Slashdot Mirror
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?"
If people don't like it, change it. Lack of interest is the public telling you something. People go to sites like Sluggy Freelance, Slashdot, etc. because the site offers something they enjoy and tell theri friends about. One email blitz of friends telling friends can make a huge difference. People just have to like the contents.
The Gardener
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sites and communities fall into obscurity for one of two reasons:
a: They're way to limited in their scope, thereby alienating a large potential audience; or
b: They lack any interesting or original content, and thus don't attract any new members/users.
A lot of webmins are quick to blame the audience for their lack of ingenuity or creativity. Remember - if it's not very interesting, who is going to be interested? Furthermore, if it's not very original, then most people will gather around something that is.
I think the poster is thinking about this the wrong way. When it comes down to it, if no one visits your website, it means that nearly no one WANTS to visit your website. This either means it sucks, is on some topic nobody cares about, or is a mixture of the two.
Even if it's on an obscure topic, it eventually will pick up search engine hits etc... I have friends who ran sound mixing websites and even an RV parts store. They do nothing for advertising and started having all kinds of hits in the first case and orders in the second (very different types of websites).
Anyway, if your site is dying, it's because of a more fundamental problem.
The sites you put up as examples are sites where the user interest is nonexistant. I don't care about a "cute lil' cat" or "cute lil'" anythings, for that matter. I don't think I'm alone among netizens for that. And I don't think that "Magick" has a huge following either.
However, if you want a media system and a belief system that are popular, Star Wars and Christianity are both doing fine.
And sites become popular overnight! Need I remind you of the dancing hamsters and "All your base" phenomena that took the nation by storm inexplicably with only wierdness to pull them along?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Hasn't this always been true, not just with web sites? There are millions of books in publication, but why is it that we only hear of or care about (probably) 2% of them? Because the good ones are popularised while the not-so-good ones get lost in the sea.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
I can only speak to my own sites, particularly Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, which is dedicated to contemporary nonpop (read "classical new music and electronia").
We started in September 1995 (using RealAudio 1.0, if anyone's old enough to remember that), have won awards (real ones, with money, such as the Deems Taylor Award for Internet journalism presented by ASCAP (yes, I know /. loves to hate ASCAP) at Lincoln Center), and have had nearly 330,000 visitors and 130,000,000 hits since we started counting in 1997.
Those aren't big numbers, and they're also not big money. When you have a kind of 'mission' -- i.e., bringing nonpop to a wider audience -- it takes a lot of time. A lot of time. And folks always want something new, which means even more time. (Even the process of editing, converting and uploading our two-hour radio shows -- real radio, not Internet bitcasts -- for posting takes big chunks of time.)
Like any content-rich site, it's also expensive -- bandwidth, storage (our site is nearly 6GB), software purchases, licenses, travel for interviews, etc. -- even if we (there are two of us) don't get paid. In fact, 80% of the site's cost is paid by us, and fundraising icons and even fundraising sales are ignored. We've had to answer inquiries from licensing agencies, negotiate agreements with composers (are remember we started three years before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and had lots of stuff to 'grandfather'. When the New York Times print and online editions featured us at the end of October, we were hit will 11GB of bandwidth overcharges.
We've eschewed the banner ad, kept the site focused on content and not design, and maintained near-complete Section 508 accessibility. As web expectations have grown, so have we, even though we're not a design-happy site.
It's a lot of work, and we're halfway through our seventh year of doing it. People, I think, just tire of 'labors of love' after a while. We're a first-hand case of a site that has received accolades from visitors and media, and as two aging professional composers (both in our fifties) who also have day jobs, it's a pretty exhausting task. To have to pay $5,000+ a year for the privilege of doing it is even more tiring.
Will we go away? Of course we will, either when we've completed our mission (unlikely) or when we're just unable to face another day of watching hundreds of visitors suck down the contents of our site without so much as a dollar sent in via Paypal.
Dennis
http://kalvos.org/
Thats the problem - this has broken down because there is SUCH a sea of sites out there that the chance of me 'catching' a good site is minimal.
/. about a year and a half ago when I was pointed at it by a geeky chum to see some piece of new about a new CPU. I've probably pointed a couple of people at it, they caught it too. /. is highly contageous, and easily transmitted.
If you look at sites as virii - I 'caught'
The problem is that the chances of me 'catching' another site is minimised because there are too many sites to visit - so I don't come in contact with the VAST majority of them. There might be a great site dealing with stuff I'm really into that I just never come across because its insulated by a sea of crapola!
If you look at the material on the paper version of this site in the paper version of THIS site there are some good insights into the difficulty of finding your market for a niche product - and the possible rewards.
...is when a site becomes popular, and the resulting bandwidth usage leads to excessive bandwidth charges.
This very problem - a problem surely manufactured by the bandwidth providers - has forced even Salon.com, and Slashdot, to consider or implement subscription systems.
This will effectively cut them off from a large portion of their intended audience because
1) Some people can't afford to subscribe;
2) Some people already subscribe to 50 places, and are NOT gonna add another load onto their finances.
This is how you destroy even the most popular ideas and sites, very quick. Bury 'em in high bandwidth costs, and scare off 90% of their audience by forcing them to go to paid subscriptions; or worse, cause them to stop operations altogether.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I run a skiing portal/weblog community type site... I haven't had any problem getting members. I attribute this mostly to how I've built the site.
1. I don't have any expenses, so I don't care whether I get readers or not. Not a primary concern.
2. I concentrate on making my site interesting and easy to use. This should be your 1st goal, because most weblog/portals suck. IF a potential new user navigates to your site, and there is nothing there that interests him/her, that user won't ever come back.
Slashdot is targeted at the right kind of people for this type of media... geeks. The target demographic has a lot to do what people expect to get from your site. The vast majority of internet users don't understand what a weblog is. From that aspect, you need to provide content in a manner that normal users would understand. For example, my skiing portal is layed out like a magazine, with complete articles, and other diversions.
Have interesting subject matter. Understand your target reader.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
The web was meant to share information. Really! No Really! That's why it was initally created.... Not to sell stuff. No Really....
Idealy, portals are just that, a way to share mass amounts of information and allow users to find their way there. Also communities are a way to share information of a like idea, sport, subject matter, whatever....
It's when you throw in a large commercial aspect of pop-up ads, click here for this, or buy that from me, that people / surfers loose interest in your site. They are there to share ideas and information, not buy something. If they want to buy something, then they'll go to the appropriate store or online store, not a community that sells it. Just go direct to the horses mouth.
A web community that I'm still apart of went through this failed transition. He wanted to make money off of his extrememly popular and traveled web community. He added lots of ads. And took it from a small, focused community, and made it into a large portal. This failed because the focused community only cared about one thing, not the rest. He dropped back to where he started. He then charged a small fee and made a membership section. I paid for a membership. Very few did.
Everyone else jumped ship and went to another FREE community. Communities are easy to build and find. If it's good, and the information is there, people will come. If you force advertisements and memberships or sales down the throats of users, they will leave. Information was meant to be free. Keep it so, and people will come.
My advice:
Don't do it for the money, do it because you love it. Do it because you have something to share. Do it because you want to talk about what you enjoy with others that enjoy the same thing. Don't do it to make a quick buck... It will never work.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Of course its us, its all about us. Reading off a computer screen is a chore. We trade off the comfort of curling up on the couch, leaning back on a Lazy-Boy, or steaming in the tub. I grab a magazine on my way to the bathroom, read a chapter or two of a novel before falling asleep at night and read the morning news while eating toast and eggs in the morning.
By contrast, when I'm online I am sitting at my desk, hands on keyboard, or keyboard/mouse, and I have to be constantly scrolling/paging, clicking, scanning for links. Frankly its not relaxing and the results are usually far less interesting than a good magazine article with better resolution/professional graphics and highly detailed photographs.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite. I spend several hours a day on the web. It's just that I don't use it for casual entertainment or recreation. It is just plain boring compared to well-crafted print media.
There's wisdom in that there cynicism... it demonstrates the limitations of the geek mindset. In the "creating an online community" case, Slashdot geeks tend to think that all they need to do is create the message board (mailing list, online forum, whatever) and They Will Come. They will not, for the same reason that if you decide to have a party in your basement, and you don't invite any friends, No One Will Come.
But this sounds unduly harsh. What I mean, more precisely, is that online communities model physical communities. It's not what you know, it's who you know. If you can't convince your friends, face-to-face or via e-mail, to join your community, then who the hell WILL you convince? Introduce your coworkers, your high-school hacking club, whoever you think might be interested in your forum. If they use it, it's a success. If they don't, rethink the architecture of the forum.
Content is not enough. Usability is not enough. If people can talk with people they want to hear from through the abstraction of your forum, that's enough.
Seriously, though...can anyone else see that this is a fairly desperate attempt at driving traffic to two VERY obscure websites?
I agree, and if it works, more power to them. The real trick will be to maintain that traffic, or even a small portion of it.
If people go check out the site, and it's crap, then they won't go back. If they decide to go back, then it was lucky for them to see it mentioned here.
$0.02 (CDN)