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Comments on How can we grow this community?

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How can we grow this community?

+9
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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 Linux is large, from software developers to hobbyists. 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 "conferences". 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:

  • 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?

  • 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]

  • 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?


  1. Should the question list not show some questions to anonymous visitors? What should the criteria be? ↩︎

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Firstly, as an official Ubuntu Member who frequents the tech support IRC channels, I think I can help with getting more activity here.

One of the most recent "whoa what happened here" events in the Ubuntu world, phased updates, may be a great boon here, since I wrote a thorough answer as to what phased updates are and why apt now behaves differently on you-know-what-website. It blew up with activity and is still blowing up. I'll just copy the question and answer over here and start directing people on IRC over here rather than to the old place.

Additionally, using this place as a sort of wiki (making good, high-quality self-answered questions) may drive more traffic, as we become a known source of high-quality information that can't be found anywhere else except for official documentation

Finally, I implemented the whole LeftSEForCodidact thing that @re89j suggested. I even wrote an explanation for why I'm moving to over here on my old profile.

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Thank you! (4 comments)
Thank you!
Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 1 year ago

Thanks for your support, and for the tip about phased updates. Codidact welcomes self-answered questions, and we can set up other post types or categories if the community wants articles or papers or something else.

You might also be interested to know that users here can mark answers as outdated if they are, so it's easier to tell that that once-ideal answer with lots of upvotes might not be the best way now. And we have tag hierarchies, which means there can be tags for specific versions/flavors/etc without giving up the ability to have them show up on a search of the general tag.

ArrayBolt3‭ wrote over 1 year ago

OK that feature is awesome. Having outdated content is always a pain - in fact me and the Ubuntu Community Team are struggling with this very same problem with the official Ubuntu Wiki and are working towards rectifying it (though enough else has been going on that the Wiki fixing job kinda got left by the wayside for now).

I'll see if I can get the Q&A about phased updates ported over real quick while I'm thinking of it and have time.

ArrayBolt3‭ wrote over 1 year ago

Should I add any legal notice about licensing or whatever to the Codidact version of the phased updates Q&A? I'm the author of both the version on SE and the version on Codidact, so I don't legally have to add any notice, but if it would be preferable for one reason or another, I can add a notice that I authored both versions or something like that.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 1 year ago · edited over 1 year ago

You're the author, so you're allowed to use your work however you like and don't need to link to the original copy. If anybody raises questions about whether you're the same person or a plagiarist, we can point to this post. Codidact doesn't require anything from you, so it's only a question of whether you'd be more comfortable saying something up front, in a note on the post. No need to.

The default license for posts here is CC BY-SA 4.0, but you can choose another from a selector when you first create a post. (You can't later edit that, though; it'd be too confusing to try to track differently-licensed versions of a post.)