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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?

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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:

  • 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?

  • 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]

  • 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?


  1. Should the question list not show some questions to anonymous visitors? What should the criteria be? ↩︎

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2 comment threads

Some thoughts (6 comments)
Dvar Torah (2 comments)
Some thoughts
Harel13‭ wrote about 2 years ago

(1) Hi and Shanah Tova [pardon for the long post split into parts; I'm not posting this as answer both because it's not an answer and because I expect it will be downvoted, see below]. I haven't been here in quite a while. If I'm not mistaken, I had joined the Judaism Codidact before it even had a name and joined in on the voting for that (personally, I think 'Judaism' as a site name is a bit boring, but that's (probably?) not the issue here...).

I hung around here for a while after the site was created, but eventually left. Some time ago I started thinking about this place again after a chat with another member whom I also know from a couple of other sites and eventually decided to drop by. Frankly, I'm surprised that I still hold one of the top scores around here, though I haven't posted anything in a couple of years.

Harel13‭ wrote about 2 years ago · edited about 2 years ago

(2) I started out on Mi Yodeya about three years ago, around the time you left/were kicked out, so I don't have that sense of betrayal in terms of the site like some of the older users, but I also don't really know how the site gained popularity. But I became frustrated by some things, such as the comment-less downvotes. I came to the Judaism Codidact in hopes of helping create a better site with the same basic concept. Sure, we started out agreeing on expanding the subject range to include more history, which is something that I liked, and the DT section is a great idea. But quickly I noticed that the staffers and/or members with the most say were mostly the same old 'veterans' from MY and it seemed things were going in the direction of Mi Yodeya II and I wasn't interested in that. After having some suggestions on the Meta rejected by those same 'veterans', I got tired and called it quits. I went back to Mi Yodeya.

Harel13‭ wrote about 2 years ago

(3) On that note, during the summer, a friend who's doing his MA in archeology explained that one of the reasons he decided to major in his BA in geographical history instead of archeology a decade ago was because when he did his student excavations, he was sent to a site where the veteran students and staffers had long formed a clique. All newbies were 'out' and hardly anyone took the time to coach and guide them. They were essentially disposable grunts. He lost his interest in majoring in archeology soon after. What happened here so shortly after the site was created seems similar, and that saddens me.

Harel13‭ wrote about 2 years ago · edited about 2 years ago

(4) I'm not posting this to be 'that disgruntled ex-member (in fact, I never deleted my account) coming back to flame everything'. I'm not mad at the site, just a bit sad. Don't take this the wrong way. I'm not mad at anyone in particular, nor do I think there was some conspiracy to make the site this way. But things happened nonetheless. I eventually came to accept my place on Mi Yodeya and kept my distance from Codidact.

However, I'm taking this opportunity to explain why I left and to offer one suggestion: You want to make this site attractive and to grow the community? Figure out how to not make this Mi Yodeya II, but instead be the Judaism Codidact. No, that's not an easy task. I can't say I have any practical tips at the moment, especially since I haven't been here in some time.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 2 years ago

Thanks for this feedback. I'm sorry you feel pushed away, and I'm especially sorry to hear that you perceive an "old guard" clique when some of us are trying to do things differently here. Part of our problem is a small base of active community members; if we could pull more people in, then the changes (scope, platform, philosophy) could start to become more apparent, and that might help draw in even more. But how to get started?

One thing you might find ironic: even though I was a moderator, I often felt on the outside on Mi Yodeya because I'm not Orthodox. I definitely had broader inclusion in mind when we started this community, for both general reasons and for personal interest.

Harel13‭ wrote about 2 years ago · edited about 2 years ago

I'm glad to hear that you're attempting to have broader inclusion here. That's one of the biggest flaws of MY in my opinion. I'm Orthodox myself (and prefer not to define myself as Modern Orthodox though some might see me as such), but also get frustrated seeing the super-Orthodox members over there push away both non-Orthodox members and questions regarding other movements within Judaism or sects or the topic of heterodoxy in general. Orthodox ties with other Jewish groups is a subject that has been on my mind quite a bit over the last few years for various reasons.

In any case, again, not having been around to really watch the growth of Mi Yodeya, I can only assume two things:

(1) Its growth is directly connected to SE's general growth - as more people came to SE, more people noticed that there's a Judaism niche.

(2) As it gained popularity, people searching for places to ask Judaism questions came to find it more easily on a cursory Google search.