Invite codes, help or hinderance?

[charmian]

Since I went and bought a Dreamwidth acc, am thinking maybe I should cancel my regular hosting. It'll save some money, after all. I'll keep the domain name around, though.

Anyway, the Dreamwidth owners seem to be thinking of not using invite codes, in order to encourage growth. IMHO, the spammers are the strongest reason against doing it, and that there are some other steps towards growth which could be taken w/o abolishing invite codes.

However, as discussed in the news entry, it's not clear that using invite codes would solve the problem anyhow, as the main problem is that DW has an undersupply of popular communities and active users who others want to friend. DW lacks unique content to attract new users, it seems.

I have no idea how this can really be remedied. Communities can't cross post like regular journals, and with the smaller userbase, it's harder to create healthy ones.

Comments

[niqaeli]

I've seen some really good suggestions in comments over on the news entry: the big ones are better marketing and perhaps an account-creation queue so people don't feel like they're begging an invite off a stranger (or a friend), and improved community features (some kind of import would be really helpful, yeah) but things that make it worthwhile to bother with packing up and moving.

Basically, if they can increase the overall user pool, I think stronger, healthy native communities will grow naturally from that. And I think that there are a number of extant communities that will head over here when DW gets authenticated cross-site reading up and some form of community import.

[charmian]

I think it's whether they can increase the active user pool, not merely the use pool in general.

Yeah, authenticated cross-site reading is a big one. Is that the next thing on their list? It's definitely something I see tons of people talking about.

But I had thought that the site owners had rejected community import, unless it was for a community with only one poster? IIRC there were a lot of copyright issues around that.

[niqaeli]

Yeah, sorry, active is the key adjective there! A large inactive userbase is useless.

I think there's been some kind of talk about coming up with something for communities although I've been kind of in-and-out-of-it re: development lately, so I could be pulling that out of my ass. There's huge, huge copyright issues though, yeah, so I dunno.

I think stronger community features, period, regardless of import, would help a lot. Make it so community moderators want to be on Dreamwidth because it makes their jobs easier and makes their members lives better.

I really hope that after scheduled/draft posting, the next thing they take on is authenticated cross-site reading. I think it's hugely important and will make a big difference in how willing people are to come over here, or to use the accounts that they already have over here. (And I admit, it'll please me too because while I am willing and able to put the effort in to reading LJ people who don't cross-post, I'd be just as glad to close that tab down.)

I know I'm part of one of the really vibrant circles on Dreamwidth: I was in on closed beta, and fairly early at that, so I followed a lot of the developers and got hooked into the networks of other True Believers really early on. It's been ages since my droll's been very quiet at all -- the places that are quiet are the comms.

[charmian]

Definitely. For large comms, those would be helpful features, although for smaller, lower-traffic comms, those features are less pertinent.

It sounds like they're doing something like that for the insanejournal scans_daily comm (importing it to DW), although there won't be comments for the entries they're importing.

Oh yeah, me too. However, a lot of people on LJ have put their RSS feeds on friends-only, so I'm not sure how effective that will be.

[niqaeli]

Well, I was thinking about community features in general. Not just the improved moderator tools (although lord, those would be a godsend to large comms), but other things that make having a comm worthwhile for the members. Like how here on DW on a paid community, all users can post polls regardless of whether they are themselves paid. (This would be really useful, f'rex, for my local social group's comm that gets used for a lot of planning purposes.)

If they had more nifty things like that that make communities on Dreamwidth a better choice, at the very least, it gives new communities the impetus to create over here rather than on LJ or IJ.

(I still don't get why kink/prompt memes get created over on LJ, honestly, given the comment lengths permitted here, but eh.)

[charmian]

That would be a useful feature to put in the publicity. I think it's easier to push for growth after they've created more features.

Perhaps Dreamwidth could try marketing itself to the local event comms as well? I think with TV fandoms etc a saturation point might have been reached (and anime fans are well... somewhat less interested because they don't care about some of the issues that made other fans angry at LJ) There are a lot of people I know who honestly don't even use the advanced features on LJ, and so don't really care about shiny new features, I find. Like they also have a WP blog or use FB, or they are only on LJ to keep up with this specific group of friends, so there's like, no incentive for them, even when I offered them a code.

Because they don't get as much traffic?

[niqaeli]

The thing with TV fandoms is that, there was a saturation point reached with MLs, too. The fannish consolidation onto LJ was piecemeal and took a long time and there was a lot of grumbling about "why should I learn about this new service when the MLs work just fine without this fancy crap,"

Which is why I think a lot of the solution is to get the features out there and make sure people know about all the things that make Dreamwidth an awesome place to be -- which isn't just about the shiny features, after all, but also has a lot to do with the transparency of operations and the support and developers' culture.

And really to an extant, it's a waiting game. Pro-active courting of new active users is super-important to this, because a small but highly active userbase will continue to grow as people suck their friends in by, well, continuing to use the product.

Because once upon a time, I had a blog that I hand-coded. I didn't think it was really very much trouble at all, to be honest. I only picked up an LJ account because, hell, a few people whose blogs I read were also doing support-work over there so I grabbed an account to check out and then didn't use it much for awhile, until I found more people doing interesting fannish stuff over there.

[morineko]

It's not the codes, it's the content problem. I agreed with the poster who said that journaling is dead outside of Facebook (I'd add Twitter to that, too.) I admire the people who are trying to breathe life into comms here but they can post all day and if nobody comments there really isn't any point.

[charmian]

I think the situation is somewhat different because what LJ/blogging had to offer was very different from what MLs had to offer, for better or worse. What Dreamwidth has to offer is, while improved in many ways, very, very similar to what LJ has to offer. (Unless they start offering features that like... change the paradigm of the LJ fork, like start offering forums or chatrooms or activity streams/extreme Twitter/FB/whatever integration)

Well, what I mean by saturation point is that in a lot of social groups on LJ, people have heard about it and already made their decisions, so like you say, when the exciting features come out, they may re-evaluate things.

To play devil's advocate, though. I agree that all of these things are great, but... for a lot of LJ users, and a lot of users of social media services in general, these aren't important. Rather than good support and good customer service, many people would rather have fifteen icons and polls and not have to pay anything.

[charmian]

Yeah, I saw your comment on the comm. It's different from when LJ started, or even when LJ abolished invite codes. The landscape of how people use social media has changed a lot, and the people who are left on LJ are there more for the people, not the features.

Indeed... if no one comments, it's like there's no point. Like I was saying, if there's a comm that does the exact same thing on LJ, that's a problem for the DW comm's longlevity. And, if you want to start a comm based on an entirely new concept... it usually makes more sense to start it on LJ. Not trying to be too negatively thinking... but it seems that in a lot of cases where a social group shifted over from LJ to somewhere else, what motivated them was a) they were pushed out from LJ by LJ policies (various fanworks groups, scans_daily), or b) they were attracted to the LJ clone by their unsustainable, everyone gets five bajillion icons!!! policies (roleplayers). What would be interesting is to look at cases where an LJ group went not to a clone, but to like an entirely separate service.

(Another case: lolmeme and bandflesh, where the communities didn't start on LJ, but formed on JF, and were there because they are against LJ TOS)

[niqaeli]

Well, (most) everyone wants a free lunch and that's always been true. (Throughout all of history, but online too! Geocities was always crappy but it was free crappy.)

I dunno, the thing about Dreamwidth is as much as it started off as being LJ-Done-Right, I honestly think it's going to branch off and starting doing a lot of innovation in features. Like how LJ innovated a lot of stuff that is pretty common among social networks now (hardly anyone realises that LJ did it first on a lot of stuff that they, well, did first -- that's it's own discussion, tho). Because they've got such an active development team and are so open to suggestions, a lot of stuff where you have edge cases who are bending things sideways and hacking third-party software to make DW do something Really Nifty is stuff that will eventually make its way into the site properly.

I mean, on that note, I recall a comment somewhere where the notion of turning tracking-as-a-whole into essentially the non-shitty version of FB's activity stream -- letting you track all kinds of things about your friends (although presumably only when/where their settings permit it). It's not a huge thing, but I think that's a subtle shift in thought process?

Anyway, yeah, I think it is innovation that will bring people over (aside from better marketing of things, which I definitely think will help). Not just the better features and fixing 'working-as-designed but as-designed is stupid' features, but ones that do things that aren't being done elsewhere. And I do think we're going to see those happening here on Dreamwidth, as they get through coding some of the other underpinning stuff.

[charmian]

Oh yeah, but I guess I just mean that right now, the icon thing seems to be what is motivating people strongly enough to speak out.

I hope it does. (Is there a lot of third party software now, though?)

That does seem like a good idea! Although, I think the inbox needs some redesign if it's going to be like that >_> Maybe also integrating the inbox with the friendslist, since that itself is/should be also like an activity stream?

Oh yeah, I think those will be the most important features for getting new people over.