If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit.
I think people are recreating their niche communities here but they are floundering since the user base is still pretty small. Maybe it’s best to post to the “big” communities until the time is right to move to smaller, targeted communities?
From a user point of view there’s definitely that initial rush of ‘wow, this group looks great!’ to scanning across to see 0 posts, 0 comments, 0 users access feeling sad…
That’s not too say that these should necessarily be removed but it’s a lot harder to get people in to niche communities. Unless you outright went into the Reddit equivalent and said politely you were trying to start one here. But they’d probably be happy in Reddit by this stage so…
This might actually be a good time to invite people from Reddit, while the new unpopular decisions are still fresh in people’s minds…
I did this while the whole API thing was happening and only a couple people liked and joined, and one user said “what’s going on with Reddit?”
Tough crowd, I guess. :-(. But you did have a couple people join, which is a couple people more than would have joined before. That’s not zero.
We’re all used to these massive platforms with 9-digit numbers of users, but there’s no need to be that big for everyone to have a good experience. I doubt anyone on Reddit regularly interacted with more than a tiny fraction of the total userbase, even if they hung out in the big subs.