As we continue to spread the word about the SAFE Network, it’s critical that everyone that comes onboard knows where to go to find information about the project. As we mentioned in the weekly Dev Update, this currently isn’t the case for Reddit where there are currently two subreddits relating to the project - r/maidsafe and r/safenetwork.
Whilst the community has worked hard over the years to build an incredible resource in the SAFE Network Forum (which MaidSafe neither control nor moderate - we simply pay the hosting fees), the value that we all derive from participation in the Forum has inevitably reduced the interaction on Reddit.
For community members who have never really used Reddit regularly, it’s worth restating why this is important. Reddit is a global platform that reaches a massively dispersed demographic of the online population. At the risk of stating the obvious, Reddit is a different beast to the Forum. It’s a place that many people visit every day repeatedly in order to keep up to date with others who share their interests. Its real value comes from its immediacy: millions of people drop into subreddits that they’ve subscribed to repeatedly on a daily basis for one simple reason - community endorsement.
The upvoting system on Reddit is where the true value lies. If you only have a couple of minutes, you can drop into any engaged subreddit and immediately tell what issues and discussions mean the most to the community. Similar to Twitter, when you’re short of time, it’s a great place to pop into in order to see what’s happening in topics that you care about. We believe that there are hundreds of thousands future newcomers to the SAFE Network who are already on Reddit. It will be easier to spread the word about the project on a platform that they already use and like.
In addition, for those who are more concerned about the price of MaidSafeCoin, it’s worth noting that many investment decisions take into account the level of community participation. Our forum is growing fantastically, with a huge level of engagement - but ultimately, the reality is that any potential investor who gauges the number of Reddit subscribers will view us less favourably as a result.
So it’s clear that we want to do our part to encourage participation on Reddit. However, with two subreddits, we are diluting our efforts before we even start. Recently, there has been fantastic work carried out to auto-post between the two. However, after much discussion internally, we have decided that we would like to archive the r/maidsafe subreddit and focus all of our attentions on r/safenetwork.
Our plan for this is as follows:
- From Friday 12th January, we will archive the r/maidsafe subreddit, making it read-only. A message will be added to the banner header and a post stuck at the top asking people to subscribe to r/safenetwork instead.
- We’d love to have the banner for r/safenetwork redesigned in order to look sharper. If anyone within the community is keen to pull together a design for this quickly, please get in touch with @dugcampbell!
In terms of moderation of r/safenetwork, MaidSafe are keen to follow the same approach as the Forum: we would like this to be community-owned and run (moderated).
Hopefully this all makes sense but please do share any thoughts below!