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Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

#31

Post by wuliwong »

alexeichemenda wrote: post #2

You have to create the content by yourself. No user is going to create your content magically on an empty site. So build your content (it will be a rather long process), and then it will (not organically) generate interest. Also, target your friends / people you know that could use your website, and ask them which content they would like to see, if they want to help you build the initial content. What's your website…

Thats what I have been doing with my current website. It is a website for links for Swift. I have 300-500 daily visitors but haven't seen a large uptick in traction. Right now i easily have the largest collection of swift tutorials and references and my plan is to just stay the course and continue to build my repository. My hope is that there will come a tipping point in user traction during this growing of the repository of links. But thats just my theory. :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

#32

Post by wuliwong »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #13
alexeichemenda wrote: post #2

You have to create the content by yourself. No user is going to create your content magically on an empty site. So build your content (it will be a rather long process), and then it will (not organically) generate interest. Also, target your friends / people you know that could use your website, and ask them which content they would like to see, if they want to help you build the initial content. What's your website…

This is what I had to do with http://www.cocoacontrols.com for about six months before I had enough UGC for it to be sustainable. Finding acceptable repos on GitHub, downloading them, running the projects in the iOS simulator, screenshotting them, and writing up a description took a significant amount of time.

What is UGC?

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

#33

Post by aaronbrethorst »

wuliwong wrote: post #32
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I had to do with http://www.cocoacontrols.com for about six months before I had enough UGC for it to be sustainable. Finding acceptable repos on GitHub, downloading them, running the projects in the iOS simulator, screenshotting them, and writing up a description took a significant amount of time.

What is UGC?

user generated content.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

#35

Post by danbmil99 »

mappum wrote: post #29
rwhitman wrote: post #19

You have to fake it. Yelp seeds every city they enter with paid copywriters for instance, Reddit was entirely fake accounts initially. Airbnb pays for photography of nicer listings. Either hire professional copywriters or recruit unpaid off-site interns to do it for you. Personally the intern method I think works best because they are dedicated to giving you good content, but really rough around the edges and the con…

Will people really agree to an unpaid internship for some brand-new, unknown company? What's the reasoning there?

> What's the reasoning there?

Startups! Kewl!!

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

#37

Post by greenjello »

balor123 wrote: post #27
tempestn wrote: post #21

Another approach is to make it backward compatible with something else. For example, if you wanted to make a new site/network similar to StackExchange (but presumably with some revolutionary changes; not just a "me too" copy), you could start by adding an interface layer using the StackExchange API and adding some of your new smarts to give your users some of the benefit of your tool, on top of the StackExchange cont…

Does that work in most cases? Most communities don't provide APIs. A few will provide RSS feeds - not clear if you can legally reuse them like that?

StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and other creative commons sites provide good starting data sets because all you need to do is attribute to them. No expensive licensing things, or anything like that.

Often you can write a pretty good bot using their data, and emulate user interactions. Enough users won't notice the site is run by bots that it's better than nothing if you don't have funding :-)

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

#38

Post by drwl »

mappum wrote: post #29
rwhitman wrote: post #19

You have to fake it. Yelp seeds every city they enter with paid copywriters for instance, Reddit was entirely fake accounts initially. Airbnb pays for photography of nicer listings. Either hire professional copywriters or recruit unpaid off-site interns to do it for you. Personally the intern method I think works best because they are dedicated to giving you good content, but really rough around the edges and the con…

Will people really agree to an unpaid internship for some brand-new, unknown company? What's the reasoning there?

for experience and an entry on a resume

Re: Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

#39

Post by cdcarter »

rwhitman wrote: post #19

You have to fake it. Yelp seeds every city they enter with paid copywriters for instance, Reddit was entirely fake accounts initially. Airbnb pays for photography of nicer listings. Either hire professional copywriters or recruit unpaid off-site interns to do it for you. Personally the intern method I think works best because they are dedicated to giving you good content, but really rough around the edges and the con…

Pay your interns. If you have any questions or concerns with a policy of paying the people who work for you, stop what you're doing now.
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