I thought Excitelike was an old coin-op video game from Nintendo?

You're thinking of Shenmue.

Foghorn Leghorn


That was the inspiration for the name, yes.

Vs Excitebike is different than Excitebike. Vs Excitebike is better.

Ah, the age-old Vs Excitebike Vs Excitebike debate.

Okay, I actually clicked the link and... I'm not sure this stuff is right for me. I really don't care for those "Which [INSERT POPULAR MOVIE/BOOK/VIDEO GAME] character are you" questionnaires (I refuse to call those 'quizzes'). If a "quiz" sounds like it's from an old issue of Cosmo, I take a pass.

Some people like them, though, so it might haul in some cash for you. I do see there are other categories of questions (i.e. trivia), so maybe some kind of user preference for what sorts of quizzes are presented with "suggestions" on a sidebar?

Yeah, eventually I'm going to get a decent quiz suggestion algorithm working. Like I said, right now I'm starting it off with the popular stuff because in order surpass the traffic saturation thresholds necessary to maintain a viral state for this to work you gotta cater to people that do do (doodoo!) those sorts of quizzes. Eventually I'll have some less Cosmo stuff in there, but it's the cosmo stuff the attracts the people that do and share the quizzes in the first place. Once they become regular visitors I'll have the freedom to introduce them to things outside their comfort zone.

Trust me, not the first site I'm bringing viral. I know a lot of people here aren't going to be into the stuff that's on there, but it'll be a lot easier if I have the help of the few people that might be down for lowering their standards for a few minutes. It'll go viral one way or the other. On my own, it might take a year. With help, perhaps a few months.

Oddly enough, I have shared SE with a ton of my friends over the years. All of them preferred to stick with something awful or reddit.

I never shared SE with anyone, because I didn't want to divulge my secret source for all the interesting links I shared with them.

I tried to share it with a couple of friends, but it didn't take, so I dropped them. They're dead to me now.

Right? I welcomed people to inner sanctum but it was far too bright and illustrious for them.

I poured my heart out after my break up several years ago on Old SE and told my ex about it.

She was mad.

I don't think the kind of people that will take a "Which minion are you?" quiz are the same kind of people that will contribute to meaningful discussion.

I'm the one that looks like a Twinkie.

Is there something that isn't clear about using pop quizzes to build traffic so more intellectual stuff can be introduced on the wave of popularity from the other stuff? I feel like I'm having to repeat myself here.

I think the idea of an "intellectual" quiz site is fine -- smart people like to show off for their friends too! But I think you might have a hard time transitioning from general pop quizzes to the more intellectual stuff. People who self-identify as "intellectual" are probably going to be reluctant to taking a quiz on the same site as "ordinary" people (just look at the resistance you're getting here!), especially if it DOES go viral -- the trend among smart people is to think they're too smart to fall for trends.

I don't think it's a bad idea, but it's definitely going to be a marketing challenge.

I never said it would be easy, but much of making anything work on the internet is a matter of throwing enough traffic at it. That's hurdle one.

+1 Said it Better Than I Did

I think it's because people are having a hard time accepting how lame most of these 'quizzes' are. What kind of traffic are you trying to build? Why not start out with the intellectual stuff?

Because they wont bring in enough traffic for the site to go viral.

I get that, but my impression is that most stuff that goes viral is kind of accidental-
that trying to get something to go viral almost never works.
But hey- if somehow you hit paydirt with this thing you be sure to remind me how wrong I was.

It doesn't have to conquer the world, it just has to surpass a saturation threshold that allows it to maintain a steady amount of daily traffic. It's just a numbers game.

In 2004, maybe. These days I just assume that anything "viral" is some kind of marketing bullshit unless proven otherwise.

and you would be correct.

Its like posting flyers about a dog club hoping to get cat people to show up.

When the dog people vastly outnumber the cat people and the only way to get to the cat people is through the dog people you cater to the dog people in order to reach as many overall people as possible. It doesn't matter if I put up flyers for cat people if there aren't enough interconnections between the cat people for the message to survive the transfer.



The internet is a numbers game. That's why advertisers pay by the thousands of impressions. If you want to reach any specific kind of demographic without a direct connection to that demographic you have to aim wide and large. Now, if you want to kick in thousands of dollars for a targeted marketing campaign we can talk a different strategy. But until then, I'm going to use techniques I know work within our limited resources.

Other than "people are fucking stupid" which, honestly, always works as an answer, can someone explain the obsession with minions? I didn't understand why they were "hilarious" in the original movie, and I damned sure don't understand why people feel to post memes featuring them on their Facebook page every five minutes!

They seem to have taken up the same niche in social media that Looney Tunes characters did, only now its a minion in a maid outfit making the recycled dad joke or vaguely bigoted statement.

Omg, you're such a Flippy!

That must be a minion name, right?

So is this supposed to be some kind of money-making thing? Because if it's not, I don't really see the point.

If only there was some sort of explanation to go with the link...

OK, missed the part about 'making a few bucks a day'.
Good luck, but I stand by my mod. Maybe I'm just too 'intellectual' to see how this would appeal to anyone,

No, you're just a curmudgeon who hates everything.

It is possible to be both y'know.

Let him enjoy his victory gin you bastard!

URL Blocked by FortiClient
excitelike.com/
is in the category
Security Risk:Spam URLs
Your FortiClient administrator has blocked this category

Fortiguard just back to me, it'll be reclassified to entertainment. Yay!

I know! I ran into that issue yesterday. Don't know what's up with that :(

edit: figured out how to ask them to reclassify it. We'll see what happens.

So, I think I understand what you're doing Steele, but I wonder if you really think it will work to find new SE members. I get that these dumb quizzes are supposed to bring traffic to Excitelike and that it will then direct some users over here. Meanwhile, you'll shift the focus of the quizzes and content to stuff those of us already here will be more in agreement with.

Realistically, it seems like you're not going to get much of a crossover, despite trying to somehow align the content. I guess it's no skin off my nuts, but is this really the best way to build traffic for SE? Especially paying traffic? I hope it works.

If you want crossover with the SE crowd, you would probably have better luck building a site with real quiz questions- like trivia and other things people actually have to think about.

I would love an actual trivia site that featured challenging, ever-changing questions about a variety of topics, but I found nothing intellectually stimulating about the content currently offered.

Seriously? Is everyone just fucking with me today?

Is this a quiz question?

I'm beginning to want to be a minion.

Sorry Steele- You know everyone here, myself included, appreciates the work you put into SE, and I know you mentioned that you wanted to eventually move into actually quizzes like University tests and such (which I dig), but my web-time is precious, and there is too much shit on the internet for me to bother checking back in every so often unless I know I am going to be enjoying my time on that page.

With these type of pages- of which there are MANY on the net- you really only get one shot at an impression, and "Which Taylor Swift song are you?" and "What minion are you?" makes me run from the site, not stick around and click.

You asked for an opinion and feedback.

Do you know why there are MANY of these sites on the net? Because they gain traffic like wildfire. Traffic that we desperately need access to if we are to ever have any hope of growing SE.

It's fine, man. Your response wasn't much different than anybody else's here. The reason I'm frustrated is that I didn't just ask for opinion and feedback. I asked for help with a specific plan that I know from experience can get us access to that traffic.

I don't give a shit if people here don't like the site. I DIDN'T MAKE IT FOR SE TO USE. I made it for SE to benefit from.

If nobody here wants access to the resources it can bring in and we desperately need to grow... Fuck it, fine. I'm just adding this to growing list of crap me and the community disagree on. But with our limited resources we only have so many options available to us.

But... if it's not for us, how exactly are we supposed to help with your plan? You get mad at feedback on the content and brush aside any mention of the plan itself with "trust me, I know what I'm doing!" So what, exactly, do you want from us?

If what you want is for us to spam links to your quiz site to all the dumb people we know on Facebook so you can get more traffic, that's fine -- but ask for that! Don't just ask for generic "help" and then yell at us when we give you the wrong kind.

It's a start, b. SE basically burnt out any connections it had to actual traffic sources over the years. Any traffic through links that might've still been pointed towards the old site are lost to us and Marck stopped cultivating new connections long ago.We're basically starting from scratch with nothing but a sliver of the userbase numbers of old. That means I've also got no negotiating power to get us any decent link trades. Best I can come up with is to start our own satellites.

If the numbers do get up to a making it a few bucks a day, getting us to EC2 also gives us more options than just my little toys I'm working on. It offers stability. We currently can't handle any sort of real traffic that a decent referral linking would pull in for us. If you were to drop a link to SE in a rising reddit thread we probably wouldn't be able to access the site for a few days and we're definitely not in the situation that we can just turn on additional servers to handle the temporary boost.

Way I figure it, if I can do it right on the quiz side, I can at least gradually bleed users that have been pre-vetted by the quizzes. Think Last Starfighter style. Specific quizzes will be designed to lean more towards making sure they're the type of person that would fit in and contribute. It's not necessarily advertising SE so much as making SE a discovery, something they've found for being them, a place that fits. Which I think is something many of us felt about SE when we found it.

Know any adult themed web comics that would link to SE? It worked the first time.

I'm a big fan of Oglaf, but she doesn't seem to do links. Which is funny, because she spammed and ditched SE when she was first starting out. That's about it for me for the adult stuff.

I think this will work out, getting something to maintain its own traffic isn't difficult in this day and age, it's just a matter of time.

Like I said, I hope it works. Obviously everyone here looking at Excitelike thinks it's dumb as fuck, and it is. I guess the dream is that some small fraction of people that stumble upon it will click the link to a website that has posts with dickgirls, atheists lampooning fundies and science news.

But mostly they'll come for the dickgirls. And we better not disappoint.

Has there ever even been a dickgirl post on this incarnation of SE?

Not that I recall. I can't post dickgirls from work though.

Apologies if this has already been answered, but are these quizzes that you've written or that you've culled from the socials? I don't see you as the "Which Iconic Handbag Are You?" type.

I'm a Chanel Classic Flap bag, btw.

Culled. Wrote my own scraper and everything :)

I haven't taken that quiz, but I'm willing to bet I'm a Gobots backpack.

Fringed buckskin Possibles Bag here.