Introduction
Substantial credit goes to Diana Coman for helping me to organize and see that I have been carrying around substantially more accreted stupidity and accompanying blindspots than I thought. And in that the need for planning exploded beyond simply "Make Marketing Big" into what is essentially a complete operational reboot of Qntra. On some of these points action has begun as the plan iterated through several drafts, but with the drafts having stabilized it is time to shift from planning and leap into action. I've still got dumb to unload and head breaches to fill, but when it comes to Qntra... This is the program.
1. Readership Growth
Approach
- Pick Fights For Exposure - Get offensive and leave the defensive curl, any publicity is good publicity
- Aim To Become The Biggest Outlet Doing Journalism in Bitcoin And At Large- Take an aggresive posture. As Bitcoin touches everything, everything could be Bitcoin news.
- Hammer The Idiots - Expose the most vocal idiots attaching themselves to Bitcoin and things Bitcoin touches. Document the fiat system's losses for the record.
- Some Positive Reporting - Spread the good news when it happens. When TMSR gets a win, make people know about it.
Venues
- Comment Accepting Blogs Outside TMSR
- Social Media - Twitter/Gab
- Forums
- Messenging Apps - Telegram, Whatsapp, Discord
- Any Place The Kids Are Hanging Out
- Meatspace - Local conferences, Meetups, and University Faculties
Implementation
- Blog Crawler, Comment Checker, and Comment Placer - Toolset for interacting with unalligned blogs
1) In first iteration script curls a given url collecting all links on the page, it curls these collected urls collecting still more urls, and checking for comment boxes that allow name/url/email identification and excluding file extensions not used by blog posts. A text file containing urls of commentable blog articles is returned by the crawler. In this first iteration, comments will be manually placed on the target posts by the operator using a web browser. This allows some discretion in the identification of targets for picking fights, opportunity to tailor tidings, A/B testing of messages, and the avoidance of shitting on alligned blogs. A second script takes the target list as input and reports comment placement successes and failures providing data to inform future campaigns.
2) Potential later iterations specifically targeting wordpress.com, blogspot.com, and disqus comments with their own crawlers and logged in automated comment injectors have the potential to target unalligned blogs without catching alligned blogs during their runs.1 Payloads are to be informed by successes and failures collected during the first iteration's manual commenting with automated target selection and verification.
- Social Media - Twitter/Gab: Warm up or create accounts. Pick fights with other journalists, outlets, and niche gurus fighting for stupidity. Expect no direct readership off of these platforms, seeking instead attention off platform from the idiots.
- Forums - Solicit contributor assistance in place Qntra stories in Reddit and the other forums appearing to have activity. Seek out forums with enumerable user bases to use their private message functions for spreading the Qntra word.2
- Messenging Apps - Telegram, Whatsapp, Discord, Slack, etc: Explore the creation or use of tools to push individual Qntra stories to masses of readers. Development of automation tools is likely to require treating each as a moving target requiring evasion of obstacles the enemy places to prevent people getting in contact with people.3
- Any Place The Kids Are Hanging Out: Identify everywhere attention outside the WoT is gathered, and probe for ways, preferably automatable, to shove Qntra into people's faces.
- Meatspace: Investigate meetups centered around Bitcoin, Journalism, or "tech" and meet people. Keep tabs on conferences advertising Bitcoin headed to the area for collecting material.
Discarded Venues And Approaches
- Explicit SEO Efforts: Search engine bots aren't people, and Qntra needs to reach people. Effort expended into outreach will target people directly, and any SEO that results is incidental to that aim.
2. Contributor Growth
Approach
- Place links to the "Write For Qntra!" page during outreach in locations where it makes sense to do so. Share the same, wide funnel with the readership outreach effort while keeping out an eye for opportunities to target writers.
- Onboarding - Take a promiscuous approach in accepting contributions and new contributors on the entry level. Guide folks with interesting talents outside of writing towards introductions to relevant castles. When someone shows up with information that does harm to the enemy, verify and bias towards publishing.
- Visit the local Faculties - Get a look at the size of the potential talent pool. Talk to students. Consider ways to plumb it to bring out any potential local or visiting talent.
- Meetups - Attend some local meetups, meet people, and introduce Qntra. Screen for live people. Hand out business cards. Organize some meetups either in Montevideo or where contibutors happen to cluster.
- Conferences - Keep an eye out for conferences advertising connections to Bitcoin for the opportunity to find lost people among the idiots. Hand out business cards.4
- Education - Assist contributors in sharpening themselves, formally or informally. Maintain an open structure to meet writers where they are when they come in, but have regular contributors demonstrate or grow into having a solid grasp of journalistic practice.
Venues And Implementation
- Workshop - Organize activity in the #agriculturalsupremacy channel as a workshop for discussions on the day-to-day operations of Qntra. Promote a competitive, professional environment of continuous improvement. Acknowledge and value good work and Qntra's contributors.
Discarded Venues And Approaches
- Waiting For Potential Contributors To Materialize: "If you build it, they will come" has been found not to work in practice.
3. Editorial Strategy And Coverage Growth
Approach
- Own The News Space In Everything Bitcoin Related - Expand coverage to everything happening in Bitcoin and the World
- Quality Reporting - Maintain high standards for accuracy as Qntra expands its coverage.
Venues
- Qntra - News gets published on Qntra
- Workshop - Coordinate with contributors to exapand the reach of what Qntra covers in #agriculturalsupremacy and promote education in the workshop to grow journalists.
Implementation
- Beats - Allow contributors to take ownership of particular beats, as thimbronion is doing with Chinese ownership of California, without restricting their contributions to their beats.
- Sourcing - Broaden the sourcing of stories, revisit noisier outlets covering Bitcoin that have a history of pushing press releases as news for leads to follow.5
- Build contacts - Get to know readers and contributors brought in by outreach efforts along with people inside the WoT and encourage them to submit or preferably, write up leads.
- Reduce The Editor's Writing Load - Grow the contributor base and volume of contributions so that the Editor in Chief does more editing and coordination while ceasing to function as Author in Chief.
- More Complete Coverage Of Events In The Republic - Stop passing over news in the Republic simply because aspects of the stories carry a certain sadness. A clean dissolution of a failed venture is still a clean dissolution. And when the Republic scores a clear victory, it is a candidate to feed the spreading machine's payloads.
Discarded Approaches
- Editor In Chief As Lone Writer - Raises the serious issue of "Why does that weirdo have two blogs?"
- Strict Focus On Best/Lulziest News - A narrow focus on the exceptional stories is too narrow to serve as a paper of record. Every story reporting the facts is poison to the enemy that thrives on its expedient fiats and fictions.
- The crawler here would largely be the same with an additional filter to have the final output file include only .wordpress.com, .blogspot.com, etc on these runs. The comment placement checker should be useful without changes. The major addition are scripts that automate the commenting for each of these platforms. [↩]
- Requires further development, but probably going to involve walking the enumerable userbases of some Vbulletin and similar forums with a script. Possible targets include Bitcoin/Altcoin forums, writing forums, prepper/survival/conspiracy forums (likely to be in want of better alternatives to pantsuitist mainstream reporting, forums that might find a particular story relevant to their interest. [↩]
- Approaches for these require substantial further planning and development including which of these to target first, and how to use them in ways the don't want to be used. Feasability on any of these platforms likely to come down to how many contacts can be forced per SIM card verified account cookie when the contacting is automated. [↩]
- In December 2019 there was a missed opportunity to catch many of Bitcoin's historical lolcows gathered at the Radisson in Ciudad Vieja. [↩]
- Not rewrite, but follow for that golden time that a SFYL happens. Or a decentralized buzzword thing is revealed to not be. [↩]
[...] Bingology - The Blog of Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier ADD7A9A28F85E5EF1F51904F309BB8D7F3251143 About | Contact | PGP Public Key | Archive « Qntra: A Plan For Action [...]