[Warning/Feedback] Website is becoming too crowded/diluted

[lux7]

Coming back to the Main Page after a while I have a feeling there are too many new articles popping up too frequently.

Now even allowing for all of them to be good ones -and the ones I opened were good-, it's impossible to treat a topic that is yes vast, but not infinite, without repeating the same old things over and over with just a slight different shade each time (or risk saying contrasting things).

The cross references to articles saying more or less the same things are already appearing a bit too often, which can be perceived as a trick to get people to pay the registration fees.

The website can either:
1. stay a source of wisdom for self improvement -with few very good core articles and few new ones- or

2. become a bit like an online newspaper -with a new article every day-

Since we are not talking about global news with something new happening all the times, going for the second option might get a few people to come back more often but can lose a quite lot in terms of credibility.
The core information is getting diluted and lost with a million different takes and repetitions and new articles that will seem more and more like space fillers.
It will start looking more and more like "another dating/relationship website".

I feel it's the wrong path in terms of quality, but might even be the wrong path in terms of monetization.

 

[lux7]

Just a note: don't take it as mud slinging, I wouldn't waste my time for something I didn't care.
I guess I feel at least a bit part of this and this is just my feedback on it, whether or not it will be heeded I felt like I had to give it .

 

[Ryan]

Personally, i'm totally fine with this. I just bookmark all the articles, and read just the ones that apply to me at present.

Reading ALL the articles as soon as they come out is a waste of time. Reading about relationships when I can't even get a date is a waste, but that doesn't mean the relationship articles are obsolete.

You may have a point if it was Chase writing all these articles, but it's a collection of different writers now, all with their own experiences and viewpoints. So even if they do repeat stuff, it's still enriching the website (and my studies) anyway.

 

[Ross]

1. stay a source of wisdom for self improvement -with few very good core articles and few new ones- or

2. become a bit like an online newspaper -with a new article every day-

I prefer to think of it as both. I'm not Chase, so I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm willing to bet that this content is far and above viewed more than Chase's eBook. If you want compact advice, buy that. If you prefer to read into deeper topics, pay attention to the articles. If you prefer to have both the compact advice, and read deeper into topics, then go ahead and use both .

The core information is getting diluted and lost with a million different takes and repetitions and new articles that will seem more and more like space fillers.

There is a search function out there if you want to look for specific advice. As I said before, core, organized information in a digestible format is better equipped to a book, rather than a website.

Since we are not talking about global news with something new happening all the times, going for the second option might get a few people to come back more often but can lose a quite lot in terms of credibility.

You would be surprised at how much the dynamics change. Socially, the world is constantly evolving and changing. New issues arise every day and people are constantly changing with the ebb and flow of the movement. The universe is not in a state of perpetual concreteness; rather, it changes every waking moment. One year, fat men may be all the rage because fat men have extra money; the next, the fit guys with low body fat will be considered the most attractive. One day, saying words such as retarded may be common dialect to describe persons of a certain disability - the next day it will lead to women being dismissive of you from the use of such vulgar tongues.

Personally, seeing the team grow from one writer to a duo to multiple is quite exciting. Re-hashing good content will be done over and over to cement those in your mind. Meanwhile, other things will disappear from articles as they become less popular. We are emotional beings, and emotions change from day to day - makes it nice to have constant reminders .

 

[Chase]

Hey Lucifer,

Thanks for the feedback. A few explanations, and possible solutions:

1. As Ross noted, How to Make Girls Chase is actually what I'd recommend as the real CORE to learning the material. The articles I view as great supporting material that flesh out various aspects, but if you're trying to put a comprehensive game plan together from a number of articles, you're always going to struggle, whether it's 10 articles or 10,000.

2. I've always viewed and treated articles as having a dual role: one is as content for regular readers to consume, because it sucks if you enjoy a site but it never produces anything new, and the other is as the business's primary source of marketing - e.g., Wikipedia is successful not because it's got a handful of good articles on it, but because it's got a LOT of good articles on it, and many other sites that have fallen by the wayside have died in the wastes of low traffic, low sales, and middling amounts of on-site content, OR volumes of spammy, lower caliber content that nobody wants to read anyway. The main avenue of growing this business, at least right now, is curating more articles on the main site. We've done some conventional advertising, and I'll do more in the future, but personally I'd rather spend money on paying good writers to write good content than on buying ads on other people's content sites. Feels like the difference between buying and renting traffic.

3. Navigation-wise, I've tried (and continue to try) to make GC as easily navigable as it can be. If you only want to read my articles, for instance, there's a box on the sidebar right on the homepage where you can click on my name and it takes you to a blog page view containing only my articles, in reverse chronological order. If you have another author you like, you can click on his name and read his stuff. If you go through all of my stuff and decide you want some more variety, you can surf the homepage and see if you find a writer you like, and then click on his name and read his articles. Also, if you want the best articles on the site, check the sidebar on any article page - there's a list of 30 "Classics" and 30 "How-Tos" up to and including March 2013 that make up the top of the "recommended reading" list through that date (needs to be updated with all the more recent content, but still pretty useful). Finally, there are the "Getting Started" eBooks, mainly designed to ease navigation by helping readers figure out what they need to learn most, and pointing them directly toward it. There are a number of ways you can navigate the content - you don't have to read each article as it comes out on the homepage if you don't want to use the site that way.

4. Core-info-wise, another one of the plans in the works is to skim all the top articles on the site and collect them into a "Best of" book that'll be available as well - basically, all the best articles presently on the site, in one book. That way, instead of having to scour the site for them, you've got them all there in one place.

Anyway, I'm trying my very best to keep the information on here as fresh as possible, with guys who are talented at what they do and bring different perspectives than me, and by trying to cover topics I haven't previously covered when I write myself so I'm not repeating myself too much. If we're not doing a good job on any or all of those regards though, please let me know how with some examples / specificity, and I'll see what we can do to address them.

Chase

 

[Big Daddy]

Whoa, good to see you posting around here, Chase

I thought for a while that there were too much articles on the website, but then again, I don't have to read all of them. Maybe there are 10 thousand people that'd love the read it, so they read it. And by doing that you keep people reading, the business growing, and everybody is happy, and I have no problem with that whatsoever.

 

[lux7]

Hey Lucifer,

Thanks for the feedback. A few explanations, and possible solutions:

2. I've always viewed and treated articles as having a dual role: one is as content for regular readers to consume, because it sucks if you enjoy a site but it never produces anything new, and the other is as the business's primary source of marketing - e.g., Wikipedia is successful not because it's got a handful of good articles on it, but because it's got a LOT of good articles on it, and many other sites that have fallen by the wayside have died in the wastes of low traffic, low sales, and middling amounts of on-site content, OR volumes of spammy, lower caliber content that nobody wants to read anyway. The main avenue of growing this business, at least right now, is curating more articles on the main site. We've done some conventional advertising, and I'll do more in the future, but personally I'd rather spend money on paying good writers to write good content than on buying ads on other people's content sites. Feels like the difference between buying and renting traffic.

Anyway, I'm trying my very best to keep the information on here as fresh as possible, with guys who are talented at what they do and bring different perspectives than me, and by trying to cover topics I haven't previously covered when I write myself so I'm not repeating myself too much. If we're not doing a good job on any or all of those regards though, please let me know how with some examples / specificity, and I'll see what we can do to address them.

Chase

Hey Chase,

Yes, I see the point of having many updates.
There can be a fine line between "new content" and "too much new content" though.

I'll make an example with another magazine/publication I liked a lot: "The Economist".
I loved the paper version, I don't like the website so much anymore because as hard as they try to put something new every day, it gets diluted and each article only adds a fragment of value.
As I have noticed other "old timers" comments as well, there's a school of thought that say today The Economist is much less of a well researched magazine targeted at people who want good insight and high quality as it's much more a mass market magazine.
While I used to use it as a source of wisdom to get information on many different subjects, today I use it not too differently than the way I use other online news websites. I find it just a tiny bit better whereas years ago I found it on a whole different level.


Between a lot of quantity and high quality there's sometimes an inverse proportion, and I feel this is one of those cases.
So the base argument is: is it better to have many articles with each that add a little bit of value -a lot of novelty for less quality- or is it better to have less novelty with each article that adds a lot of insight and value?

Marketing-wise the first could make sense, but it can backfire. Relatively easily.

Because the high quality website will lose its unique USP, the quality, in the quest of attracting more people. It can work at the beginning, but at the cost of becoming more like "all the rest" and more subject to volatile and fickly fads and trends.

And because of the risk of alienating a bit some of the core people who who loved and stuck with this place because of its great content (and those are the people who would stay for the long run).


If I had to think of a possible solution/trade off: maybe a part of the website that gets updated every once in a while with longer and "deeper" content versus the main page that gets updated almost daily with shorter, more "up for discussion" topics (how to get x girl, "is it fair..", "this kind of woman vs that kind of woman".. ?

 

[Thedoctor]

Lucifer,

I'm curious what kinds of articles that have been written recently that aren't up to par with the rest of the content here? A quick glance of the current articles on the main page has a nice blend of various types of well-written articles. I won't repost them here for the sake of redundancy, but there's one on helping you keep to your goals, a couple on men's perception of women as "ideal" wives that dives into where those '50's perceptions come from. The Civilized Man was extremely insightful for me in terms of talking about the pendulum swing of society over the years towards liberal and conservative trends.

The site still pumps out very insightful, innovative articles. I like the fact that it doesn't just print the typical PUA stuff, but branches out into other important areas to help you achieve whatever goals you might have.

I'm not trying to brown-nose either. If the site starts writing extremely redundant articles or the level of quality starts to drop, I'll be the first to chime in and say: "Chase, what the hell man?"

But, I just want to know what articles recently have made the site diluted, as you said?

-John

 

[lux7]

Lucifer,

I'm curious what kinds of articles that have been written recently that aren't up to par with the rest of the content here? A quick glance of the current articles on the main page has a nice blend of various types of well-written articles. I won't repost them here for the sake of redundancy, but there's one on helping you keep to your goals, a couple on men's perception of women as "ideal" wives that dives into where those '50's perceptions come from. The Civilized Man was extremely insightful for me in terms of talking about the pendulum swing of society over the years towards liberal and conservative trends.

The site still pumps out very insightful, innovative articles. I like the fact that it doesn't just print the typical PUA stuff, but branches out into other important areas to help you achieve whatever goals you might have.

I'm not trying to brown-nose either. If the site starts writing extremely redundant articles or the level of quality starts to drop, I'll be the first to chime in and say: "Chase, what the hell man?"

But, I just want to know what articles recently have made the site diluted, as you said?

-John

Hey Doc!

I was actually avoiding real life examples because I didn't want to make it sound personal towards anyone, I believe each article is interesting, flows nicely and is well written, it's just that when you try to have too many and/or adding too many similar ones, you end up adding less value in each new article.

It might be a futile exercise as it sees to be only me who's having this feeling , better that way , but I'll try to pick a few examples soon anyway.

 

[maximus6004]

I like the idea. Sometimes new questions to the same.problems arise. If anyone has studied the brain at all and chase even talks about it in one article. The brain when not using information for awhile.tends to be forgetful of such things therefore it is a refresher.

Secondly our brain.only searches for things we notice. Very interesting but if anyone has read chases book more than once when I first went through I noticed everything with the fundamentals. Read it again well I was having troubles at the time with conversation. All of a sudden I see the I we and you and how often it should be used. Im like I do not remember seeing this. Well the brain ruled it out as unimportant and the approaches made me.notice where I was lacking all of a sudden you start to notice all this information on the things your thinking of. It would seem like magic, but it's how the law of attraction itsks. You think about what you want everyday and your brain when hearing.or seeing certain triggers to what you want you notice.

Max