>be me
>few weeks eariler
>browsed Mainchan
>saw that many posts had 4-5 upvotes and had lots of comments
>had to leave for a few days
>return
depressed.jpg
>the comment sections of most posts are empty
>most posts have 1 upvote
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>>Well its called school homie
My up and down vote no longer work because i used to up voted every post i see
ask boss man about it
Who is he?
u/Cicero
no
teenagers when there is a person with 10 meters of then
bruh
you're dead.
I'm gonna fuck you in the butt.
bruh
It's more alive than ever. Now how's your growth going?
I'd like to know what other kinds of advertising and discoverability stuff Cicero is doing besides 4-Chan banners. The brief Reddit exodus fueled a lil bit of growth, we picked up some people (that don't post much or ghosted) but Lemmy got all the traction from that.
The 4-Chan natives here aren't the best for discussions in the sense that they tend to ignore most posts and only leave short replies in the posts they participate in while mostly ignoring the voting buttons. They do make a number of non link-aggregation posts but those tend towards certain types; 'ask everyone a thing', 'edgelord stuff', 'schoolkid stuff', 'half-retarded memes' etc.
I know Cicero is laser focused on developing the Mainchan app but this has the detriment of not focusing on user growth. Particularly quality user growth, users who'll use all the site features, participate in long-form conversation around both content aggregation posts (links to stuff) and non-aggregated posts (internal stuff like memes, pictures, Q&A, etc). The SEO for the site should be hammering keywords and phrases like 'reddit alternative', 'question-and-answer website', 'content aggregation website', 'social news website and forum', 'imageboard', 'social networking'.
If there's an advertising budget it should go to advertising on all competitors sites. Use the fact that they have ads against them. There should be ads on Reddit, on Twitter/X, on Linkedin, on TikTok, Facebook, Youtube etc.
Right now it seems there's none of that which is why user growth is stagnant. Cicero didn't even bother to submit Mainchain to the sites that popped up during the Reddit blackout to point users to alternatives like redditmigration.com. Meanwhile Lemmy admins spun up a Git Repo to clone whole user comment trees or subreddits onto their platform.
Cicero mentioned crafting a pitch deck not too long ago. Those are used to secure funding by investors and would go a long way towards getting some extra resources for advertising and user growth/retention. I wonder where that's at atm?
The main problem with Mainchan is that there isn’t raally any new features to attract users to the site. Sure, there is the ability to remain anonymous, but that can be accomplished by just creating another account.
The problem here isn't really features, it's the Empty Restaurant Problem. Mainchan lacks the social proof to attract new users. They come, see just a few users making posts with no replies and few upvotes and they leave thinking this isn't a place where they'll find any social interaction. Then they go to a place like Lemmy/Kbin and see many users making many posts with many upvotes and many replies and they join there because Lemmy has demonstrated social proof that a mass of users will interact with them which is after all what social media sites are for.
Now one can fake social proof, there's companies for that that'll flood the place with real-looking traffic to eliminate the empty restaurant look. That's basically what Reddit did, they had everyone in the company posting and commenting under multiple accounts and employed bots to make even more posts and comments so that the site looked like it was hopping on day one. So, when Digg imploded Reddit looked like the happening place to be for the real users looking for a new platform.
For large scale growth you need users to get users. Most sites and influencers choose to fake it til they make it by using Social Proof services to boost their numbers at the start. The other route is a big ad campaign which may or may not work on it's own. A combo of the two though usually does it. That or have the one in a billion luck that your unique content goes viral (which is kinda advertising in it's own way).
I very much agree,but there are also "pioneers" who want features. There are plenty of people who's immediately look up a website's "whitepaper", who is looking for a specific design. After the reddit debacle there was tons of " I made a forum lul" type of situations. I get a little bit the same vibe from mainchan, even though it is not a new idea or place. It's basically towing the old line of dogmatic flat hierarchy and privacy that you see on places like 4chan. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it feels like a theater group trying to make it big in 2023. It's important to keep in mind that archaic message boards definitely needs this sort of snowball effect, because they are archaic message boards.
Now people's first response might be to ask what I want, but that isn't as relevant. The point is that the creator gave us a venue and nothing else. There is seemingly no strong conviction or idea behind it, therefore there is nowhere for the website to go. The people that are moving on and actively looking are probably more hardcore users and content creators, and they want a place that is deliberately designed. This is undoubtedly more true now than before, as more and more people are using forums.
I think a lot of people are still wallowing in the notion that the internet is the wild west and that that won't change. That is a much more radical idea compared to the idea that forums can't be designed in a better way as to have more constructive discourse for example.