this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
8 points (90.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43856 readers
1822 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I created !maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world a few days ago. Now it has >4k subscribers. I credit that to my meticulous reposting of content from other places (90% from /r/maliciousompliance, 10% from elsewhere). It took a bit of effort but now people are posting their OC.
A site like this needs to reach critical mass to be self-sustaining. I see a lot of new communities with 0-1 posts from the mod. That’s not nearly enough to get people engaged - users are going to see that it’s a ghost town and leave. Reposts are a temporary measure to get past the chicken-and-egg problem of "there's nothing here so people aren't visiting" and "people aren't visiting so they aren't posting stuff".
Reddit itself exists on reposts. As a (ex-)Redditor of 12 years, I've seen countless reposts. Ideally, reposts make up a small percentage of the content, but given the small nature of this universe, I'd personally encourage and advocate reposting of content from elsewhere to kickstart discussion.
This is absolutely the case. Communities need content to aggregate around before the community itself grows to a point where it can become content in its own right.
Reddit itself launched with the founders operating sockpuppet accounts to post content and have conversations, just so that it looked like there was already a community to join and activity happening when early adopters showed up.