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 playing, GMing, or creating role-playing games 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 "Discord". 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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Roll20
Roll20 is an online resource designed to facilitate forming RPG groups and playing. In addition to potentially running ads through their Google Ads widget, we might be able to work out a collaboration with them. Their "About" says:
The Roll20 team is dedicated to enabling gamers to unite across any distance via our easy-to-use gaming tools. This means we strive to lessen the technical burden on the participants, facilitate the formation of new gaming groups, and to make barriers to entry as few as possible when gathering around a table for camaraderie. To accomplish these goals we seek to create a service that is sustainable and will be a resource to the gaming community as long as it is needed.
Roll20 is owned by The Orr Group, which is a company that assists nonprofits to fundraise and grow. It might be worth reaching out to Roll20 to see if we can work together to accomplish our mutual goals - to support RPG players in any way necessary. Roll20 can direct Q&A towards us, and we can direct people looking for groups and resources that we don't currently offer towards Roll20. (No guarantees, but it might be worth reaching out to them.)
Schools and Universities
Because "Codidact" has a strong educational connotation.
And here are surely many who could help on those kind of questions (well, not as a free homework service ofc).
Also, you would reach a lot of people already with a few posters (to hang on a wall) for example.
But I would suggest to make an inviting "welcome screen" first, where they can find the fields they are interested in (even if this is then somehow piped into the Incubator).
Could also be "Online-Universities", like Udemy for example.
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Statistics
If the figures are "healthy" you could add something like: 25 categories, 4800 questions this month, 6400 answers, 17,245 upvotes in total, 2170 downvotes, 28,473 comment posts. 0 Votes to close. Most traffic in: TRPG, Writring, ..., Hot Posts: ... etc.
This would give a sense of "how big" and "lively" and "how likely" the community is to answer.
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SE
One strong driver to keep in mind are the strict rules enforcements of SE. I was on WB:SE recently and the way new posters were "welcomed" with a "Vote-to-Close-in-their-face" sometimes barely an hour after posting, was/is totally annoying. And the users who experienced it and dared to speak up in Meta were really shocked and did not understand, why they were "killed" so to speak. They also indicated that they are "afraid of posting again".
I really do not like that attitude. I regard the opinion based closing of a few against the unsuspecting newcomer as downright arrogant. Why do they think they know what question is worth answering or not? They don't, actually, just their opinion and maybe "gutfeeling" tells them.
How on earth would a poster regard his/her question as not "deemed fit to answer" if there is no one willing to help them. Everybody just points to the "holy rules" and "principles" which are cut into stone and will and must not be changed... All burden is shifted to the questioneer those who come to do the Q part of Q&A. Those are the real VIPs... but Q&A (on SE) perverts this into the opposite: Everything revolves around what kind of answers can be given. The A part of Q&A is the primary thing. Nobody cares about how to understand intention of a question and be gentle/kind with those who are not able to write the perfect text on the first try. Is that a reason to bash them? I am certainly not of that opinion.
I am here on Codidact now to figure out, if this community is less toxic and more welcoming to new posters. So far it looks to be a very calm place, something that gives the impression of a safe-space where someone really can post a question that is dear to his/her heart and not being judged about how "entertaining" it is for the answerer "to waste their time on answering that".
I was shocked though to see, that essential sites are totally absent here. At least totally invisible. They are hidden in the Incubator from the outside world.
A newcomer looks at the dashboard, does not find "his/her" category and leaves again. This is uninviting.
TL;DR: The best place to contact people and make them aware of Codidact would be SE... is it possible to advertise there? This would be awesome.
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