How can we grow this community?
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 recreational, competitive programming is large. Sure, golfing is a little different from TopCoder and the like, but lots of people enjoy programming and enjoy challenges, as we know from other golfing sites. 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 "hackathons". 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:
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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?
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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]
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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?
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Should the question list not show some questions to anonymous visitors? What should the criteria be? ↩︎
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TIO?
This community uses Try It Online (TIO) a lot, as do other golfing and programming sites. TIO doesn't host ads, but is some sort of partnership with them possible? What might that look like?
(I realize I'm answering a question with a question. If somebody posts a real answer about TIO I'll happily delete this in favor of it.)
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Questions
The most important thing to gain traffic in a code golf site is having good questions. SE code golf has 12,718 questions(and counting), and many people are still actively posting questions in there, so it gets a sizeable amount of traffic for answers. Good questions get more votes since code golf is a place where voting is encouraged on all posts. This in turn gets code golf featured on other stack overflow related websites.
Codidact's main outlet to non-codidact places is through its Discord, and SE Chat's Nineteenth byte chatroom, which features new codidact posts. If the frequency of codidact questions increases, there will be some natural osmosis of users from the SE side(which is already a thing, but it will reward activity here more).
code.golf also has many veterans who were tired of SE code golf(and SE in general). There's a good chance we can find some strong suggestions to improve the site from there.
SEO is definitely a thing that matters here: the most popular questions on SE code golf generally make the top results. This needs to happen with codidact as well. So what we need is just.. more outlets for people to find this site, and a loot more(at least average) questions. Ads on related active sites like ATO, vyxal, stax, and other would help to some extent as well.
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