I have been thinking about community growth and how the voat fracture has split several communities apart.
Compared to Reddit the userbase at voat was small. To grow a non political sub on voat took work and dedication. It really takes one to two very active and motivated mods to get a sub going and stay going. It’s extremely easy to get burnt out. Over the years the majority of communities on voat have disbanded and have tried to replicate their subs on several platforms. Non have really matched the spark that was voat in its prime (IMO).
I’m curious about how the future of poal and phuks relationship will work and how that relationship will effect community growth.
Phuks seems content on small growth with little to no advertising on other sites were Poal seems the opposite, very eager to gain users and growth. Voat got its growth from Reddit fucking up and Poal was created because Voat is fucking up. Seems fucking up is the growth strategy here.
There’s a lot of cross posts on all three sites. Does this hinder community growth?
Just running “whatever” thoughts I had this morning.
Happy Friday Phukers.
I think growth as a necessity is a strange concept. The vast majority, if not all of the users here, are familiar with other aggregators and the issues they have. For a long time we went on with basically no growth at all, but I would argue that this is actually a positive thing in terms of the long term development of the site. We have never had the "holy shit we have 300 things that need to be sorted out within 24 hours" periods that Voat has had, and Reddit has moved into an era of designing every aspect of the site around monetisation.
The result of our approach to advertising (or not advertising) the site is that we have a small community that is easy to get feedback from and an environment where development on the site is never a necessity. Things can be gradually improved or changed when people have time or want to work on the site, rather than needing to.
I think one of the most positive aspects of the site is that users actually have input over what is going to happen to the site. Reddit is never going to have that again, and Voat has been slowly stripping features for a while now, with nothing really going on. Poal is up in the air really, it's too soon to tell what is going to happen with it. We have managed to create a different situation than the one that exists on Voat in a number of ways, Poal needs to find a way to avoid that and also start implementing some stuff on the dev side that sets it apart from phuks.