Comments on How can we revitalize our community?
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How can we revitalize our community?
We've had low activity on our community for a while. Low activity means people visit less often, which means lower activity because they're not here asking and answering... iterate. We have ads active Somewhere Else, but without activity, people who follow them are unlikely to stick around.
We set up this community in a hurry early on, making the best decisions we could at the time. We've learned things since then. If we were starting today, I would argue against bulk data import and instead focus on new work and selective import of high-quality posts we're attached to from over there. I don't know if our large amount of imported content is part of the problem or orthogonal.
We had a great community elsewhere, and then the corporate shenanigans broke it and many people left, but we didn't succeed in picking up here where we left off.
What can we do to increase participation here and make our community more attractive to visitors? Should we reset -- delete most of the imported content (if it hasn't been edited), do some targeted recruiting, and try to start fresh? Or does our community, once broken, not recover?
This suggestion grew out of a comment discussion on another answer. I'm posting it separately so it can be voted on. …
3y ago
The imported content may be a problem in that Google will see it as duplicate content, and Google does not like duplicat …
3y ago
Just a bystander here, but imported content is very off-putting. It basically says to visitors: There is so little t …
3y ago
I wonder if segregating content that was imported and not further improved would help. Create a new category, maybe cal …
3y ago
Unless people here want to reask and reanswer questions previously ask on the Other Site (I wouldn't), I would say the d …
3y ago
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Just a bystander here, but imported content is very off-putting. It basically says to visitors:
- There is so little traffic that they have to copy stuff from elsewhere so you don't notice there're only crickets chirping here.
- You're in the wrong place. The real content is Over There.
- Answering an imported question is a waste of time since the asker isn't here and they'll never see it.
- If you happened to bump into this place, you should definitely check out Over There, since that's where the content you're seeing came from in the first place.
Look around and see that the three sites that imported content are doing very poorly (Scientific Speculation, Writing, and Outdoors). They are in the bottom four ranked by recent activity.
the ability to import the content was one of the inducements for people (like me) who had created a lot of content at the other place
I faced the same issue moving to here from elsewhere. To get the new Electrical Engineering site going, I started with a few of my more popular answers at the other place. However, instead of just copying them, I used the opportunity to clean them up a bit, make the question more to the point, fix awkward wording, etc.
I also only did that to my own content. That way I didn't need to include any attribution. Attributions add clutter here, and invite people to go elsewhere.
When I started with one of my answers to someone else's question, I rewrote the question in my own words from the concept. That's useful anyway. Unlike the original questioner, I know what the answer is, and can ask the question better to be more generic, but also to target it better to the answer I want to write.
Here are some examples:
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