sciatrix

Agree on all counts. You need content to seed a community on a new platform, and that means you need to have some motivation for people to make it. You wouldn't want to hire journalism students, mind--if I was trying to do that, I'd approach some of the bigger content providers, maybe in a couple of mid-profile fandoms, to start posting platform-specific shit over there. They'd lose some audience, which is why you have to make an incentive otherwise--we're fandom, we pay in attention and love, you have to compensate--but they'd pull quite a bit over there, and that helps. Might help to link longerform stuff on something like Tumblr with a pull text, like I know a few Wordpress blogs that reach Tumblr-based audiences do in order to pull comments somewhere less nightmarish. But you can't do that unless people can see the content before committing to join or unless they can join with a very very low bar to doing so, like a free login. (And no, free trials of paid accounts are not going to snare people, particularly if you demand a credit card--your customers got wise to that one, thanks.)