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Comments on How can we grow this community?

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How can we grow this community?

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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 electrical engineering is large, from professionals to do-it-yourselfers to students. 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:

  • 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?

  • 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]

  • 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?


  1. Should the question list not show some questions to anonymous visitors? What should the criteria be? ↩︎

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Ive been on here two minutes and I can't help but notice the rudeness and pomposity of some power use... (2 comments)
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  1. When you search on Google about a specific electronics/electrical engineering question, EE Codidact is not in the first few results so I think users should try to upload relevant content frequently and self-answer the question.

  2. On Chemistry Stack Exchange, you can ask a question and even answer questions even when you don't have a Stack Exchange account so a good idea would be to do that here as well because many people "get bored" of making a new account and decide to search or write an answer somewhere else.

When an unregistered user asks/answers a question, it should create the user right there and then in very few steps.

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Search results (7 comments)
In chemistry.stackexchange.com you can ask a question and even answer questions even when you dont have a StackExchange account (1 comment)
Search results
Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 3 years ago

I don't know what makes it special, but https://electrical.codidact.com/posts/279580 is consistently one of the top hits in our Google analytics. I don't know what's special about that post (is it an unusual but important topic in EE?), but I hope y'all do.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 3 years ago

@Monica: I don't see anything particularly special, other then a well written post that does a good job of covering its topic. Being a fairly long post, it contains a bunch of search-fodder jargon words. Maybe that helps. Maybe the topic is covered in some courses, and this post matches all the typical keywords that students use to search for more information. It's really hard to guess sometimes why one post does well, but something you think is just as good and relevant doesn't.

Does Google give you the search terms that were used? If so, that might help explain the motivation of the searchers.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 3 years ago

One of the top searches is "capacitance multiplier". I don't have the details of what searches led to what pages (including what else led to that page), but it's reporting more new hits on that page than new uses of that search, so that's clearly not the only one.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 3 years ago

@Monica: If people are finding that post by searching for "capacitance multiplier", then things are working well. I think what's going on is that there isn't a lot about capacitance multipliers out there, so the search engines find this post. That's actually a great result.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 3 years ago

Sounds like a good result, yes! What other areas of EE are not well-covered out there, that people here could cover?

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 3 years ago

@Monica: That's hard to guess. I wouldn't have thought of capacitance multipliers until I saw that paper, for example. I did write a few self-answered question early-on that I knew from elsewhere were common topics of questions. That was before we had the Papers category. I've got several ideas for papers, but it's hard to take the time. The day job keeps me busy enough, and the consulting that I do on the side hasn't been this busy in eight years.

Lorenzo Donati‭ wrote over 1 year ago

Olin Lathrop‭ "I've got several ideas for papers, but it's hard to take the time." You could post in meta a question where you suggest the topics you think will be interesting. If you can't write a paper or a self-answered question, maybe someone else could.

This could also motivate some users to do some research on the topic and post here the results.