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New member, feel like the invite system will limit growth and is a bad idea

Glad to be here! I'm on both Voat and Reddit (same username), and snapzu looks way better than either of them.. But this whole invite system thing will make it hard to get more users and slow the website's growth. I'm not sure it's such a good idea when snapzu could've easily tripled in size overnight.

8 years ago by Kiwikku with 6 comments

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  • Moderator (edited 8 years ago)
    +13

    The thing is, we don't actually want to grow that large that quickly. Snapzu is about good people sharing good content, not sheer numbers.

    I don't know the exact figures, but we've seen nearly several thousand new members since yesterday, and there are possibly 10,000 more pending incomers — that actually would be a near tripling of the user base. The invites have limited growth enough to prevent us from being completely overrun, and thus we can help the new users acclimate to this community.

    The invite system also acts as a basic filter to weed out some spammers, trolls, and otherwise undesirable people. Those willing to go through the invite process do so because they want to be here, and that is at least a minimal guarantee of their positive potential.

    • Captainmarvel
      +3

      Thank you for such a well thought out and timely response.

    • RyanGooseling
      +2

      Absolutely. I think there is a fine line between a large community and a completely broken one. This is not to say that I don't want Snapzu to grow, I do, but I would much rather this continue to be its own place than become Reddit 2.0®.

  • cmagnificent
    +5

    The question is infrastructure. Certainly without an invite system the number of people trying to sign up could have tripled overnight, but a site can't go from a relatively small community instantly to a relatively large one. Voat has been down for some time now because of this issue, while snapzu, because of the decision to limit the influx has remained up.

    In principle, I completely agree with you and think the idea of exclusivity is detrimental to a community based service, but in reality the options were to either limit it for a time while upgrading the internal infrastructure to handle more users or to get hugged to death where no one could access it. In that scenario I think the latter option is more fair to the people that have been here well before all us refugees started showing up.

  • Bossman
    +4

    I understand the concerns, but I think this is a good idea while the site is still growing. Some links are already pretty slow to load. And I'm sure Snapzu is seeing a huge influx of new users because of what happened at reddit recently. And to be honest, it's better than the site going down completely (ala Voat).

  • MadMonk
    +4

    Its already tripled in size in a day? Wow. I will say that the invite system has done a good job at mitigating the reddit hug of death, since we can actually post and see things (although search seems to be broken at the moment.)