I figure that new element needs an explanation. I added one of the activity stats to the sidebar (though only visible on the front page). The main goal is to test the idea of group motivation. Can we have a group motivation?

This stat is, on its surface, a more obscure one. It's the number of people who have been the first to comment on a post in 24 hours. It might be fun to have a number we are trying to push higher as a group. Usually, most sites incentivize people to care about their numbers. Fewer sites set a group effort. Might as well see how it goes.

I know when I added it, it was at 9. That actually seemed kind of high because usually it's just a few folks who make the first comment. Still, even at 9, that's only 3% of the total unique people who have interacted with the site in the past month. Thank you polls. If you expand the concept that different levels of interaction have different population scales (voters, posters, commenters), to include more groups; Folks who are the first to comment are actually the smallest group. Arguably the most important.

I think it would be interesting to try to keep it above 8, the closest power of two we've seen it above. So if you see the number is low, you know what to do. I'm doing my part.

Also, being the first to comment on something is like a super-upvote here, because of how the alg works. So it's a good way to pick out worthy content.

The other thing you can do if interested is help drive more traffic here. I know that most people just want to use the site. But for the people who think it would be fun to drive more traffic here, I might as well mention some ideas and tools we have.

Polls. A lot of sites don't have polls, or they are limited to only one vote, and so produce bad results (like any single-vote first-past-the-post system). Making a poll gives you free rein to link to anywhere.

Article mode. You can write up anything and have what you wrote look like a blog. It makes it more authoritative, even if it shouldn't. Any long text post you would write on another site, you can write it here, share it as an article, and automatically your opinion matters a little more. Try it out. Tip: submatrix probably comes off more authoritative than goatmatrix. Remember, the only difference between a news article and a text post is page formatting. Often, a text post can be more well-researched. You, and almost anyone on this site, deserve as much voice as any of these journos. Journos get to have their words on every site and assumed as fact. And half the difference is just formatting. This is most of the appeal of Substack. Submatrix sounds cooler. And the main difference is that you are already here, and you can convert anything you've already written into an article. Heck, other people have written things that are pretty shareable.

Threads. We have bump included in the alg. We also have inline image support like 4chan. Running a 4chan style thread here is something I've wanted to see happen. Getting people invested is hard. But I still think it's possible. And such a thread would be more re-sharable than a link post.

Besides growing traffic, you can also share threads that are guarenteed to get a discussion. Discussion posts and ask threads are guarenteed to get at least one comment. Not every link post gets that guarentee.

That sidebar stat will die after two to three weeks. Let's see what we can do in that time. Really dope would be if we got it above 16. We've got the population. We're at 16 right now for first commenters for the week stat. And that's before we've even tried. And we had more than 16 unique posters+commenters today when you combine them. But keeping it above 8 shouldn't be that hard and could be our first goal. We just need one quick boost to get back over it and then I think we've got it.