How do you beat the lurker factor ? Got 1000-1500 uniques a month. Feels like two people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=215410

by teppefall • 18 years ago

7 10 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Google Analytics tells me I have 1000-1500 unique users a month. But it feels like I'm talking to myself.

Am I boring people to death ?

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

Get more visitors, and it'll probably solve itself.

We get about 40,000 visitors a month, and have only a couple hundred unique posters during the same period. Participating users are always significantly less common than lurkers.

Of course, you might have more friction preventing participation than you should. Is your signup process crappy? If you ask more than two or three questions (username, password, optional email address), then your signup process is crappy and needs to be fixed. Do you require all posts to parse a CAPTCHA? Once during signup is probably enough--it's certainly enough until you have a spam problem to deal with. Do you make people agree to a long "terms of service"? Unless you really plan to enforce it in court, don't make folks click through...just include it on the site somewhere so you can point to it when you want to revoke someone's post privileges and need a fair reason to do so.

And, maybe you are boring people to death. I don't know, and couldn't help if you were. Just keep working on improving your site, making it sticky so people stick around and tell their friends about it, provide good content so that search engines send people your way, etc.

teppefall4• 18 years ago

Yeah, big spikes in traffic often equals more customers. But not always. If you screw up the demographic data in an advertising campaign you just get clicking monkeys who likes to install spyware.

People like my software, but are probably bored to tears by my web presence. And therefore I get very few comments on my blog. I was hoping for more info so I can tune my software. Maybe I have to build in some social stuff into the main website ?

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

Do you have forums?

A blog is just not useful to the vast majority of your users (or, even if it is, they are not investing the time to read it). Our product website gets, as I mentioned, 40k visitors per month...our blog gets about 2000. Our forums are very active, because they provide a mechanism for people to get help and talk about their problems and goals. People love to talk...but it sounds like you're wanting them to only talk to you (because commenting on a blog feels like talking to one person--talking to a forum feels like talking to the world), when what they really want is a range of experiences.

noodle2• 18 years ago

well, that depends on what we're talking about here. blog? application? etc..

teppefall4• 18 years ago

I'm talking about my blog. I have one blog + sign up process for my paying customers. I don't have the server capacity to go free. I sell software btw. I'm trying to give my customers something extra by offering web login, license control, bookmarking, whois, search, etc. It is probably way to boring though.

The blog thing is great. It has tripled my traffic and 25 percent of incoming users are now from search engines.

noodle2• 18 years ago

blogs will definitely do that.

there are tons of great resources for blogging that will give you ideas on how to get participation on your posts.

i'd suggest checking out problogger or something similar for ideas.

JacobAldridge• 18 years ago

There's a good analysis at Trovus http://www.trovus.co.uk/blogs/137-community-contributor-acti...

It certainly supports that your experience is common, and more importantly gives you a framework to improve (ie, make 'Groupies' 'Doers', and 'Doers' 'Stars').

teppefall4• 18 years ago

DZone whines about this problem every day now :)

art_wells• 18 years ago

Whether it's a blog or a network or a community tool addon thingy, what you need most is to let people know that their contributions are both need and likely not redundant to others. Polls can get the ball rolling, but they are a gamble. Nothing is sadder than a three-day-old poll with two votes. Nothing is stopping you from boosting those numbers behind the scenes, though.

Don't expect people to chime in in a reaction to a specifically popular or unpopular opinion. "Me too" and "Screw you", despite their popularity in popular spots, are no fun to write and won't be written, even if strongly felt, in an empty room. Expressing a unique, rare, and non-antagonistic opinion, and then asking for others, is more likely to get reactions than "I like music, do you like music?" or "Taxes suck, am I right?"

Also, invite pride. If people have profiles or pages, let them create something that they can point others too. Allow for long, weird contributions.

teppefall4• 18 years ago

My system is not very open. I get 100 000 spam comments on my blog per year. A thousand or so get through the automated defense system. So people who comment don't get a fluid conversation.

How do you beat the lurker factor ? Got 1000-1500 uniques a month. Feels like two people.

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