Well, I’ve been here two weeks now and it’s been good. Interesting. Learned some things, had some decent discussions.
I don’t mind the links, I just don’t think they should be posted one by one, and I don’t think the post title should be the link. Put the link in the body of the post. And users who like to contribute lots of links to random articles rather than their own blogs—that’s fine, good even, but maybe consider collating a week’s worth into one post. So you might have a few different conversations going on in the comments, so what? Better than half the links posted being a “miss” and sitting there with no comments.
Comment quality. Now look, it’s awful cheek from a newbie like me, I know, but I’ll give my honest opinion because it might be useful to see the perspective of a new member—not a returning old member or a long-time lurker but a really new member. After all, if you want the place to thrive to you need to attract and retain new members, right?
It’s not just the number of comments, or even their level of engagement with the main post, it’s the whole tone. There’s this sort of… malaise, for want of a better word, that seems to hang over the place. I sometimes get the sense that people aren’t really enjoying being here. There’s this sort of dry, formal detachment in a lot of the comments and it’s hard to separate out personalities and characters (with several notable exceptions—gjm, for one). Basically, it feels like people either aren’t having fun or don’t want to look like they’re having fun. (Not Lumifer, obviously. Lumifer definitely has fun.) Point is, I came here all enthusiasm, ready to enjoy myself having interesting debates with interesting people—which I have had, but the atmosphere is like, totally harshing my buzz, man.
Well rationality is hard work and demanding; maybe that is confusing you.
This is the sort of thing I would downvote if I could. Not helpful. If you want to build and grow a community on a website, you need to make using that website pleasant. StackExchange, for example, understands this very well; so does Reddit.
Well, I’ve been here two weeks now and it’s been good. Interesting. Learned some things, had some decent discussions.
I don’t mind the links, I just don’t think they should be posted one by one, and I don’t think the post title should be the link. Put the link in the body of the post. And users who like to contribute lots of links to random articles rather than their own blogs—that’s fine, good even, but maybe consider collating a week’s worth into one post. So you might have a few different conversations going on in the comments, so what? Better than half the links posted being a “miss” and sitting there with no comments.
Comment quality. Now look, it’s awful cheek from a newbie like me, I know, but I’ll give my honest opinion because it might be useful to see the perspective of a new member—not a returning old member or a long-time lurker but a really new member. After all, if you want the place to thrive to you need to attract and retain new members, right?
It’s not just the number of comments, or even their level of engagement with the main post, it’s the whole tone. There’s this sort of… malaise, for want of a better word, that seems to hang over the place. I sometimes get the sense that people aren’t really enjoying being here. There’s this sort of dry, formal detachment in a lot of the comments and it’s hard to separate out personalities and characters (with several notable exceptions—gjm, for one). Basically, it feels like people either aren’t having fun or don’t want to look like they’re having fun. (Not Lumifer, obviously. Lumifer definitely has fun.) Point is, I came here all enthusiasm, ready to enjoy myself having interesting debates with interesting people—which I have had, but the atmosphere is like, totally harshing my buzz, man.
That’s my two cents, I’ll shut up now.
Well rationality is hard work and demanding; maybe that is confusing you.
It is hard work to put out a small amount of well researched and well-reasoned material and very easy to churn out a lot of low quality material.
I am not suggesting that your material is low quality but I think you could probably move somewhat in the direction -volume +quality.
This is the sort of thing I would downvote if I could. Not helpful. If you want to build and grow a community on a website, you need to make using that website pleasant. StackExchange, for example, understands this very well; so does Reddit.