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Growing a website like Reddit
Hi there!
I recently launched my new website. It’s similar to Reddit, but there are only 11 categories you can create groups for.
These include art and literature, beauty and fashion, business and finance, food and beverage, health and family, home and garden, music and video, news and politics, science and technology, sports and gaming, and travel and local.
How can I attract new members? So far I have one member (met them on Twitter, made a few posts but hasn’t returned). It’s hard to get members when you have no activity, and hard to get activity with no members.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
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8 Replies
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All new posts need a flair going forward
byu/JonODonovan insocialmedia -
Like Voat?
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What value do you offer that would get somebody to contribute?
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When Reddit started the founders found and posted tons of content themselves. It’s like any site, generally you have to create everything to have something of value for folks to check out and stick around.
Reddit runs on user submissions now but less than 0.1% of users submit stuff. Most people only consume. You have to consider that. Until you reach a critical mass of users, you’ll have to be the one adding nearly all of the content. You’ve got to create that value.
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I agree with others here that it would help a lot to have some differentiator, anything slightly different than what you are competing with. The description so far only claims it’s just like Reddit, but new, and more limited. Since technical function differences are probably going to be problematic to set up (eg. group meetup functions) it might work to try to add a bit of tone or theme. Or not; it would take work using any approach.
You might reach out to bloggers to contribute, people already creating content and promoting themselves in different places. Or add news links. I get it that the problem is that it’s completely empty, and a completely empty site with 100 posts by one person probably isn’t going to seem appealing. Posting about the site in other established groups is probably not going to be welcomed everywhere either. If the idea is to re-create Reddit, just in a different site, then it probably never will “go.”
This same issue came up related to moving a tea forum–I’m into tea–from an established, accepted, user-populated version to a new form, due to a conflict between the site owner and main moderator. They had what any site needs most to get started: an active user base with a dozen or so core members, who felt like they “knew” each other. All the same it seemed to me that re-creating an existing site, as the same but different, wouldn’t be enough, that this shift over and redundancy wouldn’t be appealing. It did gain a little traction but felt stagnant very early on, and stayed quiet. It seemed to have needed any difference to make more sense, some way of feeling newer.
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…..I might not use that ever, TBH Reddit almost satisfies for community based discussions but one thing you should do is create content by yourself or pay somebody/friends to create some content for ya.
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> It’s hard to get members when you have no activity, and hard to get activity with no members.
It is. It is the single largest problem when bootstrapping a social site of any kind.
The answer is, reddit lied.They astroturfed. The admins posted new content under various accounts. They switched users and commented on it. They faked the votes. They made more new accounts and engaged in conversations with people.
But yeah, at some point, the earliest visitors to Reddit were viewing conversations by admins,. In some cases a single admin answering themselves again and again from different accounts to create the illusion of conversation.
And when Digg self imploded, Reddit got a big big boost out of nowhere.
The real question for you is: WHY would anyone choose to post anything on your site?
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Any link to it? Got to start somewhere somehow !
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