

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

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.<p>For example, can you get a bunch of college students and pay them to generate content for your website?<p>Are there established channels for doing so, or do I have to find these people myself?<p>Any other ideas?<p>(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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jwegan
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.

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anigbrowl
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.

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sendos
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.

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jwegan
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.

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uptown
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.

