Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by kromodor » Mon, Jun 30, 2014, 2:56 PM UTC

kidlogic wrote: post #43

Platforms require two important factors - self-marketing and publishing tools. It's important that the published content benefits everyone within the community, which helps build up to true Network Effects. Github (same-sided platform): publish your repo, users can download and contribute to your code. More code, more branches, repeat. Youtube (two-sided platform): Published content provides entertainment. Users can…

This seems pretty sound.

It should provide benefit of publishing inside regardless of the inside crowd (to a point of course).

Another example like yours - soundcloud.

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

#52

Post by kromodor » Mon, Jun 30, 2014, 3:12 PM UTC

It is important to keep in mind that the following is only an assumption. We'll be able to test it in few months when our website is live.

We have approached the situation from similar angle as many people here already described.

However, we involve a tool which allows people to make "cool albums" and can easy share it outside the site, into their existing communities.

We assume that since we will have almost none real users (beside the fake ones), inside action will be non-existent. Thus if the users use the tool to share outside, we might benefit from the outsiders checkout the album of their mates.

Of course, while this sounds clever, it hides risks - the early adopters should provide at least like-able content. And this, by experience, is not the general case. To be counted, also, is that our early adopter is someone who is already member of an existing community.

And whoever registers in the site should be carefully caressed to feel special in order to, at least, provide feedback.

tl;dr - fake accounts; a lot of personal attention from founders; people can benefit from the site without inside users.

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

#53

Post by loumf » Mon, Jun 30, 2014, 7:02 PM UTC

A lot of people call this a chicken-egg problem. For some reason, that's supposed to make it seem hard to solve, when in real life, anybody could start a chicken farm very easily.

You simply buy chickens.

If your question is how do I start a chicken farm without buying chickens, then you have made the problem unnecessarily complex.

The thing is, though, when you buy a chicken, you can be relatively sure that you will get eggs. And you can be sure that if you have eggs, it's not too hard to get chicks.

Your real problem isn't how to get content (that's simple, you buy it), but how to then get users that want that content. And then, how to get some of those users to make content.

(to answer your direct question: StackExchange was seeded by JoelOnSoftware and CodingHorror readers -- it was a closed beta until they got enough content. In other words, Joel and Jeff already had chicken farms, and they donated a bunch of them to StackExchange)

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

#54

Post by anewfounder » Tue, Jul 01, 2014, 12:23 PM UTC

I have a sort of similar experience. I am developing a jamming platform and to lift it off we're looking at paying/artificially creating accounts that imitate real users. Its not cheating or anything, its just creating great content and making it look like at first this is coming from genuine users. Another method is to ask early adopters here (and possibly on reddit) to have the first go at providing content. some will respond :)