E2 really is unfriendly to new noders
(Don't node about noding. Ok, I'm violating that rule. Nuke away if you feel it necessary.)
For the longest time, I knew the node "E2 is unfriendly to new noders" existed. I assumed it was mostly a bunch of rants complaining about E2 and didn't bother reading it. Well today, because it was linked from the node "Thoughts from a new user", I decided to actually read "E2 is unfriendly to new noders".
You know what? For a node with that title, none of the nodes still surviving there was actually about how E2 is unfriendly. Most of it sounded like excuses to me.
E2 is friendly enough as far as I'm concerned, but I've been here long enough (not always under the same account) to know that E2 has been losing users for a long time now. I remember back in the days when your node would be in "New Writeups" for what, minutes? Now they seem to stick around there for longer than the nodes on "Cool Writeups". Wasn't the point of Cool Writeups to showcase good nodes, so everyone got a chance to read them before they got lost in the nodegel? Who needs it now if there are so few users, so few writeups, that New Writeups is just as good, if not better, for advertising your node?
You may not care if E2 doesn't have many users. You may be satisfied with the good friends you already have here. I'm not. I want more people to read what I wrote - not just what I wrote, but I also want more people to read the nodes I like. I feel like a dinosaur on a sinking ship sometimes, coming back to E2 year after year with its dwindling user base.
How can we get more users to come to E2 and stay? I wish I knew. I don't know if it's just a matter of advertising. I used to think our link from slashdot was enough. Is it?
Are we nuking too many nodes that people are scared away? When I first got here, there really was the sense that you really could write about everything here, even boring things, because it was called Everything after all. Now nodes seem to be nuked much faster than they used to. Is Everything really about everything? Is it a matter of disk space? If so, I can understand.
I think I would rather see a lot of negative rep nodes lying around than seeing people scared off. It's true that would lower the general quality of writing on the site. It may require that there be some sort of filtering or sorting, so that highly regarded nodes could be found easier.
A few days ago, I just discovered http://thisisby.us. They seem to have a different problem. There doesn't seem to be a lot of nuking going on, but there are so many new posts that most are read by relatively few people. I like the fact that people are encouraged to read and vote on nodes here. If only we could strike a happy medium between the extremes.
If you have ideas about how to increase the readership of E2, I (and hopefully others) would love to hear them.
OK, I've gotten that off my chest. Feel free to nuke this now.
Nov 11 update: It seems if you can get a link to appear on the front page of reddit.com, then you can bring tens of thousands of visitors to it. I'm going to try to get some of my favorite nodes written by you guys on there.
sam512 says: How can we get more users to come to E2 and stay? See the extensive list on
my homenode. The problem is not that we don't know what to do; it's just that the people in charge simply won't do it.
artman2003 says: most nukes are mercy nukes. They seem to wait most of the time until your w/u goes really far into the negatives, to stop your XP bleeding.
Oolong says: I'm pretty sure we're slower to nuke things than we have been for years. Much slower, and much more inclined not to nuke at all than we were a year or two back. If it's looking to you like there's more nuking, that might just be because you get more chance to notice a writeup *before* it gets nuked...