Fresh Meat

[CML]

On the cast Wadds and I were talking about what a pain in the ass it is to get people to do anything and how getting an 8-man together, let alone a forum of any lifespan, is an impressive achievement. It's also been awesome to see an uptick in discussion over the last few weeks. However! Said uptick has been the byproduct of the same posters who have been here forever, and, though I love y'all, especially myself, we need to attract more people to the forums to make it self-sustaining -- a party that goes on should the host leave, or (I shudder) maybe even a business.

So in this thread we (Magic players really love nosism for being practicioners of an individual 'sport') will brainstorm the ways we can attract Fresh Meat to the forum. We could talk about what kind of people we're looking to attract, as nothing would be worse than turning into an MTGS cesspool, but I think the tone and culture of the discussion will encourage enough self-selection, if not too much. I'll start off:

-More contests, especially ones that solicit content from outside sources (like maybe we could run a Riptide contest in a CFB article of Jason's)
-Evangelizing on other sites without being as much of a dick as me
-Telling your paper-Magic buddies about Riptide
-Appropriating a Cube celebrity for our purposes (I can ask Thea Steele in person, for example)

 

[VibeBox]

Thea Steele

being a place that could legitimately call itself "tolerable to women" relative to the misogynistic dumpster fire of the rest of the web and particularly magic sites would be A Good Thing and a great way to go
give thea carte blanche as an article outlet, imo.

 

[anotak]

ive been bugging my friend who runs a peasant cube locally to post, he uses a lot of riptidelab ideas

 

[CML]

i am not sure thea cares much about cube any more, but, who knows

o god the misogynistic fire dumpster is a disaster but the white knight define in opposition thing to me is equally vomit worthy

 

[Spiderdoofus]

I think Jason's articles on CFB are your best outreach option. Most people here are trying to do different stuff with cube than other sites, and the articles let those views be fleshed out.

I think creating an environment to encourage other people with interesting ideas who are part of this community to write articles would be a good idea too. More content is good, and maybe those people could write in other places too, spreading the word. I don't really know how most MTG sites find their non-pro writers, so I assume there is some sort of submission system.

 

[CML]

there was this one article i wrote that got a bunch of traffic to the site, but afaik it all receded quickly, which may have been OK, as r/mtg/ is worthless. the others, if i'm not mistaken, have made at best a small bump.

i imagine there exists the market for people who want to write here, but im not sure how to find them and attract them. the main forum here is far from dead, it actually gets reasonable traffic compared to the average MTGS and TheSource board, but MTGS's robustness comes from having every forum for every retard known to mankind, while The Source sustains itself through both its longevity and Legacy being great fun. The Source is a far better model for what we're trying to do here, though I dunno how to best adapt its success.

Wadds, Chantron, weigh in?

 

[Jason Waddell]

Well, we tried the Cube celeb route at one point and that kind of fizzled. Kranny was my big hope for growth, but now I'm left scratching my head for ideas a bit. I like the idea of getting another celeb on board, but don't know what all we have to offer.

 

[Jonas]

I came for the contest and stayed because of the content and people, if that is any help.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I came for the contest and stayed because of the content and people, if that is any help.

Yeah, we could probably do a better job reaching out to the subreddit. Many people actively disliked me / this site for a long time, but I feel like the winds may be slowly changing.

 

[Eric Chan]

Thanks for starting up this thread, CML. I remember we had a similar discussion on this topic like six months ago, where we racked our brains trying to come up with ways to drive in more active forum members, and basically concluded that it's not easy.

The Kranny experiment didn't work out, though at one point Jason and I were wondering if Justin Parnell could be our celebrity advocate, as he's shown nominal interest in this site.

I still post on /r/mtgcube on occasion, but recently I've been very careful about linking back to this here site, as those posts tend to get downvoted into oblivion immediately. I've noticed that the subreddit has a much stronger distaste for powered cubes than salvation does, though, so there's hope for them yet.

Evangelizing on other sites is... tricky. I mean, at that point, we're just spamming out links, which is a bit tacky and shameless. I guess I don't really know what the answer is. Is anybody here really active on Twitter? That's one place I suppose we could continually link our front page articles from, without feeling guilty about.

 

[VibeBox]

reaching out to the subreddit

please don't

every retard

please don't

 

[Jason Waddell]

I don't know what the bias against reaching out there is. I mean, all of you who are here came from somewhere. Many from Salvation. The recent post on the subreddit brought us a few new posters, including Jonas who has been a very welcome and active addition to the boards.

 

[Jonas]

I actually came from mtgs, been linked here from there a few times. Not much of a redditor, hardlybever been there. Sorry if my earlier post was a bit confusing.

 

[anotak]

i came here from the cfb articles.

however i used to read the mtgs cube forum quite a bit before that, but i soon realized that the general attitude of folks on there is pretty nuts. its not even just their cube section, all the subforums have pretty bizarre attitudes compared to what i've found typical for whatever format elsewhere.
i remember mtgs edh discussions saying kikijiki kills aren't good because if you lose to it you clearly aren't playing any removal in your deck. and then they list "answers to kiki-jiki" such as wrath of god. what

 

[Jason Waddell]

I actually came from mtgs, been linked here from there a few times. Not much of a redditor, hardlybever been there. Sorry if my earlier post was a bit confusing.

Was our contest linked on MTGS?

 

[Changling Bob]

I don't know what the bias against reaching out there is. I mean, all of you who are here came from somewhere. Many from Salvation. The recent post on the subreddit brought us a few new posters, including Jonas who has been a very welcome and active addition to the boards.

I don't remember how I found the board; I think I was googling for general cube advice and filtering through for good stuff, because almost everything is garbage.

 

[Jason Waddell]

You know, our board started with me just cold calling people from the comments section of my articles. "Hey, I've got this Google Group, you should come hang out."

 

[Jonas]

I think someone mentioned it, and I had passed this way before so I though I should come and check it out again.

 

[VibeBox]

I don't know what the bias against reaching out there is.

reddit is a cesspool as revolting as 4chan

 

[Jason Waddell]

reddit is a cesspool as revolting as 4chan

I'd be inclined to disagree, but... well, suffice to say I've met lots of really nice people through Reddit, and the various subreddits are quite diverse in the quality and type of people they attract. This feels like a blanket statement that I can't really get behind, but I don't know if this is really pertinent to the topic at hand.

 

[Changling Bob]

much like 4chan, some subreddits are good and some are bad. much like reddit, some boards on 4chan are good (/tg/ on a good day), some are bad (everything else)

 

[Lucre]

You've convinced me to start posting on salvation forums again. Do we have a banner ad? I'm sure if I started winning the daily card contests consistently with the backlog I've been posting here we'd get some press, but the press would be card contest nerds and those people are rarely designy people (oddly enough).

Do we really want the sort of people I'd be drumming up on the cube forum? I guess there are 3-4 names I like there, but damned if one or two of them haven't popped up here already.

I've also had the opportunity to tell a couple other cubers to come to me and Eric's night. It might work pretty well. Myles, an old buddy of mine was interested in doing streamed drafts of the modo cube, but how many more sarcastic modo drafts do we need?
Eric, how would you like to do a 360 powered cube day some time? I can probably get the guy to come out.
I know one of my old ontario buddies has an ontario cube fb group now, but I'd have to ask about a bit.

 

[CML]

Well, we tried the Cube celeb route at one point and that kind of fizzled. Kranny was my big hope for growth, but now I'm left scratching my head for ideas a bit. I like the idea of getting another celeb on board, but don't know what all we have to offer.

fun? may not be enough though, people are lazy and it's hard to get them to do things, celebs especially

 

[Lucre]

Okay I found the sig and got it working on salvation.
If we start producing more cube content than other usual sources do (dude no one is doing it) and start putting it on their normal venues of distribution and people will eat it up. But let me tell you, you're gonna get dullards or people who are more excited to tell you whats wrong than contribute anything. There are a lot of types of content that aren't being made right now and it would be super easy for us to cultivate an edge in this wide open market.

 

[CML]

i'm pretty hopeful the climate here would either self-select against the typical dolt or turn him into a better person, at least as regards cube stuff