Like you, I’m a passionate user of K.Bin but lately, I’m noticing that things are getting kinda stale around here. The most recent thread in this, the top-level magazine on K.Bin, is 4 days old. Many other top 25 magazines are also suffering from a similar lack of fresh content. I run /m/scifi and it’s been continuing to grow and thrive over the past 4 months for one simple reason. If you want to Supercharge K.Bin, then remind yourself of those four little words every day:
It’s the content, stupid.
This should be the defacto slogan of K.Bin - you wanna get people off of Reddit? It’s the content, stupid. Stop complaining that Reddit sucks - we KNOW it sucks - but K.Bin won’t become the sane alternative if there’s nothing to read or interact with, there.
I’m just one person, but I’m doing my part and I know others are doing the same. If we can transition from 1% of the crowd adding new content for the other 99% to lurk and read to 5% of the crowd adding new stuff for 50% of the crowd to respond to and the other 45% to lurk and read, we’ll be well on our way to defeating Reddit.
Food for thought - have a great weekend.
Yes I always thought Reddit’s rules against self promotion were pretty dumb. Like how did Reddit want people to find out about cool new things that Redditors make? From other news sources and then post to Reddit afterwards? That makes no sense and just means Reddit is the last place to find out about the cool thing that the Redditor made.
Now with Lemmy and KBin we have the chance to self promote again, and we need more posts anyways.
Eh those rules seem dumb and are in some ways… but as someone who moderated a roughly 200 and 250k subscriber subreddits for around 6-7 years, I can say from experience that an insane amount of people just tried using the platform to shotgun links to their bullshit youtube channels or content mill tech blogs.
You’d see one of those links, look at their profile and sure enough they just had a huge list of them firing off the same link to 10-20 subreddits, then the next link, then the next. No discussion, no commenting history in those subreddits for the most part. They were just using them as a way to get clicks and nothing more.
Left unchecked, that shit destroys the quality of a community. I know because the first big sub I grew from about 10k to 250k had been left open to that stuff for years and had totally stagnated. As soon as I started cleaning house the place blew up in numbers and quality of content.
The vast, vast majority of people linking their own off-site content on reddit (in my experience as a mod) was definitely people just spamming. And if you let them do it the subreddits go to hell.
I’ve been blogging since 1997 and prefer to write things on my own site, but yeah, the sort of “rule” on Reddit was to not link to your own blog. I disabled Google Analytics this year, and it should also be free of any ads, so I feel okay about linking to my own (long) posts about stuff, complete with plenty of photos and the occasional video, but I’m still not sure if that is frowned upon as “self promotion” even on the Fediverse…