Don't be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.
Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don't wait on someone else to start posting. You don't need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.
Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don't upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say "hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer." Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren't here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, "hey, thanks for participating." You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.
In my mind, it only needs to be a fraction of the size of Reddit to be potentially successful. I've been using online forums since the 90s, back in the day there were some forums with great long-lasting communities that had only a couple of dozen regular members. Sometimes a smaller forum is better than a larger one. Granted it's different since forums generally specialised in one topic, but don't forget the days where you didn't need to be a huge all-encompassing platform to be successful, especially when you're not trying to make money from it.
Totally agree. It's called social loafing. From Wikipedia: "In social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when working alone. It is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals."
In large communities like Reddit, users are less likely to participate than in a small community
It was better that way. I in no way feel engaged in reddit comment sections. I don't recognize anyone and don't bother to follow or chat with anyone. I pretty much comment and move on if it's something I care enough about. I don't want to get obsessively invested like I used to back in high school street fighter online forums (some embarrassing discussions) but I'd like to actually be part of a community that sees each other as people and not arguments.
Sometimes I miss the 90's and early 2000's forums. Smaller and positive communities with good moderation. Hope this inherites that spirit.
I'm not old enough to remember forums, but recently I was lurking around archives of some old forum and, the community around it seemed so special that I hope we can achieve something similar. Obviously, back in the day internet wasn't so massive like it is now, so perhaps that feeling of closeness would be difficult to achieve (?)
#MakeTheWebDecentralizedAgain
Oh definitely. Also if you didn't like the moderation or site policies you could just make your own forum. I'm sure it's a bit of a rose-tinted view but those were the good-old days for me.