Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Two questions about The Motte;
Communities like this have the problem of attracting fresh meat.
Stagnant rather than growing. Fairly sure about that one.
Feels like decay rather than stagnation, but I may be wrong.
I've been worried about the fresh-meat-pipeline since we migrated, and AFAIK so far we don't really have one beyond word of mouth. But I don't have any good proposals on how to fix it either.
Do not get me started...
We have no less than 3 posters that broke out to a wider audience, I'm already quietly seething that none of them decided on their own to promote us on any of the platforms they have access to. But it's ok, they made it big on their own, not like they owe anything to us, or anything.
So then I'm seething even more that no one whosl's running the site decided to outright bribe them to promote us. With this amount of recgniziable names hailing from here, you could easily market the place as a dojo for Substack starlets. Yeah, yeah, so it would cost some money, give me your Paypal, and I'll be happy to chip in.
And then you realize that we don't have to stop at people who came from here. You can advertise at the scores upon scores of politics / debate youtubers and streamers. These dudes are still shilling Raid Shadow Legends tier shit for chump change. We already have "invite" functionality, so you can attribute registration to specific people, and literally pay them per new user.
Man, we're not even trying.
I think it would be quite interesting to map out everyone who's become a semi-public figure after starting out here (depending on size being examined, it's rather more than 3 by my count), but that's not a project I'd want to undertake without acquiescence of others and many prefer to avoid too strong of links between different parts of their online identities. As for me, I'm always happy to share posts from wherever to wherever if I see something interesting that seems worth pointing others towards, but haven't had too much time to read this site lately so am unlikely to come across the Good Posts organically. My relationship with the site as a whole has been and remains marked by years of messy Lore which I neither want to ignore nor unduly focus others on, making generic promotion a bit complicated as things go. I am working in stages on an article outlining basically the process of being useful as a writer (which will include a section discussing the role of the motte in my own path and spaces like it for others) but "when will I actually finish an article I have in the works" is always a complicated question.
Well, to be fair, you have to temper the promotion with a bit of realism about the mess, and you can't let yourself be too disappointed when people thereby dismiss any positive conclusions as Pollyanna, "must be a pony in there somewhere" optimism.
This is exactly what the Quality Contributions Report is for, no? Often they're not all winners, and usually not all the winners are there, but reading those alone probably gets you at least 25% of the best posts for at most 1% of the effort.
In theory, yeah, and every time I've stopped by to read it it remains quite good, but in practice I don't actually exert that much conscious control over where I go online. I got out of the habit of reading the forum regularly and never got into the habit of reading the QC report in lieu of it. There's a lot of good when I see it, I just don't usually see it organically these days.
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