Saidit is growing - A look at the numbers

submitted by magnora7 from (self.SaidIt)

Just for fun I dug deep and had a look at all the stats for saidit and wanted to share.

According to the stats from multiple sources, every month we have about 50-70,000 pageviews and 27-34,000 unique visitors.

Saidit is in the top 3% of most-viewed websites in the world, and we're currently ranked #424,000th place in terms of views. (For reference voat is #6,400 and reddit is #18)

This means every day about 900-2,600 unique visitors come to saidit. About 10% of those users have an account, and about 20% of those with an account actually vote on stuff or leave comments.

Saidit has a great culture that's growing organically, and it's a wonderful thing. I personally feel like this is a cool place to hang out and share ideas, which is exactly what we want saidit to be. Nice work everyone, however you have contributed, even if just by reading this. This wouldn't be possible without you!

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[–]magnora7[S] 20 insightful - 2 fun20 insightful - 1 fun21 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Another interesting stat is that if we ran ads, we'd make about $3/day (about $90/mo). But we're not going to ever run ads, everything will be run by donations and other means. This will ensure that ad revenue won't eventually become the main motivation for site designs and improvements, which is the exact path of action that destroyed both digg.com and is now destroying reddit. We do not want saidit to go down a similar path. So we run on donations.

If you want to help saidit financially, look to the 'donate' tab at the very bottom of this page, we offer both patreon and cryptocurrency donation options. /u/d3rr and I are both personally currently paying about $20 out of pocket per month while also doing all the programming. And our server/domain/DNS guy is working for free too.

So any extra help in this area would be genuinely appreciated. We don't have to make money on it or even really get paid for our labor, but it'd be cool if it wasn't a net financial loss for the people running it. Especially as saidit scales to become larger and requires better servers.

Thank you to the 5 people who have already donated and subscribed to payments already to financially help out saidit. It is a huge help! This is what needs to happen for saidit to scale properly and it's good to see people caring enough to actually lay down money for it. Saidit appreciates you!

[–]SundogsPlace 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

that's great, because I'm sure most use adblockers. I don't go to sites that force you turn it off.

On that note, I'm glad to see this site doing well!

[–]Vigte 9 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Glad to be here, thanks for giving us a place to just talk, relaxed.

[–]icecreams 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

thanks for the platform magnora7 --this is by far one of the only platforms i actually trust is comprised of real opinions, whether you agree with the person's perspective or not... with sons under 6, i have made a career out of being honest and fulfilling promises--so it would be an understatement to say i often harp on the value of being honest with me; tell me the truth-not what you think i want to hear.. right? lol.. anyways SAIDIT is a gift, i've following ya since the antiextremes relauch//heavy for 2 years... its come a long way, but Saidit has stayed true to the values you committed to in the begining as a response to the mod/bot corruption on other popular platforms.. so -- thank you! and thanks everybody else for sharing the good word...

[–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Happy to have you here

[–]HibikiBlack 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm glad we are still growing. The site is already developing a sense of community and there is still a lot of space to grow and improve. The quality of discussion is very good as well.

[–]i_cansmellthat 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Glad to see this! So nice to see that when someone tries to do the right thing with honest intentions, others are drawn to it. I feel that this is one of the only sites out there that isn't pushing an agenda, trying to sell me something, or gathering data. Thanks for all you both do!

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

What a great compliment. That's what we're going for, no agenda or sales.

[–]gtrogers 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This is great news! I visit a couple times a day because it's not as big or as fast moving as reddit (duh) but I predicted the day I signed up that someday this site will grow into something good. Keep up the good work!

[–]Mle 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Saidit is great!

[–]crypt 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

Said it is a great and I constantly push people to covert.

More people would come if they worked on fixing the layout for phones or offering an app.

[–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

We are right in the middle of developing our mobile interface. I've already done the html and css development, and we're just doing the technicals of enabling the subdomain m.saidit.net where the mobile layout will be. And a very alpha version of our android app is available in the store right now (we haven't publicly announced it yet because it's still being developed) which will also use the m.saidit.net layout.

We're definitely taking mobile development for saidit seriously, and we're making progress on it. Just give us a bit more time and we'll get there.

[–][deleted]  (3 children)

[deleted]

    [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

    If you're using a native app with webview just to render the mobile site through a dedicated app, why not just add a webmanifest to your website and have Chrome and Firefox on mobile devices make their own WebApps (which basically opens the website in an app-view) for now?

    Because people wanted an app, and this is the best way we can figure out how to do it. We might look more in to the webmanifest thing, can you explain it more please?

    We are definitely prioritizing m.saidit.net over the app, but they're actually being developed in parallel. We have a separate person working on the app while I do the m.saidit.net development.

    We're developing everything in xamarin which can export apps for both Android and iOS.

    It just takes a lot of time, that's all. But we're always looking for tips so I appreciate the feedback.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

      Hm thanks for the explanation. /u/BobDole might be interested in this, since he's helping make saidit's app

      [–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

      It's been difficult, but we are pushing to get apps out there. No eta just yet.

      [–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

      https://saidit.net/s/SaidIt/comments/8yt/saiditnet_dec_19_2018_new_saidit_android_app/

      [–]Orangutan 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (23 children)

      Why isn't the "send replies to my inbox" option not a one click question in preferences rather than something we need to deal with and click every time we make a submission?

      [–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

      Hey so we worked 5 hours on this last night just for you, and now the checkbox remembers your preference so you shouldn't have to un-check it ever again. Whatever you submit it as, it will come back as the next time. We've tested it so it's working. Cheers!

      [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (21 children)

      It's on our to do list, but we haven't figured out how to code it yet. There's a per-thread per-user setting in the database (which is what that box unchecks) but there's no per-user setting for that outside of a thread.

      So we'd have to create a new database entry for every user (which we have never done before), as well as write new javascript functionality to access it, as well as properly set up new users to have correct database arrangements, and then add it in the html of the preferences page.

      Or alternatively we need a per-user setting that hijacks some existing setting we don't use, so we don't have to create a new entry, then applies that automatically to the per-thread per-user setting when a new thread is created or viewed. Not sure which the best way is.

      It's a 5-10 hour project potentially and you're the only person to have mentioned it. That's why it's not done yet. But we'll get there eventually.

      [–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (20 children)

      Your second method is how I'd do it. We introduce a new user preference that will override the state of the checkbox on the submit post form. Nothing new happens or is tracked once the post is submitted.

      [–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (19 children)

      We introduce a new user preference that will override the state of the checkbox on the submit post form

      Oh that's even simpler. We just need to find a setting that every user has that isn't being used I guess?

      [–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (18 children)

      New user preferences are super easy, like the ones we added for chat. They end up in the DB, but it's all handled automatically, we just add it to some list and it's managed for us.

      [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

      Alright well then add the preference to the list, and I'll figure out how to hook it up to that checkbox and let's get this done.

      [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (16 children)

      /r2/r2/templates/newlink.html

      <input class="nomargin" type="checkbox" checked="checked" name="sendreplies" id="sendreplies" data-send-checked="true"/>

      checkbox="checked" needs to be removed if the user prefers that.

      In Preferences, under the category "messaging options" we can add a default-checked box "receive replies to posts as messages".

      Or, how about this d3rr, we make it so that when Orangutan unchecks the box while submitting, it remembers that preference. And we don't add anything to the Preferences page at all. That might be even simpler? Not sure how to do that though.

      We can add in preferences.py

      pref_post_sends_replies=Vboolean('post_sends_replies'),

      I'm just not sure how to load preferences.py in to newlink.html. I don't see where it's loaded in to prefoptions.html.

      But in place of the code in newlink.html we should have:

      ${checkbox(_("send replies to my inbox"), "post_sends_replies")}

      So we have to change the checkbox from an HTML element to this

      [–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (12 children)

      Or, how about this d3rr, we make it so that when Orangutan unchecks the box while submitting, it remembers that preference. And we don't add anything to the Preferences page at all.

      Oh shit, that's it. Love it. So we'll still use a preference for this, we just won't add it to the preferences page at all. Let me dig up some code examples.

      [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (11 children)

      Maybe we can add

       pref_post_sends_replies=Vboolean("post_sends_replies"),

      in to preferences.py

      Then we just have to add this line to the start of newlink.html, which is also at the start of prefoptions.html

       <%def name="checkbox(text, name, disabled = False, disabled_text = '', prefix = 'pref_')">

      then also later in the file at the checkbox add

      ${checkbox(_("send replies to my inbox"), "post_sends_replies")}

      This might be a problem with users who don't have an account though? And how to we set it default to on?

      [–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (10 children)

      I think we can skip any preferences.py changes since we're not going to be showing this preference.

      So I think we'd want

      ${checkbox(_("send replies to my inbox"), c.user.pref_sendreplies)}

      So the final missing piece is hooking into the post submit functionality, to set the user's preference to whatever checkbox state they just used.

      [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

      c.user.pref_sendreplies

      Do we have to create this first somewhere? 

      pref_post_sends_replies=VBoolean("post_sends_replies"),

      has to be added to the top of newlink.html or something then? Doesn't that need to be in a python file?

      [–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

      So the final missing piece is hooking into the post submit functionality, to set the user's preference to whatever checkbox state they just used.

      That's the exact functionality we have in the preferences page, so I think your code should already accomplish that, as long as c.user.pref_sendreplies is defined correctly as a preference somewhere

      [–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

      example, adding a boolean preference "pref_chat_enabled". i'd call it "pref_sendreplies" to match the existing "sendreplies" but no biggie.

      adding the preference: https://github.com/libertysoft3/reddit-ae/blob/88b6edc4e2361a903215ed57ce4767043f4ef5c3/r2/r2/models/account.py#L166

      getting user's preference state:

      c.user.pref_chat_enabled # boolean

      You will have to do a flush and maybe a restart before the permission gets created.

      [–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

      Haha that's the exact variable I referenced to make my example I just sent to you. I think we've almost got it here.

      [–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

      okay I will add the preference right now.