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Ask HN: How do you get a community site off the ground?

1 points by marsrover ↗ HN
This week I released a website I've been working on the last few months. It's a site to review and discuss anime. I've had a few users sign up but no interaction with the site. I believe it's sort of a catch-22. Nobody wants to interact because nobody is interacting.

I read that Reddit seeded their site with fake accounts. My issue with this is I don't want low quality content spread across my website (mainly the reviews).

Which leaves me with the question: how do you get a community driven site off the ground?

6 comments

[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 18.2 ms ] thread
sharemywin
you may have to pay to get some initial reviews.
marsrover
do you know of a reputable service that would offer this?
sharemywin
I would just use upwork, find someone for $3 an hour. you may need to edit them and/or come up with the ideas.
gus_massa
A few forums started with the communities of the readers of a blog. For example HN (and somewhat Reddit) started with the readers of the Paul Grahm blog. StackOverflow with the readers of JoelOnSoftare and CodingHorror. This has the important effect of setting the initial tone of the discussions of the site.

So my advise is to start an interesting blog about anime, wait 5 years, open the discussion forum and then make it a more general forum for anime. :)

I understand that you don't want to wait 5 years, but nevertheless, if you can try to write an interesting blog and send the discussion to your forum project.

marsrover
I have a tumblr that I started 3 years ago that I just post pictures on. It currently has around 100k followers. Do you think this can be substituted for a blog?

edit: thanks for your comment. It has given me some ideas on how to drive traffic.

Cozumel
Slowly! Invite your friends, family, people who read your tumblr. One of the most important points is for you personally to post every single day, live on the site, always be there. Always posting, always replying etc especially at the start.

Initially people will just drop in randomly if there's no posts, no-one there they won't come back so you keep it going all by yourself at the start if you have too! Once people are coming by themselves you'll reach a tipping point where they'll start bringing their own friends over without you even asking.

Another point which I'm sure you know, but don't worry about the 'quality' of your content, people mostly don't care unless it's outright spam or junk. Never try and micromanage your site/content, I've lost count of the number of sites I've seen killed because of that, just relax and let your users basically be at home and post what they like.

And last but not least make sure you have an effective blocking option. People may love anime but they won't always love each other, be prepared for that, don't take sides and point them towards your block!

Edited to add, also regular backups! Nothing kills a site faster than it crashing and having to start over because there was no backup in place.