Advice for Websites Combating Net.Obscurity?

waveclaw asks: "A Catch-22: how to initially draw people to a community when the a community itself is the selling point and your being drowned in information sea that the web has become? Many people take the popularity of Slashdot and other 'people concentrators' for granted. Whole communities are developing, as they have done for thousands of years, on web logs and news sites via reader feedback. Unfortunately, not all sites are well traveled. (Side note: a lot of reseach has apperantly gone into this.) For instance, the special interst publication Dragon Spirit Magazine is closing their doors due to a lack rather than surfiet of viewers. Belfy Comics lists an entire section of online-only comics which are (for lack of a better term) abandoned by both viewer and creator. Porbably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalist nor jack-booted: it's obscurity."

"While network outages are easy to diagnose by comparison, what does a site do when it's dying? Sites like Keenspace and Webring and wiki try to build self-referential collections of sites and pages that sometimes work and sometimes don't Has anyone out had their back to this wall a lot and come out winning? Short of a listing on Slashdot, how?"

Comments

Uhm...

[Black Parrot]

Ever heard of "porn"?

Re:Slow morning?

[CrosseyedPainless]

The person who submitted the story has worse spelling and grammar skills than CmdrTaco. That's *always* newsworthy.

Thousands of years?

[komet]

Whole communities are developing, as they have done for thousands of years, on web logs and news sites via reader feedback.

And to think that I only joined slashdot in 1999! :)

Weren't you a geek in high school?

[ers81239]

Didn't you or at least one of your friends go through that 'Nobody likes me, how come I'm not popular' phase? Well, in case you didn't, here is the lesson to learn:

You don't become popular by whining that you are not popular.

This thread reminds me of all the stupid web site surveys I've put up for clients. They ask dumb questions like 'Do you think this site is cool?', 'Would you recommend it to a friend?', 'Do you plan on coming back to this site, if so how often?'.

Nothing says 'I AM A LAMO' like these types of questions.

I agree that building a community is hard. But like others have said so far, it is a social/marketing problem, not a technical one. I think communities are made by leaders, not by good ideas.

imposter

[Strange Ranger]

Probably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalism nor jack-booting: it's obscurity."

Cliff, Katz steal your password again?