Draw traffic to this site

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

All,
I feel like fewer people visit this site every year. At the same time I see some active AC-er at reddit, for example. Is it everybody's feeling or my view is just skewed?

Anyway, what are ideas to draw traffic to this site? I am right now thinking of integrating reddit to it. Like maybe posts here automatically cross post there? This will save people choice which resource to visit more often. They will get two in one.

[Buster's Uncle]

I know someone who could speak to the people politics at reddit - but no idea how you'd even begin to implement that technically...

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I have no idea either but this is minor. Anything can be implemented.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's not minor if we can't talk Draz into it...

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I meant on our side. Of course, we need some interface with them too.

[Buster's Uncle]

I meant on our end - it's way over my own tech level.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Well, I was thinking I can contribute on our end.
😛

[Buster's Uncle]

Draz?

[DrazharLn]

I don't think it's a good idea for everything that gets posted in AC2 to be cross-posted on the reddit or vice-versa, I think that would just be annoying for both communities?

I am happy for interesting threads and content on AC2 to be posted on the subreddit, but I don't think that needs automation.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Not everything, of course. Some cross post mechanism that user explicitly set to be cross posted. Could be one-directional like from reddit specific communities with specific code that tells to also cross post in AC2 in specific topic.

[bvanevery]

I don't think automating cross-posts is actually a benefit.

The only good subreddit for our content is r/4Xgaming, because it has a relatively large number of subscribers.  It's got good moderators who understand game promotion and are proactive about it, trying very much to drive traffic to their own 4X gaming review website.  And as comes with a well-run sub, it's got a tagging system, expectations of structure and participation, it's not a mouthpiece for anyone's specific agenda, it's got a few rules, etc.  I don't think we can automate into that, and I'm not interested in disrupting the political relation with the mods, which frankly is the best I've got anywhere on Reddit.  I usually don't get along with Reddit moderators and this is one of the few exceptions, where the show is well run.  It is best to let sleeping dogs lie, and just have a presence there "by hand", like you and I have both been doing.

Meanwhile, r/alphacentauri is a depressing backwater of 1.7k subscribers.  I don't get along with one of the mods at all, I think u/nonsense_factory.  I washed my hands of that place long ago.  I got treated like pretty much some kind of nobody troll, even with all the previous effort I'd spent trying to drive traffic there, so I'm very much done with that.

Reddit suffers in general, from a great difficulty in trying to grow small groups.  I don't think there's any realistic way to get "surfacing" or recognition for a Reddit sub.  I've read articles, I've searched the internet some about it, I've come up with nothing.  It seems all you can do is show up in various places, talk, and hope people come.  I think the Reddit admins probably tightly control any other method, as a matter of their business model.  The product they're probably trying to sell, is advertizing venues.  That gives them a vested interest in consolidating traffic around a few key foci.  Not allowing anything to spread out, gain more attention, and thereby diffuse the number of "big whales" they can offer a paying advertizer.

In the limit, this leads to 1+ million subscriber groups.  Where the original ethos of a group often gets completely watered down, and there's no sense of community because it's just a lot of random people talking and making noise.  The whole trajectory of Reddit is for some groups to get "big", as a kind of pyramid scheme.  This is about gathering eyeballs, not making communities.  I'm pretty sure the problem is not exclusive to Reddit, it is a general trend and business model of monetized social media.

I think we need to be clear, that this site attempts to build a community.  Although there may be overlap with the methods used to build monetized social media platforms, there's a point at which these concerns inevitably have to diverge.

People on Reddit are mostly conditioned to be kinda lazy.  You're given this smorgasbord of supposedly all this great stuff, all these subs to choose from.  Well frankly I've narrowed my subs down to a pretty small list over time.  I seem to be very much in the minority in this regard.  Most Redditors are using it as this kind of big addle-minded aggregator feeder, where they have spam spam spam spam spam coming to them all the time.  In the mental sense, of driving their eyeballs with way too much attention and distraction.  Not the literal sense of spam marketers.

So for a person to make a transition, from that kind of addle-minded attention deficit sort of internet existence, to a community they can be more focused on, takes some kind of personal decision or gumption.  Not just clicking on the next sub to see "what's up".  That's very much like channel surfing when watching a big cable TV package. Or browsing a Netflix catalog endlessly, trying to find something "good".  These consumer behaviors aren't accidental, they're conditioned.  You don't want consumer behaviors.  You want community behaviors.

One of the most basic barriers to community participation, is whether you're gonna make an account on this site.  It's too bad that such a barrier to entry, is kinda necessary.  I'm sure it causes lots of people to disqualify themselves.  I'm always really pleased when someone actually gives feedback about my mod, because it usually means, they bothered to make an account to do so.

There are plenty of other problems with making communities.  I mean heck, like whether key actors get along.  I don't have a magic wand about communities.  I've got some pretty severe ideas about governance and administration, that were actually proven in practice a long time in the past, on my co-moderated gamedesign-l.  But none of it has quite risen to the bar of building my own website, yet.  And I'm not sure how may of those ideas, are applicable to improving things around here.

I've semi-accepted the reality that I've worked on a very old game, that although a great thing, has a limit as to how much attention it can get.  It just doesn't have the corporate backing, the full time pay scale, to be otherwise.

And my "super community best practices" website, someday, is probably going to be for the benefit of my own commercial gaming effort.  So that when I put in those long, difficult necessary hours to drive traffic and make a better community, I actually get paid for it.

I did start trying to learn about Search Engine Optimization the other month, as some kind of piece of this puzzle.  But I quickly got bored with it.  You read about people with the worst sort of ideological mentalities, reading that stuff.  They all want that big eyeball money.  As a socialist, I want to jam up their surveillance capitalist works.

The irony is, I'm going to need some eyeballs too, if I ever expect to make money.  But at least I can make the committed decision, not to be evil, since I'm not some Suit that graduated from Harvard Business School or whatever.  Nor am I some jerk from Silicon Valley vulture capital financing.  I would have moved there long ago, if that's what I wanted out of life.  Not like I wasn't duly informed back in the days of the dot.com boom.  I steered clear.

[bvanevery]

I started another thread about Search Engine Optimization.

[Buster's Uncle]

You did indeed.  https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=21745.0

-And because it's all part of an intricate web of interconnected facets:  Building a Community

---

-I'll note my strong belief that by far the single most effective tool we had for building this place in 2012 was GotMs.

I worked the creative/packaging/promotional end, lacking any interest whatSOever in actually creating scenarios, though many were generated around custom factions I (or someone else less often) had created.  I struggled a lot with the writing of accompanying stories, though I find many cases where something I felt no confidence in at the time -notably the one about Cha and Miriam's daughter- really hold up well now.  The art/frontispieces we regarded as less optional -for obvious basic marketing reasons not least- and I'm usually way more comfortable with that part.

The bottleneck has always been on the scenario-generation end, and I believe few, if any, of the people on that end of things in the past would cite problems collaborating with me as factors in drifting away from the GotM team.  I'm sure there would be a strong consensus that my bells-and-whistles/creative-end contributions added considerable value.


-Point being, if there was a hypothetical modder or two who, very intelligently, took an interest in the general good health of AC2 for reasons of his own ---  those same reasons might be served in multiple related ways if, say, scenarios were generated featuring someone's hypothetical mod and we workshopped the kind of thing I add in the hidden GotM Team folder --- slickly-packaged scenarios ought to prove the best-possible bait for promoting both this particular community at this particular forum, AND the best possible way to get people to actually PLAY whatever hypothetical mod...

[bvanevery]

Where did people uptake GotM from though?  People already on this site?  Or people being drawn to this site from other places?

I've created tons of content in the form of After Action Reports.  I've pretty much mastered the "screenshot and text" form now.  I don't get the feeling they're pulling much traffic in here at all.  Part of my ongoing SEO effort is to verify the degree to which that is so.

Although I could certainly make scenarios... given that I have piles of back content that nobody's even looking at or knows about, some of which is still perfectly valid content, I'm presently more inclined to find out the reasons why that is.  And do something about it, if there's some clear advertizing path I haven't taken.  In other words, I don't believe in "build it and they will come", because I already built a lot of stuff.

It's not for lack of appearing on the front page of this site.  I did notice The Tree Hugger went up.  That was probably one of my best ones.

I'm not sure if people regard AARs as an old fashioned genre and (foolishly!) want YouTube Let's Play videos, or they just don't want AARs of SMAC.  The study on that would be figuring out whatever Paradox's site is doing.

Recycling old GotM scenarios is certainly possible BTW.  If nobody's looked at them since 201x, it's all new to whoever.

[Buster's Uncle]

Wellll - AARs are wonderful content.  -But-

Maybe -it being a passive read-the-content format and all- it inherently requires a higher critical mass of readers to get regular healthy comment conversation going.  I dunno.

sisko was always highly focused on GotM-as-a-contest, and very sensitive to low participation; I felt like the contest part was value added, but not a great-super-lot of value, and beside the point that it was promotional bait of the most effective kind I know, for whatever reason.

And Yo; I'm talking, say, if you happened to be a hypothetical modder who generated a scenario, it would, hypothetically, be a SMACX AI Growth mod-based scenario with SMACX AI Growth mod included in the package, leading directly to people actually playing SMACX AI Growth mod.



Promoting at other places was most of the point (though content for resident MPlayers to solo-play was +, too).  The minimum typical promotional spread -you helped, via commenting, w/ the Fusion is NOW thread at CFC, so OPs like that w/ art and any story, linking back to a host thread here w/ the actual file attached- would be threads like that at Apolyton, CFC, and WPC, plus whatever was feasible on Facebook that week -according to how Facebook changes how stuff works all the time- in several places there -and how much time and enthusiasm I could work up-.

Early, sisko would hit a bunch of marginal places, not least, foreign-language sites in German and Polish that at least used to have live communities --- and you know, there's quite a few stone-dead forum(ish) sites still out there that it's appropriate to spam your link, not really expecting to get a single link-clicking person, but worth a tiny effort just exactly for that tiny contribution to Google ranking...

-Late, I frequently pestered BlankW to post at the GOG AC sub, worth hitting for sure if you're not averse -as I am- to signing up at yet another place just for that...