Comments on How can we grow this community?
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How can we grow this community?
Codidact's communities have a lot of great content that is helping people on the Internet. Our communities are small, though, and sustainable communities depend on having lots of active, engaged participants. The folks already here are doing good work; our challenge is to find more people like you so we can help this community grow.
This calls for a two-pronged approach: reaching more people who would be interested if only they knew about us, and making sure that visitors get a good first impression. I'm here to ask for your help with both.
Reaching more people
The pool of people interested in Christianity, one of the largest religions in the world, is large. My question to you is: where do we find those people? You're the experts on this topic, not us. Where would it be most fruitful to promote Codidact? How should we appeal to them to draw them in?
Please don't give general answers like "churches". We need your expert input to decide where, specifically, we should be looking. We are now able to pay for some advertising -- where should we direct it, and what message would best reach that audience? Can you help us sell your community?
Finally, some types of promotion are best done peer to peer. You are the experts in your topic; messages from you on subreddits or professional forums or the like will be much more credible than messages from Codidact staff. For these types of settings, we need your help to get the word out. If you know of a suitable place and can volunteer to spread the word there, please leave an answer about it so we all know about it (and know not to also post there).
Making a good first impression
Pretend for a moment that you don't know anything about Codidact. Visit this community in incognito mode. What's your reaction? If it's negative, what can we do about it? Some known deterrents from across the network:
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Latest activity is not recent. This tells people the community isn't active. Anecdotally, we have lots of people ready to answer good questions, and on some communities, not enough good questions for them to answer. Can you help with that?
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Latest questions are unanswered. This tells people it might not be worth asking here. Why are our unanswered questions unanswered? Are they poor questions in some regard? Unclear, too basic, too esoteric, just not interesting? Can they be fixed? Should they be hidden?[1]
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Latest questions have poor scores. This tells people that either there's lots of low-quality material here or the voters are overly picky. If it's a quality problem, same questions as the previous bullet. If good content is getting downvoted, or not getting upvoted, can you help us understand why?
These are issues we've seen or heard about from across the network, but each community is different. What do you see here? What might be turning people away, and what could we do about it?
Are there things about the platform itself, as opposed to content, that discourage people we're trying to attract? If there's something we can customize to better serve this community, please let us know. If there are other changes in presentation or behavior that you think would encourage visitors to stick around, what are they?
Conversely, what is this community doing well? What draws newcomers in? I don't just mean the reverse of those bullets. What do we need to keep doing, and what might be worth highlighting when promoting this community?
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Should the question list not show some questions to anonymous visitors? What should the criteria be? ↩︎
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TL;DR
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Before launching a new site, make sure there are a lot of users who are willing to volunteer their time and effort to help build and maintain the community.
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Overall, improve the UI of Codidact and give each community its unique look and feel.
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People should spread the word about Codidact with their families, friends, and anyone in general.
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Once you have a good user base and a good UI, start investing in advertisements to reach the right people.
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Reach out to writers properly explaining why Codidact is a good community as well as subject experts in communities we have here, and anyone in general who will add benefit to any community we have here.
Introduction
I am surprised that a featured post written by an admin hasn't been unanswered for a year. Christianity has only 41 posts, which is a very small number. By looking at the launch proposal on Meta, you should have a larger number of users who are willing to participate to launch a successful community. By a large number, I mean 50 or more users. A community with only 9 people is unlikely to be successful.
Also, don't focus on finding moderators. But rather, focus on finding the right people to join the community. And eventually, some of those people will be willing to moderate.
Looks leave an impression
While functionality is more important than looks, looks are the first thing we see. I've noticed that the Judaism community has a custom widget that makes it look different from other Codidact communities. These widgets can be used to differentiate between communities until the UI is improved therefore we can implement something here that could improve the looks. I've to admit that the UI is not the world's worst thing, but it's bad for a site that people should use daily.
A quick search showed me that there're so many APIs that can be used here. We can show a new bible verse every day, for example. This would be a great way to encourage users to participate and learn something new every day. We can search for other APIs and implement them here too. [1]
Overall, the UI needs to be improved. Developers focus too much on the technical part and leave the design part. This is a problem for all Codidact communities, not just Christianity. Jeff Atwood joked about this once at the beginning of Stack Overflow.
Trust me, you do not want to see the “programmer” design we had before this.
This is the same thing here, we have a "programmer" design. And accessibility is just as bad as design. [2]
Internal public beta
Before sharing the community or buying ads for it, people who suggested launching the site should invite everyone they know - their friends, and family and even write posts in their blogs or on public sites and media.
Mentioning that this site is super inactive and relatively very small and needs volunteers, that way people who join will be willing to contribute because they already know that this site is small and inactive (and this is how all sites started - no one started big).
Ads
After having good looks and a good user base (500+), you can start buying ads. This is truly the only good way to share Codidact. While we all don't like ads (and probably don't trust them), it's still forced everywhere in search engines and social media, therefore, a good idea to share Codidact. I mean once searching for "Christians Community", we should see this community on the first page (the higher the ranking, the better for sure).
Why did I suggest having a good user base? First is that sharing ads will attract people and people want to see other people posting and interacting with the site first, no one would volunteer to a dead site (only a few golden people do that).
So, once you attract a lot of people, you want to leave a good impression with a good UI and great, useful content.
Articles
Rather than ads, I'd trust articles written by normal users like me about Codidact. So an article on The Verge or a 10-follower Medium account is great as far as it explains why this site is a good place. I may suggest Codidact admins email writers about Codidact and how useful it's hopefully those writers may write an article about Codidact which will be a great boost for Codidact in terms of user base
I don't think writers would mind that unless their profile greatly indicated a "no to suggestions about articles". And most writers will like it because it's a non-profit organization that runs a great open-source project. No ads, and no tracking as well.
This is for Codidact as a whole, not just Christianity but eventually people who are subject experts in Christianity will find this community and participate in it.
Tell people too
If anyone once sees a subject expert and there's a proper community for them here on Codidact, they should email [3] them telling them about this community and that may turn them into an active contributor here which would be something beneficial as well.
Welcome them!
This site should treat new people fairly. They may turn into great contributors later. The home page shouldn't show posts with low scores, closed or even duplicate, ever. Imagine you're a kid and it's your first time joining school. And once you enter your new school, you see that teachers are beating all new students, how would you feel? [4]
I've listed the most basic ways to share this community. And I see that most of these suggestions are for all Codidact communities not just Christianity, but if implemented right they can be quite beneficial.
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Respecting users' privacy, of course. An open-source API that doesn't collect data like the one I listed above would be great. ↩︎
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If you inspect Codidact's header, you'll that the logo has an empty
altattribute which is not friendly for people who use screen readers. ↩︎ -
Again, we shouldn't be spamming people or wasting their time, but this should be more like a friendly invite. Also, this would be good, unless that user specifically said that they don't want such kinds of things in their inbox. ↩︎
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A functional example, ain't it? ↩︎
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