Welcome to the Judaism community on Codidact!
Will you help us build our community of learners? Drop into our study hall, ask questions, help others with answers to their questions, share a d'var torah if you're so inclined, invite your friends, and join us in building this community together. Not an ask-the-rabbi service, just people at all levels learning together.
Comments on How can we grow this community?
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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 Judaism is large, and questions are an ingrained part of Jewish learning. 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 "yeshivas". 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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Monica, I don't know if you are still looking for answers, but in case you are...
Questions:
- How did I discover MY?
I honestly don't remember. But if I had to guess, it was via googling some stuff and MY showed up in the search results.
- How did I discover CD (is that the proper abbreviation?)?
I found CD through a post ("question") from Isaac Moses. This story actually surprised me, since I had seen your name all over the site in my recent searches and was surprised to find out that you had been gone for 2 years. I looked into that story and read up on everything that happened back in late 2019. Eventually I saw a mention of this site and came here.
If all of your users are coming here the same way, it would be very hard to grow this community. I think one way that could garner serious traffic to this site would be by utilizing SEO, so that CD would show up higher in the results, even higher than MY if possible. That might make the difference that you are looking for.
All that is only regarding landing users onto this site. Regarding my experience here, I am still brand new on this site. I haven't even been active on MY until about a month ago. My experience on MY has been mixed; I find that most mods are courteous, although others moderate the site seemingly based on their personal opinions. That means that sometimes questions are quickly closed as duplicates, even when they are clearly not; and then not reopened when the question is updated to state very clearly why it's not a dupe. On the other hand, I think the experienced users that I have come across over there are all very friendly.
If I were to remain here, I would want to see at least the same from mods and users here. I will only get that feeling once I participate more in this site, which I plan on doing.
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