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Recently, Lifehacks has suffered from a lack traffic and quality posts. This site has the potential to do well, but we need a little push to get there.

Throughout the years, many Stack Exchange sites have promoted their sites through various events, like the fortnightly challenges on Worldbuilding and PPCG, Code Review's community-challenges, and the many promos that several graduated sites have done. These events are great ways to stir up some interest, promote the site, and bring in more traffic, something that Lifehacks needs.

So, we want to hear from you, the Lifehacks community. What great ideas do you have to help promote this site?

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  • Beside trying to advertise on sites outside the SE system, I draw a blank. I think that beside promotion, trying to find out why we lost traffic would be a good idea. That way we can advertise it more appropriately.
    – Pobrecita
    Apr 5, 2015 at 12:02
  • Someone more familiar with the current state of LH than I may want to ask Community Building SE for their advice on growing our community.
    – Shokhet
    Apr 6, 2015 at 16:47

3 Answers 3

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This is my first time looking at this Stack Exchange and so I can provide the perspective of someone visiting this particular exchange and deciding whether or not to join the community. A huge number of topics that I clicked on because they seemed interested were labelled as "not a life hack" or "too broad" and then locked and ignored. I understand that there may be a technical definition of life hack that the site promotes but I think that, when in doubt, erring in favor of allowing borderline questions rather than overmoderating them will result in net better content and more active users. I'm a frequent contributor to other stack exchanges such as EL&U and I certainly appreciate topicality but life hacks is a broad enough term in common use that I think any any how-to question that may simplify life should be considered topical.

It's funny because my definition of life hack has almost been the exact opposite of the scope definition - the question is something trivial that you do everyday and unimaginatively and the life hack is an outside the box solution to it. Not the other way around. Requiring questions to have interesting "out of the box solutions" rather than being general how-to content is putting the cart before the horse if someone knew there was an inspired and creative way to solve a problem like escaping a sinking car or folding a shirt they wouldn't be using the exchange to ask in the first place.

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    Agree. The bane of many SE communities is over-moderating, and turning new users off by telling them their question is off-topic. What if instead we adopt the StackOverflow model, allow borderline on-topic questions while the community is growing, then tighten the scope later? Apr 23, 2015 at 9:26
  • Fascinating views! Maybe what this site reeally needs is a fresh look at what is going on, without biases and assuming. I may not agree with all you are saying, but I thank you for the time took.
    – Pobrecita
    Apr 24, 2015 at 7:48
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Social media promotion

For a start, we could try to bring in outside users. This could be done by word of mouth ("Hey, if you ever need a cool hack for something, check out this awesome website!"), or through social media. There's a few ways that I can think of social media helping our cause, here's some of them:

  • If you have a Twitter account, you could tweet interesting questions -- and these questions don't even need to have answers. If they don't, then you could phrase the message as a request for help, which would encourage people to post answers (which is a good thing!! ;)
  • If you think you can do it, you can just tweet a straight promotion, something along the lines of "Looking for a hack? Try LH!!" ....who knows what that might accomplish?
  • Whatever you do, announce it in chat, so that it can be liked/retweeted/etc for maximum exposure

Weekly Topic Challenges

This an idea suggested by Jon Ericson and is now used on many sites. A meta post will be posted soon to get an official survey of what the community thinks.

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  • I know that I shared some material on Google+ and link a lot of the material on Fanpop. Social media is not the only thing internet-wise that we can do. 1+ on the idea, hopefully this will work!
    – Pobrecita
    Apr 6, 2015 at 18:45
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I use StackOverflow and other sites in the SE network almost every day, yet I have never seen a "Hot Network Question" from Lifehacks. I don't even know how I found out about Lifehacks in the first place.

So here's an idea: bump Lifehacks questions in the Hot Network Questions list.

Right now, instead of actual, useful, practical life hacks that anyone can use, I see obscure Code Golf questions, or questions that apply to very few people like "Before taking eggs from the hens, does the farmer have to chase the hens away?"

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    Wow, egocentric much? So the HNQ should privilege the questions that you want over the questions that you don't want? Besides, HNQ is a double-edged sword: it tends to promote the worst questions, and attract more traffic but mostly bad questions and answers from people who have no idea what the site is about. Apr 27, 2015 at 11:38
  • Filtering HNQ has been a feature request for a long while. Apr 27, 2015 at 12:01
  • Sure: a request so that you can choose what you see. That isn't at all what you propose here: you ask for everybody to see more LH questions and fewer questions from other sites. Apr 27, 2015 at 12:11
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    We actually had a question on the HNQ list today: lifehacks.stackexchange.com/questions/6712/…
    – michaelpri
    Apr 27, 2015 at 20:35
  • @Gilles: would you agree that from a utilitarian standpoint, Lifehacks questions are more useful to more people than Mi Yodeia questions, on the average? Apr 28, 2015 at 3:34
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    I don't look at the HNQ lists so often, but I think that LH has a good number of them on a regular basis.
    – Shokhet
    May 4, 2015 at 18:27
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