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Hmm if you're looking for an influx of stackers, like a practical outcome, then targeting is everything. Boost quantity / quality content on one of the niche rank 20-40 territories for a few months and see what happens. Provide stats about how much a post gets zapped, have something to show.
If we make a good plan I can do it with ~AI too. Though we're a bit in an AI dip because all the news is same old and fake lol. Can change that though. I'd just need to start consuming my papers feed again (but arxiv isn't as open as it was a year ago, they changed prerequisites)
If however you're looking for feedback / market intel more than immediate recruitment, then I'd a/b test some narratives. See what gets the most useful interaction.
I also think targeting is the way forward more than branding.
I doubt we’re even at 1% of the people who would almost instantly get the point of Stacker News.
feedback/market Intel
That was the goal of this endeavor. I really wanted to get a sense of how normie forum users respond to the mechanics of SN. I have round two warmed up and we'll see how it does.
Boost quantity / quality content on one of the niche rank 20-40 territories for a few months and see what happens. Provide stats about how much a post gets zapped, have something to show.
It seems to me that the most difficult part of this approach would be communicating to the outside world about the stats.
Also, I'm curious why you don't propose activating this model on the most popular Bitcoin/lightning/mining/nostr/econ territories? We do have this reality that users mostly need to know how use lightning to access posting here. It seems that we have two hurdles for a user who wants to come here to talk about food and drinks, but only one hurdle for a user who is interested in talking about lightning.
- nostr is already integrated and automated so ~nostr should grow organically. if they don't come then the solution is probably to be found in tuning the SN nostr automation more than manual action.
- ~lightning / ~bitcoin / ~bitcoin_mining doesn't align with the targets you went to - you seem to have been wading into generic normie(-tech) space. however: ~bitcoin_beginners may be a good target
- ~econ is interesting, but I think it is a hard target to start with.
- ~tech is dominated by hn reposts, no one will come here for a bot.
- ~AskSN and ~AMA are VERY interesting as drivers because these host unique events. But that should imho be done with a bespoke marketing process for each, and they're event-driven, so it makes sense for marketing to be event-driven too.
- ~AGORA - i think that one is being taken care of well!
- ~Stacker_Sports is the closest to a true sub-community (of y'all degens, lol) and should probably have a bespoke growth solution.
- ~Politics_And_Law, ~Stacker_Stocks and ~news are hard, I think those are serving the "internal SN audience" more than the outside (~AI too, but I can influence that a little)
~DIY and ~security, with a 2-3x increase in content, can be good ones to start with I think, due to the techy nature. ~privacy could be awesome too (but expensive.) ~the_stacker_muse would be EPIC, I think, but I would have no clue how to approach that.
On 4chan, I found that people were surprisingly open to the concept. I wished that I had made the thread much more aggressive (my title: "what if you could pay to post/reply?" what i should have asked "what if everyone had to pay to post/reply?"
4chan and something awful both have a paid feature: 4chan does it as a subscription that lets you not have to solve their INCREDIBLY ANNOYING captchas and somethingawful makes everyone who wants to post pay a fee to join. So both are perhaps more amenable to the idea.
All of which is to say, I think they don't mind the "pay to post" framing. So perhaps we don't need better language there, but rather better targeting.