A lot of people have told me that they don’t want to use a forum because of how slow it is. I’ve been advertising for about a year and I only have 3 other users. What is the best strategy to get people to use it?
- are you self hosting?
If yes
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what is your server provider
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specification
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userbase locations
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server location(s)
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No, the forum is very fast and functional. By “slow,” I mean that people don’t like how slow-moving the conversations on forums are. People prefer Discord because it’s basically a chat room.
Solve a need for them. Create valuable content that they can’t get elsewhere. There is no trick and you can’t force people to join if they aren’t getting value from it.
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Sure, but when you start a Discord server, it comes to life in maybe 3 days. I have tons of interesting content on the site, and a few regular users. But no matter how much money I spend it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Is it a marketing issue? Or is it purely an issue of medium?
You’ll need to poll your users to find out directly. Every community is different. What made you decide to start the community in the first place? Did you have an audience?
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Well, I decided to create a community based around intellectual discussion. History, psychology, science, art, etc. In the early days of Youtube, there used to be an intellectual community, and they would debate politics and so on. That doesn’t really exist anymore due to the rise of algorithms and slop content. There aren’t many significant intellectual spaces, and those which do exist are just chat rooms.
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Intellectual people are still making videos, they still run blogs and some even occasionally have their own Discord channels. But there isn’t an intersection for these people to really interact besides X. And X is just slop content and algorithm-generated tea.
Like, there are tons of tiny Youtube channels with really interesting video essays, but they get like 300 views and disappear into the aether. Seems like there’s a need there.
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it took me a while to realise what X was, i understood straight away when you were talking about Discord.
set your forum apart from “forums” they have seen?
for example, if the user-base mainly use their smartphone, you would encourage your user base to enable push notifications
make a group PM, think carefully before enabling whos-online
Well, have you ever heard about Mastodon 
Anyway, microblogging is for monologues with comments, rather than for discussion. And there is another point too: content creators want to discuss where they are.
But complaining about slow discussion and how you describe your target audience doesn’t seem to make sense. I mean those individuals who have the ability to discuss don’t care about a high or low pace.
My guess is you just don’t share Discourse links in the right place.
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I’m not sure what this means?
Getting people to contribute to a discourse community site can be a major challenge, if people are just not interested that can be discouraging.
What is the value is an important question. There can be a lot of value in slower written communication, unfortunate if people can’t see that.
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Medium as in type of platform.
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A forum could work for this, but I’d be tempted to run a bunch of time limited experiments on different platforms. An ideal experiment would be one where you get something out of it, even if it didn’t get much traction. For example, if you regularly post to a blog with a comment system, at the very least you’d get to practice writing. If it does get some traction, you could try to get its audience to move over to a forum.
Depending on their goals, 300 views might be a success. The most significant video I’ve seen over the past few weeks currently has 46 views. Something was said in the video that had a big impact on me. I clicked its like button, but didn’t leave a comment. There are lots of ways of judging success.
That might be the issue. I think my personal reluctance to join forums has more to do with feeling self-conscious about joining a community. The smaller the community the more self-conscious I feel.
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Thanks for clarification.
This can be a problem, depending on how slow conversation is or if there is no response at all to some new topic posts or comments. Personally I don’t mind if there is a delay of one or two days before I see a response, but after that can give up on trying to communicate.
Chat-based communication can be better in some ways if people are seeking an immediate response, but that can also be heavily limited to there being very thoughtful discussion. I’ve had the same challenge you described in starting new community sites, don’t have a lot of good answers for you today.
Your OP seems to suggests you have an implicit expectation that this is easy. It is not.
don’t expect fast growth initially
I have one forum that’s been around since 2012 that is very niche. It gets 15 sign-ups and about the same number of new Topics a month. But it continues to live on. Would I shut it down because it only plods along? No way. It is a valuable resource for those interested in the subject.
Be patient and accept that some places move and grow slowly.
chat is double edged
Use of Chat is contentious, what people commit to chat they won’t write to a quality Posts. And Posts are what attracts people to your site via SEO.
Chat also relies on people being in a closer timezone. Topics are more friendly in that respect.
As per Hawk write leading Topics on subjects that people are interested in. That will eventually show up in search results and get views and drive engagement.
Also multiplatform attack:
A friend of mine, starting from nothing, began a broad presence on twitch, YouTube and discord.
He now has about 2.5k Twitch followers and 1k on his Discord (though tbh Discord users tend to be a bit less loyal). He’s almost a year in.
His growth to begin with was pretty fast but it has slowed.
I think from this you can draw that having a broad presence on social media is one key to getting off the ground.
reduce friction
Make is easy for people to sign up and support all the major social logins, ie at least Facebook, Google and Discord.
don’t give up
Finally, just keep going for a bit and don’t give up. Care less about growth even and just write about what interests you and see what happens after a much longer spell.
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I recently realised one line of friction with a forum is that we discuss in threads aka topics, which have a subject line, and need to be created.
One can see with email - which is decreasingly used - that some people struggle with subject lines as a concept, or as a challenge. Whereas chat apps just give you an audience. Even with slack or discord, where chat happens within channels, a normal user doesn’t start a channel, they just pick one.
So, I think starting conversations is something you need to do as a founder, or your active members need to do. Perhaps start a conversation around a topic, or perhaps just semi-regular - a weekly discussion thread.
You need to host and facilitate the group: ask open questions, prompt people for their thoughts, spark something off.
Try not to make head posts which are declarative, unchallengeable, or just too long.
Try for head posts which are more like “here’s an idea, what do you think?” or “here’s what I’ve been thinking about, how about you?”
Make sure there’s a fresh head post at least weekly.
But for sure, the pace of posting and responses will be slower on a forum than in a chat channel. The advantage can be that you’ll get deeper thoughts, more reflective answers.
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