Comments on How can we grow this community?
Parent
How can we grow this community?
Codidact's communities have a lot of great content that is helping people on the Internet. Our communities are small, though, and sustainable communities depend on having lots of active, engaged participants. The folks already here are doing good work; our challenge is to find more people like you so we can help this community grow.
This calls for a two-pronged approach: reaching more people who would be interested if only they knew about us, and making sure that visitors get a good first impression. I'm here to ask for your help with both.
Reaching more people
The pool of people interested in mathematics is large. Math is the foundation of many sciences, and it's an endeavor of its own. My question to you is: where do we find those people? You're the experts on this topic, not us. Where would it be most fruitful to promote Codidact? How should we appeal to them to draw them in?
Please don't give general answers like "universities". We need your expert input to decide where, specifically, we should be looking. We are now able to pay for some advertising -- where should we direct it, and what message would best reach that audience? Can you help us sell your community?
Finally, some types of promotion are best done peer to peer. You are the experts in your topic; messages from you on subreddits or professional forums or the like will be much more credible than messages from Codidact staff. For these types of settings, we need your help to get the word out. If you know of a suitable place and can volunteer to spread the word there, please leave an answer about it so we all know about it (and know not to also post there).
Making a good first impression
Pretend for a moment that you don't know anything about Codidact. Visit this community in incognito mode. What's your reaction? If it's negative, what can we do about it? Some known deterrents from across the network:
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Latest activity is not recent. This tells people the community isn't active. Anecdotally, we have lots of people ready to answer good questions, and on some communities, not enough good questions for them to answer. Can you help with that?
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Latest questions are unanswered. This tells people it might not be worth asking here. Why are our unanswered questions unanswered? Are they poor questions in some regard? Unclear, too basic, too esoteric, just not interesting? Can they be fixed? Should they be hidden?[1]
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Latest questions have poor scores. This tells people that either there's lots of low-quality material here or the voters are overly picky. If it's a quality problem, same questions as the previous bullet. If good content is getting downvoted, or not getting upvoted, can you help us understand why?
These are issues we've seen or heard about from across the network, but each community is different. What do you see here? What might be turning people away, and what could we do about it?
Are there things about the platform itself, as opposed to content, that discourage people we're trying to attract? If there's something we can customize to better serve this community, please let us know. If there are other changes in presentation or behavior that you think would encourage visitors to stick around, what are they?
Conversely, what is this community doing well? What draws newcomers in? I don't just mean the reverse of those bullets. What do we need to keep doing, and what might be worth highlighting when promoting this community?
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Should the question list not show some questions to anonymous visitors? What should the criteria be? ↩︎
You really need to step up your SEO game. I'd like to elaborate this from my own perspective, after how I just found …
2y ago
I'm new to math.codidact, and I'm relatively new (1 month) to MSE. I discovered this site after I found about how SE lac …
3y ago
To be blunt, improve visibility. People by and large don't know codidact exists, and for the few who do there is very …
3y ago
I think you can moderate the negative impression of not having recent questions, by displaying the number of views that …
4y ago
Certainly low quality content is an issue. Being brutally honest, if I understood the rôle of moderator as being a ruthl …
5y ago
Hello, I'm new here (joined MSE 2 months ago, before hearing about Codidact). Hence please let me know if you'd prefer n …
7mo ago
Hello! I suggest to add a space for non-question posts to Math.codidact. This may be useful in the fiollowing cases: …
4mo ago
Another suggestion of mine is to introduce personal messaging between members. On SE often people had to post e-mails in …
4mo ago
You have a choice: A. You can be a site that is ruthless about "high quality" questions. B. You can be a site that …
10mo ago
Post
Hello, I'm new here (joined MSE 2 months ago, before hearing about Codidact). Hence please let me know if you'd prefer new users not to write on this Meta thread.
One of the most attractive things about MSE, for me, is its gamification of teaching mathematics: one can write expositions of interesting problems and get (at least some) feedback. This is very useful not only for teaching but also for learning mathematics (via the Feynman method).
My impression is that you as a community are attempting to leverage this element of the attraction by retaining the reputation system and also encouraging people to contribute self-answers and articles. I think this is excellent. And, as a small community, perhaps you have even more ability than MSE to attract such users as myself because of (1) the possibility to answer things thoughtfully instead of racing to answer a question before other people do and (2) the fact that unserious users will more likely be attracted to MSE (where they can get their question answered quickly) than Codidact (where the emphasis is more on the community than on the Q&A aspect).
What I would most encourage is to continue this track by making interesting questions and answers more visible for people who might enjoy engaging constructively with them (and, conversely, I think, making "homework-help"-type questions less visible; suffice to say that an established community can probably sustain such questions much better than a fledgling community). I'm just thinking off the top of my head, but here's one possibility: right now answers can be marked as "worked for me" and questions can be upvoted. But upvotes don't always correlate well with how interesting a question is; so perhaps add special flags for "interesting" or "uninteresting"?
A second idea: perhaps it would be feasible to add basic mathematical questions for others to answer (imported from MSE or otherwise–but, importantly, not importing their answers)? For instance, for group theory, add questions like "How to illustrate Lagrange's theorem?", "How to characterize nilpotent groups?", "What are different ways to prove the Sylow theorems", "What is a Frobenius group"? If Codidact users were encouraged to do this, I imagine the community would get a steady flow of interesting questions like these and thus begin to attract the sorts of people who are interested in answering questions.
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