Remember to upvote threads
What's up gang.
Just a consideration point for the community: if you see a thread that you like or that is inline with what you'd like to see more of, remember to make give it an upvote.
As this community starts to grow quicker and quicker, we all benefit more from good content and founder advice/stories. Since the engagement figures for the internet generally follow a 90/9/1 distribution [1] we have to remember that most visitors are silent lurkers.
I suspect that a lot of people only join or get involved with communities that seem thriving and "worth their time" to join. Having threads with higher upvote numbers signals to the lurkers that there's actual activity and interest behind the scenes which might sway them into participating. A rising tide raises all ships and all that.
Anyway, just my 2c.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%_rule_(Internet_culture)
One forum application that got featured here is Discourse, from Jeff Wood. Jeff started stackoverflow that got famous partially because of voing, but he abolished it from Discourse. Why?
My guess is that voting is detrimental to small communities because it provides a sense of inactivity. Maybe a better way of calculating relevance would be a combination of replyes, views and time., at least until the community gets traction anough for voting
Ironically, I'm upvoting this.
Good post. Anything I can do within the forum software itself to motivate people to upvote more often?
Don't think so. Not unless you've got a rabbit hole worth of time to plan and develop some complexity. I kind of agree with andrerpena's thoughts. Maybe for posts with less than x votes, don't show the vote count and just have a boolean type icon for voted/not voted. And for posts with (15 or whatever)+ votes, show a star or something. But again, the complete lack of info about vote counts might dissuade people from helping bump up the number. It's a tough one and i think it's more of a social community issue than a technical one.
Adding a view counter?
Both StackExchange sites and Quora do it and it's a bit more motivating than just upvotes – you can see how many lurkers have read your content.
There is a view counter if you go to the /forum endpoint. Each posting has a number of views.
Huh, really? It seems I filtered it out.
This! Upvoted both comments. See, easy!
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
I do find that new posts can disappear very quickly on to pages 2 or 3, and there is confirmation bias potentially where the most upvoted stay at the top simply because they are ones being read more.
I just posted a question 2-3 hours ago, and its already disappeared from the first page.
Maybe 2 or 3 simple categories (AMA's, Questions,ShowIH) or even just have a 2 column display - with top voted and latest posts side by side?
That way top voted posts would still be prominent, but not force new post to disappear below the fold onto pages 2,3,4 etc...
I would love a search feature aswell - I am always coming back to the site to read an article/post later - and then cannot find it without going through the pagination dance! Or maybe just filters/sort by columns would suffice for this?
Don't mean to be critical - I love the forum and the design is beautiful. The clean design is what drew me in, compared to most overly busy forums. Just my humble opinion as a reader.