Most of the posts on this site are news or external links to more content. This website is basically just another clone of Hacker News except with NSFW. What can we do to improve it?(This is why the majority of my posts are text). One idea that I had was to promote Mainchan is to print out fliers and post them around public areas but I eventually got into trouble.
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We can't post images. Your text posts are pretty enjoyable
Better something than nothing.
Just create worthwhile content and people will stick around. This website is regularly shilled on 4chan, and every time there's a thread about this site over there we get an influx of users, but it seems like they get bored relatively quickly with this place since, as you mentioned, it's nothing more than a news aggregator, and not even a good one at that.
You can make original content yourself instead of whining, and waiting for other people to do so.
I don't think one person posting thoughtful text while the rest of the users post links just to karmafarm is enough to save this site.
this, kill all karmafarmers
I don't think whining about what other people post, while not posting anything of value, is enough to save the site either. Be the change you want to see, and others might follow.
I've mentioned to Cicero that when users post external links here, clicking those links will take the users off of Mainchain because they load in the current tab. That kills engagement because people are far more likely not to hit the back button on their browser to return to the site and comment on the link post than to just close out the tab and forget they were ever here. The simple fix for this is making sure all links created by the comment editor include a target="_blank" attribute. That would ensure links open in a separate tab every time. Meaning when the user closes the tab of the linked article they'll still have Mainchan open to the post they were on. Would make it more likely these link posts get some comment traction. It seems like a super easy fix, dunno why it hasn't been implemented yet. Maybe the HTML this comment editor injects is harder to update than I'm guessing.
I recommend disabling the link option entirely to increase engagement and to differentiate this site from other Reddit clones. The quality and frequency of posts on Mainchan is no different than the average social media site made by a "rookie" developer(sorry Cicero).
Disabling linking is a non starter. This site is aimed at being a viable Reddit alternative as Reddit slowly censors and authoritarians itself out of relevance. That means the site is a content aggregation platform. Disabling link posts disables the ability to aggregate content from around the web, killing the site's primary function.
In any event I think we see so many link posts because most of us that are trying to attract engagement and help the site grow have been posting links like crazy hoping that leads to discussion on them. Given how poorly that's working for me (I mod the s/StarTrek sub that is a wealth of links with almost zero comments under them) I've taken to carpet bombing the link posts I find interesting with comments in hopes of getting people talking more.