Incoming links: Twitter
- always upvote questions you care about, to increase the probability that they will get answered
- never upvote other people's answers unless you might gain from it somehow, otherwise you are just giving other high reputation users more reputation relative to you
- only mark something to close or as a duplicate if it will bring you some advantage, because closing things creates enemies, especially if the OP has a high profileOne example advantage is if you have already answered the question (and the duplicate as well in case of duplicates), because this will prevent competitors from adding new better answers to overtake you.
- protect questions you've answered whenever someone with less than 10 reputation answers it with a bad answer, to prevent other good contributors from coming along and beating you
- when you find a duplicate pool answer every question with similar answers.Alter each answer slightly to avoid the idiotic duplicate answer detector.If one of the question closes, it is not too bad, as it continues netting you to upvotes, and prevents new answers from coming in.
- follow on Twitter/RSS someone who comments on the top features of new software releases. E.g. for Git, follow GitHub on Twitter, C++ on Reddit. Then run back to any question which has a new answer.
- always upvote the question when you answer it:
- the more upvotes, more likely people are to click it.
- the OP is more likely to see your answer and feel good and upvote you
- if a niche question only has few answers and you come with a good one, upvote the existing ones by other high profile users.This may lead to them upvoting or liking you.
- always upvote comments that favor you:
- "I like this answer!" on your answers
- "also look at that question" when you have answered that question
- if you answer a question by newbie without 15 reputation, find their other questions if any and upvote them, so that the OP can upvote your answer in addition to just accepting
- if a question has 50 million answers and you answer it (often due to a new feature), make a comment on the question pointing to your answer
- if you get a downvote, always leave a comment asking why. It is not because you care about their useless opinion, but because other readers might see the comment, feel sorry for you, and upvote.
- ask any questions under a separate anonymous accounts. Because:
- intelligent people are born knowing, and don't ever ask any questions, so that would hurt your reputation
- downvoting questions does not take 1 reputation away from the downvoter, and so it greatly opens the door for your opponents to downvote you without any cost.
Long story short, the project is so far a complete failure on the most important metric: number of regular users, which current sits at exactly one: myself.
There were notable users who found the project online and who actually tried to use the website for some content and provided extremely valuable feedback:Unfortunately after the period of a few weeks they stopped using it to follow their other priorities instead. Which is of course totally fine, however sad.
I still believe that the OurBigBook Web feature is a significant tech innovation that could make the website go big.
I also believe that the project gets many fundamentals of braindumping right, notably the infinitely deep table of contents without forced scoping, e.g.:does not make Calculus have an ID orr URL of
- Mathematics
- Calculusmathematics/calculus, rather it's just calculus.
But there is a fundamental difficulty in reaching critical mass to that self-sustaining point, as people don't seem to be convinced by these logical "my system is better" argument alone, as opposed to having them Google into stuff they need now and then understand that the project is awesome.
A closely related critical mass issue is that existing big multiuser knowledge base websites such as Stack Overflow and Wikipedia have a tremendous advantage on PageRank. No matter how useless a Wikipedia article about something is, it will always be on top of Google within a week of creation for title hits. And since the main goal of publishing your stuff is to get it seen, it makes much more sense for writers to publish on such existing websites whenever possible, because anywhere else it is way way less likely to be seen by anybody.
Even I end up writing way more on Stack Overflow than on OurBigBook as a programmer. But I still believe that there is a value to OurBigBook, for the usual reasons of:
Perhaps what saddens me the most is that even on GitHub stars/Twitter/Hacker news terms there is almost no interest in the project despite the fact that I consider that it has innovations, while many other note taking apps as well in the thousands of stars. Maybe I'm just delusional and all the tech that I'm doing is completely useless?
Part of the issue is probably linked to the fact that most other note taking apps focus on "help me organize my ideas so I can make more money" and often completely ignore "I want to publish my knowledge", and stuff that helps you make money is always easier to sell and promote.
OurBigBook on the other hand a huge focus on "I want to publish me knowledge". It aims almost single mindedly in being the best tool ever for that. However this doesn't make money for people, and therefore there are going to be way less potential users.
I do believe strongly that all it takes is a few users for the project to snowball. For some people, once you start braindumping, it is very addictive, and you never want to stop basically. So with only a few of those we can open large parts of undergrad knowledge to the world. But these people are few, and so far I haven't been able to find even a single one like me, and on top of that convince them that I have created the ultimate system for their knowledge publishing desires.
Another general lesson is that I should perhaps aimed for greater compatibility with existing systems such as Obsidian. Taking something that many people already know and use can have a huge impact on acceptance. E.g. anything that touches Obsidian can reach thousands of stars: github.com/KosmosisDire/obsidian-webpage-export. Note taking apps that aim for "markdown" compatibility also tend to fare better, even if in the end you inevitably have to extend the Markdown for some of your features. And WYSIWYG, which I want but don't have, is perhaps the ultimate familiarity.
Another issue compared to other platforms is that OurBigBook just came out late. Obsidian launched in 2020. Roam Research and Trillium Notes also came earlier. And it is hard to fight the advantage already gained by those on the "I'm going to take some personal notes" area. I do believe however that there a strong separation between "these are my personal notes" and "I want to publish these". Once you decide to publish your knowledge, you immediately start to write in a different way, and it is very hard to convert pre-existing "private" notes into ones suitable for public consumption.
Ciro Santilli does the same via Google searches and Twitter/Reddit searches for himself, you can't invent anything new nowadays:
Kibo was known for his high-volume but thoughtful posts, but achieved Usenet celebrity circa 1991 by writing a small script to grep his entire Usenet feed for instances of his name, and then answering personally whenever and wherever he was mentioned, giving the illusion that he was personally reading the entire feed.