacy for you? I was imagining it as a way to build stronger sub-communities but I'm definitely interested to hear other opinions on what that would do to this platform.
I was expressing a fear. I think it may be inevitability. I probably also could have been a little bit clearer.
If you have enough users to have that kind of niche conversation then you can't have intimacy, you lose something. I have an example.
I was posting on r vacuum cleaners about 6 months ago. I do this weird / stupid thing that works out for me and I was called out for being a troll for doing it. I had an old dirt devil vacuum cleaner that wasn't designed well and it had large plastic surfaces that rub against one another. In the past I had learned that for fridge drawers you can use cooking oil to make them slide better and it works very well on plastic versus plastic. I took this information I applied it to my vacuum cleaner and it worked wonderfully. The vacuum cleaner moved more easily and the wheels were easier to spin. There was someone that was a frequent poster on that community that felt like they had to defend the community by calling me out as a troll. I don't think that would happen here because there's greater intimacy and more selectivity when granting access. That person that was in r vacuum cleaners HAD to be that defensive because there were so many people on Reddit and there are so many people that are trolls.
That is simply not the case here. So I don't think it's possible to have conversations that are that niche without having a certain number of users. I believe having that number of users would cause a loss of intimacy.
Without millions and millions of users you're not going to have enough people talking about vacuum cleaners to make having a sub for that actually worthwhile. Without millions and millions of users you won't have so many trolls that you have to be super defensive about somebody using cooking oil as a lubricant for a vacuum cleaner, as stupid as it admittedly is. It's not the niche conversation that causes the lack of intimacy, it's the preconditions required for that kind of conversation to be possible, for that kind of group to be possible, that would cause a loss of intimacy.
I don't think it makes sense at all, since tildes is basically invite only, and you don't want to lead people to a page they can't access.
And before you ask, I'm against opening it for everyone that finds their way here. I enjoy the slow tempo of it.
You don't need an account to read Tildes. It's all public and anyone on the Internet could read your posts.
We're pretty obscure, but still, don't post anything you wouldn't want a search engine or anyone on the Internet to see.
I actually checked as a result of this post: Google (at least) has access to, and is indexing, pages on Tildes.
We're in public, folks!
I guess that was a bit of an oversight on my part.
I think it's good advice for any content you send over the Internet.
Tildes doesn’t need to be completely open though. The content is already public for viewing. So many people lurk on forums and message boards to get info already, so I don’t see how this would be much different.
Don't YART me bro!