For years, Mainchan was something I worked on on the side. I really want people to use it. Even if it never turns a profit, it would make me happy if it had some active users. If only because it would make those thousands of hours not meaningless.
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I'll post something here every day for a while to keep it alive a bit
I'll try to make the website active enough that posting here won't be a chore!
But people are already using Cicero... Either way, make sure to shill to your friends as well.
One thing that will definetly attract users is if there is interesting or quality content. Maybe bumping OC even stronger and allowing users to upload OCs directly might help.
I did try to shill to my friends, at least my online ones, but they're turned off by the free speech bit. Given recent events, I can understand their reluctance.
People are getting turned off by free speech? Wtf has the world become :(
Meanwhile I had an idea of something that could be of use:
"Happening in mainchan", very similar to /vip/ and /qa/'s threads. Just someway to highlight things that happened today/during the week in mainchan.
What are they afraid of, exactly?
Aw, you cute. I think people see the tiny amount of users and immediately leave. It's a catch 22 you have to have users to get users. You should shill it as much as you can, even bot your own website if you have to to make it seem like real users are here. 90% sure thats how shitholes like reddit got started.
Allegedly, Twitter has made heavy use of bots to fool advertisers and maybe even push certain agendas. I read an article years ago about governments implementing the same strategy to spread their own propaganda. It's weird to think that you might have had conversations with a bot without realizing it.
Despite what elon has been saying about taking down the bot spam, I think they are doing a less than optimal job at it, I have 52 followers, and 51 of them are bots.
They are not meaningless, the amount of experience you gained is not meaningless. It took years for Reddit and 4chan to gain some traffic, and the market wasn't saturated as it is now. Don't be hard on yourself, you have done an amazing job building this website by yourself.
Building a community from nothing has never been easy. If I remember correctly, Reddit didn't become popular until Digg did something to anger their own userbase (maybe a layout change?) which caused a mass migration to Reddit. A similar thing happened with 8chan: it had been around for a while, and there were a few small semi-active communities, but it wasn't thing until the 4chan staff started censoring people for talking about Gamergate, that it grew into a serious alternative.
The way I see it, Mainchan's main obstacle is that it doesn't solve any immediate problem for most people. It promises free speech, but most communities that care about that, already have their own websites. And for those who don't care, Reddit is just fine.
he said that the frontend is build with JQuery, so at least the time he wasted grappling with that abomination instead of a nice modern front end framework would be meaningless