[Tyrannosaurs]

Interestingly from questions on their Meta sites StackExchange found that this sort of "priming the pump" didn't really work for them when it came to building on-line communities.

Their attitude (having tried it) is now if the community doesn't build itself it won't sustain itself. If you've got a working community then you can promote it but this sort of work won't work to build a community that's not already there.

Not saying that what PG says isn't true for start-ups which are obviously different, but it may be relevant in your case.

[graeme]

That's an interesting result. Do you have a link where they explain how they came to their conclusion?

Because I did build a community entirely by priming the pump. There was no community there. So it absolutely worked in my case.

However, Reddit was an easy place to build a community, as I just had to tell existing Redditors who studied for the LSAT that there was now a subreddit for that. It was an easy sell.

[damarquis]

I love some of the SO sites but they have a lot of communities that have been lingering in beta limbo for ages.

I would be interested in more detail on how they reached the conclusion that pump priming is not useful. Do you have a link?