I agree on the magic of WIP. That's why I've always kept its growth relatively slow by either having the paywall or it being invite-only.
I do think it would be beneifical to everybody to get more makers onboard, but we need to do it in a slow and thoughtful way. Perhaps someday we'll have sub-wips like on Reddit, or the Twitter-like following/follower model becomes more prominent. We'll see. But it's definitely top of mind for me.
Any concrete suggestions on how we can make the forum more active?
As for the invites, you can go to wip.co/applicants and give your invite to anyone who applied.
There's a lot of people there and the UX for reviewing them isn't great right now. I'll work on that. Perhaps it should be more of a voting system where you can give your thumbs up on anyone you think is a good fit, and once they hit a certain threshold they automatically get invited. That might be a bit easier than having to make a clear yes/no decision on whether to give your invite to someone.
Yeah it's a very fine line between quality/user size
To make the forum more active you would want some sort of reward, this is hard of course because you don't want it to become Quora/Reddit shill show. A Karma score? Do upvotes/likes go to your karma? But what would that karma do, wip is not really an acquisition channel for any of us and more a networking platform
Maybe the more active and helpful you are the higher your project ranks. A little like Producthunt but instead of upvotes the maker gets rewarded for being helpful.
As someone who loved those old school forums I think there are a lot of directions you can take this, nothing wrong with only having a hundred people writing the content and the rest just lurking
I like the idea of sub/groups, there are a few real estate projects and I would love to team up with them (big markets so a lot of room for partnerships/sharing stuff etc) which can be a big power for indiehackers
"As for the invites, you can go to wip.co/applicants and give your invite to anyone who applied." - As a true developer, I did not read the manual. Just send my first invite
A lot of great ideas here. Thanks!
I agree on the magic of WIP. That's why I've always kept its growth relatively slow by either having the paywall or it being invite-only.
I do think it would be beneifical to everybody to get more makers onboard, but we need to do it in a slow and thoughtful way. Perhaps someday we'll have sub-wips like on Reddit, or the Twitter-like following/follower model becomes more prominent. We'll see. But it's definitely top of mind for me.
Any concrete suggestions on how we can make the forum more active?
As for the invites, you can go to wip.co/applicants and give your invite to anyone who applied.
There's a lot of people there and the UX for reviewing them isn't great right now. I'll work on that. Perhaps it should be more of a voting system where you can give your thumbs up on anyone you think is a good fit, and once they hit a certain threshold they automatically get invited. That might be a bit easier than having to make a clear yes/no decision on whether to give your invite to someone.
Yeah it's a very fine line between quality/user size
To make the forum more active you would want some sort of reward, this is hard of course because you don't want it to become Quora/Reddit shill show. A Karma score? Do upvotes/likes go to your karma? But what would that karma do, wip is not really an acquisition channel for any of us and more a networking platform
Maybe the more active and helpful you are the higher your project ranks. A little like Producthunt but instead of upvotes the maker gets rewarded for being helpful.
As someone who loved those old school forums I think there are a lot of directions you can take this, nothing wrong with only having a hundred people writing the content and the rest just lurking
I like the idea of sub/groups, there are a few real estate projects and I would love to team up with them (big markets so a lot of room for partnerships/sharing stuff etc) which can be a big power for indiehackers
"As for the invites, you can go to wip.co/applicants and give your invite to anyone who applied." - As a true developer, I did not read the manual. Just send my first invite