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  • AdelleChattre (edited 8 years ago)
    +11

    There is such thing as churn, right? Users come and over time they also go, but they're still counted. /u/TeamSnapzu has over 20,000 followers, which is some indication how many users Snapzu has had. However, when you check total unique page views on posts, which we could do until quite recently, they showed a couple of orders of magnitude fewer active users than that.

    Used to be that you could keep up on virtually everything at Snapzu by following new users and going through everything in the home feed. With so many new users, it became impossible to follow everyone. Then there was the performance hit from the influx of new users, which made keeping up with the home feed so taxing for the server, if not us users, that the depth of the feed itself was cut drastically. For instance, right now I can only look back four hours or so, and then only for however many users I can follow. It’s not that I wouldn't keep up, although there are limits, right? It’s that I can’t. Many new users and much less reflection changed things.

    So then you have to find other ways to keep up on things. If anything, that's strengthened the role of tribes. It gets to be a familiar routine, checking your tribes and the ones you moderate. There are cracks, though. For instance, I'd never heard of /t/needafriend until now. The main page obvs only shows things that’re already popular, so that’s an imperfect window onto what’s actually going on. I'm not altogether sure that the contraption that has become what we know now as Snapzu is working as well as it once did.

    What you're getting at with this question is getting lurkers to participate. Age old problem, that. Guess what I'm getting at is that Snapzu's more a sieve than a vessel, for now. Could well be that for things like /t/writingprompts and /t/needafriend, maybe what’s needed is more likely to be found where there’s more critical mass to keep those reactions going. Back where they came from, right? Bound to be a hospitable environment, where those presumably have done so very well before. New creative avenues, adapted for this ecology, might have a better chance than transplants. Even then, though, we may be short some key piece of the contraption we don't even know we're missing yet.