Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

I saw this on a miniature scale when I created a new subreddit (http://reddit.com/r/LSAT)

I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links.

Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the place became self-sustaining and grew to 1500 subscribers.

I'm seeing the same thing again with a website I just launched (http://lsathacks.com), which has free LSAT explanations.

Very positive initial comments, but just letting people know about it hasn't resulted in a surge of traffic. Instead, I'm going to have to manually recruit people. Only then will I know if it's worthwhile.

My point is that this doesn't apply just to high growth startups. Almost anything new requires initial unscaleable effort.

Edit: The LSAT is the Law School Admission Test, a logic test required for admission to North American law schools.

Thats a great way to practice user acquisition.

For anyone interested in using a subreddit to practice acquiring users:

Metareddit lets you track all mentions of keywords or phrases across Reddit. It let me find literally everyone who commented about the LSAT.

http://metareddit.com

Fantastic marketing tool.

You should give http://www.commentfindder.com a try. I believe it has a more extensive index than metareddit which I'm pretty sure is based on google search.

I'd love any feedback.

I just spent some time on it - I like the concept! The one thing I noticed is that I noticed less comment-worthy opportunities on here compared to just doing a search on twitter (for my work, I just search for "photoshop shortcut" or "illustrator shortcut").

There might be some more worthy places to also incorporate search in (quora comes to mind)

Some quick notes. Mostly negative, only because I haven't used it long enough to notice advantages. Overall, it looks like a good site. Hope these are helpful:

* I couldn't block subreddits from the feed. In my case, LSAT is also a weapon in some popular videos games. On Metareddit, I was able to block the most common gaming subreddits so those results never came up. * Metareddit produced an actual feed I could check once a day for new comments. This is more of a search engine. * I have to hover over the link to see the subreddit. That's often very relevant

Apart from that, looks good. And obviously, these criticism depend on your use case. I used metareddit specifically for monitoring.

Thanks for the thoughts. I think the monitoring use case is a very natural next step. Basically "saved" searches.

On commentfindder you can exclude specific subreddits with "-subreddit:askreddit" syntax or target subreddits by removing the minus. Of course, I should make this more obvious, right now its kind of a cheat code.

I wish there were an RSS option for the search results sorted by recency. Would love to be able to see when there are new mentions for a term without having to come back and search frequently.

The metareddit monitor doesn't search through an index. It's a crawler that constantly fetches all new comments and submissions and looks for the (several thousand) keywords in each of them.

Source: I run metareddit.

Yep. Reminds me a lot of when it was fairly common to start your own forum back in the early/mid 2000s. (phpbb, vBulletin, IPB, etc.)

Interestingly from questions on their Meta sites StackExchange found that this sort of "priming the pump" didn't really work for them when it came to building on-line communities.

Their attitude (having tried it) is now if the community doesn't build itself it won't sustain itself. If you've got a working community then you can promote it but this sort of work won't work to build a community that's not already there.

Not saying that what PG says isn't true for start-ups which are obviously different, but it may be relevant in your case.

I love some of the SO sites but they have a lot of communities that have been lingering in beta limbo for ages.

I would be interested in more detail on how they reached the conclusion that pump priming is not useful. Do you have a link?

That's an interesting result. Do you have a link where they explain how they came to their conclusion?

Because I did build a community entirely by priming the pump. There was no community there. So it absolutely worked in my case.

However, Reddit was an easy place to build a community, as I just had to tell existing Redditors who studied for the LSAT that there was now a subreddit for that. It was an easy sell.

Both links say LSAT everywhere but I could not find any mention of what the acronym means! I had to check Wikipedia.

Oh yeah. Everyone in the target market knows what it is, otherwise it's pretty obscure.

It's a logic test required for admission to law school in North America, highly competitive.

Most Americans with college degrees have heard of it, even if we never go near law school. Same for the GMAT and MCAT.

How old are you? I'm 27. I find everyone in my target market (23 and under) knows about it, people my age don't always know about it, and people older than me often don't know about it.

38.

I'm 36, and when I saw LSAT I confused it with PSAT. So I thought I knew what it was, but was very much mistaking.

I'm 23, didn't know.

for those of us who aren't familiar, GMAT is for business school and MCAT is for medical school.

Give it a thought for a second.

Does the degree of inconvenience caused to you - in requiring you to figure out what LSAT means - necessarily require that you record your disapproval here?

The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing.

Source:

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

It is potentially useful to tell someone that there is information missing in something they have written. If they're smart, they don't want to inconvenience their readers. In this case, it didn't matter much because the target market already knows, but you don't know until you bring it up.

Sorry, it was meant as constructive criticism. I guess I should have made that clear. Writing it out might help unsuspecting people like me figure out what it is all about. I could also imagine it to be beneficial for search engines.

My comment taught you that I had no idea what LSAT meant and that I thought it should be explained. Now look at yours for a moment.

Here's the constructive-criticism version of your comment:

"For the benefit of anyone like me who never heard of the LSAT before: it's the Law School Admission Test, a half-day test of reading comprehension, logic and verbal reasoning used by law schools in the US, Canada, and elsewhere."

(More work? Maybe. But all the information there is also in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the LSAT, which you said you already checked.)

I disagree; the criticism isn't about the term itself, it's that the term isn't readily explained on the site.

If, as explained, the term is widely understood by the target market, then this criticism is invalid (but caused by the poster not knowing the target market). If the criticism was valid, and the target market didn't understand the term, then the site owner knows that he/she should add an explanation.

The actual definition is sort-of irrelevant.

As the original author, I agree. The comment in question made me check the adwords keyword tool for the search volume of "Law School Admission Test"

It was, as I thought, fairly small relative to LSAT searches overall. But it's good to confirm that.

Also told me that there's enough searches to make a post along the lines of "What is the Law School Admission Test?" worthwhile, to catch students at the very start of their journey.

I didn't mean to scapegoat you to highlight the existence of this widespread problem on HN:

People investing too little effort in figuring out elementary things and in the process adding to the clutter of posts that distract from the trunk of the conversation.

Someday in the not so future, perhaps all forum posts everywhere can be auto-condensed and auto-recomposed for the purposes of brevity and clarity.

Eg: The Natural Language Processing technology licensed from SRI International, that was at the core of Summly, the app Yahoo bought for $30 MM.

Until then, we could do what sensible HNers always did - resist adding anything that distracts or leads the conversation astray.

HN is hardly perfect.

People already bemoan, justifiably so, that not enough striking and incisive stories make it to the front page.

Despite efforts, there is plenty of voting-ring activity that bolts undeserving stories to the top.

The weighing of upvotes and downvotes (based on the standing of the HNer) could be better.

These are all known issues.

While these things are gradually improved, we could help by not adding to the tally with this kind of redundant clutter.

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