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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This suggestion grew out of a comment discussion on another answer. I'm posting it separately so it can be voted on.
As discussed in other answers, straight copies of content from Somewhere Else are almost certainly hurting SEO and, in volume, can give a negative impression -- we look like a copy of another site, and the new content here gets lost in that. On the other hand, some people have improved imported content, and we wouldn't want to throw that out.
I propose that we delete imported content that hasn't been touched here. Specifically:
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Posts that were imported, not claimed, and not edited: delete. For a question, these properties need to apply to the answers too.
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Posts that were imported, claimed, and not edited: compile a list, give authors time to improve if they want, and otherwise delete. (We can ask authors to go ahead and delete things they don't think are valuable enough to keep here.)
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Posts that were imported, claimed, not edited, but have at least 5 upvotes (I don't know if we have any of these): the votes indicate that the community found value in them, so compile a list for public review. (Update: there are eight of these. We'll keep those; the community here obviously values them and they're a drop in the bucket.)
This review should leave us with a higher concentration of local, valuable content, and many fewer backlinks. After the dust settles, we can evaluate what remains in a second pass. And remember, anybody is welcome to re-ask and self-answer questions here -- just make sure you don't cut corners in the question. Alternatively, we could add articles in some form to our community if people prefer that approach -- resources, wiki, blog, or something else. These are all ideas that are being explored on some other Codidact communities.
Update 2021-02-05: We have just completed the first phase of deletions. Specifically, we deleted 16,644 answers that were imported, were not claimed, were not edited, and had no upvotes. This represents approximately half the answers. In a later pass we will look at imported questions; the queries would have been too complicated to do these together.
Update 2021-03-29: We have additionally deleted 2228 questions that were imported, unclaimed, unvoted, and had no claimed or native answers.
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