I don’t think banner ads are going to drive traffic, but might as well try.
I have no data to back this up, but I assume most other forums pick up posters from people searching problems where the answers just happen to be in a forum. For example, I doubt many people who discovered 2p2 were searching for a poker forum–they were just searching for poker tips, or poker videos, or something like that, and happened to find their answers in a forum. 2p2 also benefited from the fact that topics like poker lend themselves to forum form pretty well–“should I raise or call” can be a complex problem to solve, but it can be presented with simple answers–either raise or call–that lend themselves well to short posts in a conversational format. If these problem-seekers liked the content they may have signed up, but even then I bet the main reason for signing up was so that they could post about their own specific problem or question and get more tailored responses than just reading posts about others’ questions.
Politics isn’t really like that. Anyone seeking out an actual politics forum likely has settled views, especially in a polarized political environment like the US. I think the closest we can get to someone seeking out a ‘problem’ is to have content that is detailed single write-ups on compelling topics, where the ‘problem’ it answers is “what is the deal with XYZ.” This would take work by members of the forum because I think it would have to be the OP of each thread–a long-form, well-thought-out summary of a situation with some personal opinion thrown in, enough that a new user could read the post and feel informed but also want to ask additional questions or challenge some of the OP’s assumptions. This would be a change for us; many of our topical threads are actually excerpts from other threads or have simple OPs like “shit is going down in the middle east again. let’s discuss here” or whatever. We know each other well enough to know who to @ for a more informed take or who is likely to chime in and what their positions are, so we don’t need to put that effort into a single OP (and often, things are happening so fast that no one has time to make a write-up, we just know we need to break the topic out from the mega-threads). For each of us, the thread is the answer to the question and the exploration of the issue is the fun of it, but I don’t think most newcomers will think that way unless they’re specifically seeking that conversation out, which again I think is rare.
I think word-of-mouth is probably the only way to grow, but even then I think our chances are low. I’ve tried to get IRL friends interested in this and they just aren’t, even the ones who will talk politics with me. PMs to folks you respect on other forums are probably the best way, because you know they’ve already cleared one hurdle: they are willing to talk with strangers on the internet in a forum format.
Long story short, we can and should try to add a few users whenever possible, and maybe we get enough to offset the slow trickle of posters that are leaving, but like ZZ I think we’ll just have to appreciate what we’ve got while we’ve got it.
Our community stickiness is still off the charts high, fwiw. That’s basically a metric that measures how often people return to the forum day to day (and month over month, I forget exactly how it’s calculated). We’re always at 80+% when a good number is supposed to be like 30%. People are sticking around, there just isn’t as much engagement. I guess there’s just less to talk about now.
If we’re going to grow we can try harder to promote good discussion and talk about interesting topics. In my opinion the megathreads are boring but maybe that’s just me.
I have nothing to offer except uninformed takes on the politics side, but I could do a lot better in the off topic categories other than just posting in my blog every few weeks. I really think the offtopic forums are great.
I’m happy to transition the forum to dudes hanging out talking shit and knock the whole politics thing on the head. It really is pointless and kinda depressing to talk about.
Nope. A buddy had an account there he used for poker, but started exploring other areas and thought the politics was nuts and said I should check it out. I think I did right as there was some dispute with the owners because this site started right afterwards
I think this site is better because from what I did read on 2p2 everyone there was a condescending asshole. Here, only some are, but some I have a lot of respect for. I don’t care how old someone is, how much they know, or how right or wrong they are. If the only way they can express themselves is with cartoon memes, lols, and being a dick, I will never respect what they have to say
I think it’s funny when people here gang up on me (like people did to some (senor Keed)?) on 2p2) and call me a young Fox News watching conservative lmao. I mean yeah, I’m still figuring out my world view, but I’m a very far cry from being politically conservative and wtf were they doing at my age? I’m guessing I’ve put more thought into my world view and care a lot more about injustices than most of them did before 25
About sticking around. I really don’t. The dialogue from assholes drove me away. But there are a few very good and well informed posters here and I stick my head in once in a while to see to see what’s up. I wouldn’t say I’m “around”
Don’t mind it much but IMO it would be definitely be better to have politics be a major part of the forum rather than have it be the main reason for the forum.
We got multiple new users to join the NFT discord and we’re actively trying to keep new people out lol. Lean into blockchain. Unstuck Blockchain Forums
I actually like this idea. We need something to drive traffic other than politarding.
I suspect blockchain forums will attract many with political views that aren’t exactly commonplace around here and I’m pretty sure that would bother some quite a bit.
What we should have done was unstuck COVID forums. I think we could have pulled a good number of new regs from that. And we had plenty of topical content.