spend some time getting a fresh design on that site, and show off much more of the social activity on it. Make it look REALLY busy and active, so new users will want to jump in and participate.
Then I'd recommend some forum marketing personally, go get active on a few major gaming forums and use a signature link to your site. Forum marketing is very underrated but can be very lucrative if done actively. Plus you get to participate in forums you're already interested in (hopefully) so it barely feels like work
The thing is, most people get into SEO because it's "free traffic" and they're all pitched on how they can start making money in just a few weeks, for free, working an hour a day.
SEO is very much a long term project, so you need to have long term goals in order to truly succeed. I'm close with many affiliates who make a metric shit ton of money with SEO. But that's because they build good sites, they aggressively build links, and they don't fall for all the guru crap that floats all over the internet. And they pick niches that are evergreen and will be around 1, 2, 3+ years from now.
The bottom line is that 99.9% of SEO Experts online don't know a damn thing and simply steal/borrow/copy SEO maxims from others. It's an info circlejerk really.
Any SEO who says spam doesn't work has never spammed, because it does.
Any SEO who says duplicate content doesn't work has never scraped, because dupe content works.
And so on and so on. It's a whole lot of FUD in the industry, FUD that gets newbies really excited and then leaves them wondering why they suck and everyone else is ballin'.
I setup SaaSaholics.com a month or so ago, got it seeded with a bunch of content, but never got around to getting it posted here to get some users. Everything is ready to go, I really strongly believe a SaaS forum could be a useful thing for us to all collaborate at.
I'll host the site for free with no ads for the indefinite future in the interest of getting it going. I think a submission here would potentially get it rolling, but it ultimately is in that awkward "who talks first" mode...
Facebook has an opportunity to disrupt Adwords. One of the major reasons Google's Adwords makes so much god damn money, is that they 1) have a HUGE reach and 2) have really good retargeting abilities.
Example: Go browse around on liquidweb.com...then go look at some sites running adsense. I can almost guarantee you'll start seeing liquidweb ads on those sites.
Now, why do you think Google launched +? The major reason was to grab market share in the social networking space, but also because it's a MASSIVE retargeting tool. Now they know what your interests are, and they also know who your friends are and what their interests are. That's some game over type of stuff when it comes to advertising.
Facebook has had this information for years. If they introduced an adsense/adwords platform, they could run a sitewide ad promoting it to webmasters (reaching SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION sets of eyes) and get an instant userbase. That could significantly shake up Google's monopoly on the web advertising space.
twitter is inherently a spammer's heaven. It's really easy to make 140 characters seem legitimate. An hour of writing spun content and a really easy to build signup bot and you can have full conversations, retweets, everything.
There's a reason twitter gets spammed so much, and it's because most of the time, normal people's 140 character messages look just as spammy as the actual spam.
Why does loading TechCrunch take me 9 seconds? What exactly are they doing to cause such a slow load? Why does a page load for them require 330 requests?
Sure, but with a system that is active (like HN), there would be enough votes coming in frequently enough to handle the ranking updates and account for time increases without needing to hit the system every 5 minutes.
I'm a coder, entrepreneur, and huge philosophy fan. I think many people similar to me (IE people here) also love philosophy as well all enjoy thinking, logic, and problem solving, the epitome of philosophy.
There's a difference between being honest and being a self-absorbed jackass though. The original email sent by the student was harmless and sincere and the response from the blogger was pretentious and whiney.
Quite frankly, I wouldn't have posted this email exchange on my own blog if it was me because I feel it would portray me in a negative light. To each his own I suppose.
Can't you do it every time someone votes? The scores aren't dependent on any other items other than their own votes, so each time it gets a new vote, you rescore it and it will drop or go up on the front page accordingly.
sure, I admit the emailer went on to judge, but his initial email was:
> Hello, I'm citing your work for a debate article I'm using
> about space colonization and how it is improbable. I do
> need credentials however, and I've yet to find them online.
> If you could reply with your credentials that'd be great.
No harm in that email, very simple.
But then the blogger went on to whip out his e-peen and tell the kid to go to his wikipedia rather than just write "I'm a self taught novelist who thoroughly researches his topics he writes about but doesn't have credentials in the traditional sense".
EDIT: I apparently have no idea how to do quotes on HN despite my valiant attempt to do so. I apologize.
Regardless of whether or not credential requirements are founded, those are some pretty dickhead email responses. Why cuss at someone asking a genuine question?
Then I'd recommend some forum marketing personally, go get active on a few major gaming forums and use a signature link to your site. Forum marketing is very underrated but can be very lucrative if done actively. Plus you get to participate in forums you're already interested in (hopefully) so it barely feels like work