Ask HN: Adding lots of initial content to a user-generated-content website | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Adding lots of initial content to a user-generated-content website

9 pointssendos7 comments

My website is a one-man operation, and, since it relies on having an initial critical mass of content for it to be useful and "sticky" for visitors, I'm wondering if you guys know of established, effective, ways to add a lot of content.

For example, can you get a bunch of college students and pay them to generate content for your website?

Are there established channels for doing so, or do I have to find these people myself?

Any other ideas?

(BTW, if there is no website offering this sort of service, maybe there is a business model there, since I can see lots of startups needing this)

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Amazon Mechanical Turk. Easy to setup and fairly cheap. You can have people do anything you want. I've seen tasks like take a picture of yourself holding up a sign that says "I love <some website>.com" or to write a review of a product on a website.

You can also give offer to give out 'bonuses' to motivate people to generate really good content.

Seconded, but beware of filling up a site with a tide of poorly-written crap, a la 'I love hackernews.com because he hunts bugs and doesn't afraid of anything on hackernews.com!'

It would help if we knew what the site was or what sort of content it needed. Like a lot of other HN readers, I'm usually happy to throw in 30 or 60 minutes of effort on adding to something that looks like it will be useful once it reaches critical mass.

The site is http://soundkey.com, and it aims to be something like flickr for sounds. So, the content it needs is audio (recorded directly on the website, or uploaded by the user) for any sound that the user feels they want to share.

It could be pronunciation of names, places, difficult words, etc, but it also can be just about any sound you think is interesting or want to share with others (since the website gives you a unique "soundkey" that you can post on facebook, twitter, etc.

Since the users can record the sound on your site I think this is a good candidate for using mechanical turk. You can review the work users submit and accept (thus paying them) or reject (deny them pay). Obviously if you deny a lot of people, you will have a reputation of not paying people, but I think if you give people very clear guidelines and review what people submit it will work.

You can also add filters like only allow people with approval ratings of greater than 90% to try and ensure you get good workers.

Aha...now that is very interesting. And I just happen to be a pro audio engineer. Also one that is behind schedule today :-/ but I'll create an account and email tonight. My first impression of the site is very positive.

You know, I really think you've got something here. You'll have no problem with content once people start hearing about your site. I feel like uploading a bunch of random sounds just by browsing through what you already have.

Nice.

I've used contests to generate content. Give some type of reward for participation, randomly selecting X winners. As long as you find the right balance between potential prize and work required you'll get the desired effect. If your site has any type of rating system for the content, those ratings could be used as a multiple for contest entries. Just try to make sure people aren't gaming the system to increase their own ratings.

With that said, in my experience the problem is that the vast majority of people that visit for the contest will not visit for the content. That will be your next challenge.

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