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.
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? ↩︎
3 answers
Our community is small. More than "people in general", I think we need to reach people who want to help us build this community. People who, beyond looking for answers to specific questions, want to engage in Q&A and knowledge-sharing for its own sake -- or, as we say, for the sake of heaven.
I don't know how to construct a short, enticing message along those lines; maybe you do? It seems like we could use Pesach as a jumping-off point -- the seder is all about asking and answering questions, after all. Can we target some ads focused on community-building to run soon after Pesach? "Have more questions after the seder? You're not alone!" Something along those lines.
That's the content half; the other half is where to run them. One idea is to sponsor some days of learning at Sefaria; they don't run conventional ads, but they do allow a dedication -- maybe we can come up with something short and fitting. In the realm of more conventional ads, what suggestions do people have? We're looking for people in the Jewish community who enjoy Q&A-style learning, not just at advanced levels, who use the Internet.
Hmm. One decision branch is whether to look for people like me, intellectually curious non-Jews.
The upside is that someone intellectually curious may contribute good questions, and there may be a lot of us.
The downside is that it changes the tone of a community to have a stranger in it. However respectful I am, I'm walking into a room of people figuring out how to practice their faith.
I don't know where people intellectually curious about Judaism hang out, but if there is some "Ask a Jew" site out there it might attract them. I would suggest not posting a general invitation but instead sending direct messages to the people most likely to make a positive contribution.
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I can answer all your questions here. Why no one bothers answering any of your questions is because they always get downvoted without any reason. And that is not only for answers but even for perfectly good questions. I have noticed that during my months suspension (which I suppose is your idea of getting more posters here) nothing has been added so I have not missed anything. I have already mentioned on here often enough, I can add hundreds of quality questions but each time I do so it is automatically downvoted.You have experience of my type of questions so you can judge for yourself if those are the type you want. If they are not then you are doing the right thing downvoting them. But remember others may not see it that way. All they see is that everyone is automatically downvoted for no apparent reason. You have heard this all before and just suspending me is not an answer that people want to hear just for asking a question. Isnt it about time that you listened to your audience to hear what they have to say instead. You seem to agree at least this post gives that impression that you have got it wrong somewhere, but you are not prepared to acknowledge it. You want to force people to do it your way. It is your site and you have every right to do so, but then dont be so surprised that you have to write such a post.
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