High Street at Cruelery.com - The Web's Bitter Afterbirth / Maybe we should advertise

Taint · 2008-09-03 03:56:40

OK, I've been thinking about Choad's latest round of questions concerning ways to attract unsuspec- um, new readers to High Street. In all honesty, I'm a little shy of inspiration. My hope with the journalism awards was to give us something to rally around using resources we were already had, but that didn't seem to interest too many folks. Thinking about it, I'm not sure why I figured so many people would be as excited about journalism as either Choad or I. But it was an attempt.

I still think link exchanges are a good idea and perhaps we could post suggestions here as to which sites we might pursue exchanges with. Or, we could advertise with a focus on some of the fun, interactive games and activities we enjoy here at High Street, for example:

GooberMcNutly · 2008-09-03 09:50:26

Here is an idea: Give some of our more prolific contributors high-street.org email addresses then send them forth to troll their favorite sub-genres. For example, send fnord over to the Black Family Reunion forum and have him do some posting, including the high-street.org link in his sig line. If we can get a couple of opposing viewpoints to come here, it might be fun to watch.

orangeplus · 2008-09-03 10:47:19

Blogroll children, easiest, most effective, immediate. Blogroll.

choad · 2008-09-03 15:23:44

I haven't kept down any food the last couple days. High temp all that happy shit. Can't read much before my eyes cross. Anyone wants to take a run at this and see how it works, go ahead. I'll try myself soon as I can trust my fingers.

fnord · 2008-09-04 01:36:33

GooberMcNutly wrote:
Here is an idea: Give some of our more prolific contributors high-street.org email addresses then send them forth to troll their favorite sub-genres. For example, send fnord over to the Black Family Reunion forum and have him do some posting, including the high-street.org link in his sig line. If we can get a couple of opposing viewpoints to come here, it might be fun to watch.

I’ve considered trolling the black section of Topix. Screwing with people who are trying to reconnect with kin is too low even for me.

pALEPHx · 2008-09-04 05:05:07

I have grown quite weary of attempting to nudge this forum in the ill-fated direction of "popularity." They've dumbed down the software, yet there's at least one brilliant person providing after-market mods. This makes no sense. Why build on something that's designed to fail? The lowbrow approach isn't cuttin' it no mo. The boardware needs to be fully fledged and functional, not stripped down to pre-1997 listserv status.

I will say this only once more: I have brought people to this site, who I respected and because I thought they'd love it, and their inevitable response was "what is this text-based, monochromatic piece of shit and why do you like it so much?" I must admit, I wasn't exactly on the best footing when I tried to explain how it was the legacy of Cruel.com, but was still stuck in yesteryear's formatting.

Advertising is secondary when you have SEO as good as HS has (which describes the way that Google and other search engines cache the pages, providing them for people who search out certain keywords). This is currently such a waste. If I, as an outsider, stumbled across HS on a search result page, I'd never join it. We need to be more afraid of this happening than the cost or effort of any advertising.

choad · 2008-09-04 18:38:30

I'm still fighting the flu fog but a few more synapses are firing today and I have some questions before we open our doors to the unwashed masses.

I don't want to look around 6 months from now and find an an unappealing mess over populated with drudge-tards, all for the sake of appealing to a wider audience.

What part of the screen you think would best serve for the blog roll? Running under the banner? Along the right, above the side images?

Please also post some links to sites with function you'd like to see here. One thing, I hope, will never change here. This -is- a text based site.

George Orr · 2008-09-04 18:52:11

choad wrote:
What part of the screen you think would best serve for the blog roll? Running under the banner? Along the right, above the side images?

Right side, above the sidepics. (That's assuming that creating "side" space on the left would be too complicated; for some reason, I think the blogroll should be on the left.)

Hope you're all better real soon!