/post#cm5m5oh9

growing discuo

i genuinely think this platform has significant potential, especially for someone who grew up on imageboards but finds them toxic (as one should) these days. unfortunately the lack of significant userbase hobbles it. is there any foreseeable way to grow this website and build it so that it's actually useful?

2d|

Anonymous

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12 comments

Thank you for this message.
For now, I'm trying to respond to requests, and improve things, while moderating any newcomer deviations that might spoil the platform.
The platform is only a week old, and it's already starting to come to life. I hope it will continue like this, why not try targeted advertising? but I'm not an expert in this. If anyone else in the community has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them, and if anyone is open to sharing it in any way, I'd appreciate it too.

2d|

ADMIN

Please do to find other ways of funding the site than targeted advertising

1d|

Anonymous

I haven't done any of this yet, I'm trying to figure out how to grow the user base! Any suggestions will be welcome

1d|

ADMIN

I found this study a while ago which was interesting, and may be of help to you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5774974/

They basically looked at two factors of online communities and how they affect user engagement.

Distinctiveness (how specific is the community's topic?) and dynamicity (how often do new topics come up? e.g. a community around sports vs one centered around a dead author)

The three most important lessons IMO:
- dynamic communities get a lot of engagement, and the people tend to keep coming back
- distinct communities get high engagement from users, but that focus lasts a short while and they end up leaving
- however, dynamic but not distinct communities tend to be boring link sharing hubs

I would say (as a layman) to first and foremost focus on becoming that boring link sharing hub, and on the way try to find or foster the site's distinct audience. e.g 4chan is for losers, reddit is for losers, twitter is for losers etc

Read the thing also, as they mostly focus on insider language and how it's affected by these factors. Too lazy to summarize here lol

Gl

24h|

Anonymous

Could you explain a little more on how you think the lack of an userbase hobbles it?

I'm also invested in it growing, but I think there are some characteristics that make it different from imageboards like 4chan. Here posts stay, which means re-visiting older threads ,continuing to develop them and having conversations that span longer perios of time makes more sense. I like that I've been able to take my time for a day before writing a reply in some cases, for instance.

I don't think that it having a slower pace is necessarily a bad thing for those reasons. In fact, it could be good if the goals is to have good discussions.

In some way I wonder if having a very big userbase could actually make that goal harder. I'm not aainst it, but for example, at some point finding the valuable discussions may be harder if you arrive to a thread with thousands of comments and branches

1d|

Anonymous

Well, for now, the boards I'm most interested in using have no activity.

1d|

Anonymous

Yeah, I think for the little time it has been open it's grown fast, but I can definitely see that.

I think perhaps sharing it among the groups you're interested could help with that... I've been thinking about asking admins of some subreddits if it would be okay to make a post inviting people to check the site for that same reason actually

1d|

Anonymous

It's a bit strange that there are empty boards. Granted, I grew up on the 90s/early 00s internet, but moderated/administrated a bunch of forums during that period.

Usually you open up a forum with as less categories/boards as possible, and not until you have content to move into there, you open a new category.

So lets say talking about weed becomes very popular to discuss on the /drugs board. Eventually, you can justify that weed should have it's own /weed or whatever, and once created, you move stuff in there.

Suddenly, the board/forum looks a lot less empty, and every category has at least something in it.

1d|

vblr!c5f8cfd469

I think one possible advantage of it, especially at the beginning, is that it kind of gives new user some sort of prompt to start with.

"Hey! do you have anything related with shower thoughts that you'd like to post about?"

If I stumble upon the site for the first time and while skimming I see 10 posts in /pol and 10 in /dev I may think there's no place for me to post "manwha" or "photography". But if I see the empty category there I'm more likely to be "Great, this something I'm interested in. I'll be the first post"

If all user are familiar with other imageboards perhaps it's less necessary, though

1d|

Anonymous

i hope it does

1d|

Anonymous

Same, I almost completely stopped using reddit since discuo got a lot of activity a couple of days ago.

I really think that small things like having no accounts or upvotes go a long way to remove many of the issues I had with reddit

Many modern sites make me feel like they are constantly trying to manipulate me and force me to act the way it's convenient to them.

1d|

Anonymous

reddit has been going downhill for a while, but I had to leave for good after the election to preserve my own sanity

1d|

Anonymous

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