Are we the few who care about alternative viewpoints?

I would think that there are many people out there who share similar views to those on this site, but where are they?

Is this really close to 'it', as far as those English-speaking people who are interested in investigating strange phenomena in a rational way, and ideally testing your ideas against people who are skeptical of such ideas?

It seems like such a great idea! Skeptiko was a great place, it still is alright, but that was part of the allure back in the day.

[Ninshub]

I'm sure we're not alone, but we're probably spread around in different places, not necessarily communicating with each other.

Well, books on the various topics do sell in quantities, so there is obviously interest from other people. I guess they are distributed across many different locations.

One example, there have recently been a number of interviews with Dean Radin on a number of different podcasts or sites. There may or may not be discussion areas associated with each. Then there are other forums,  but with a different emphasis. One which I read relates to a particular interest of mine, reincarnation. There are other forums, maybe some place the emphasis on self-help, others on spirituality, others on scepticism. (There are other categories too) This site (and Skeptiko in its own way) may cover all of those, but maybe it is the role of our forums to rest on a knife edge, balanced between full-blooded commitment to wholesale acceptance or rejection of particular phenomena, but trying to give a fair hearing.

There is also the not insignificant matter of people having busy lives, other matters may take priority.

Maybe we could come up with a list of other different forums or discussion platforms. I know places like Facebook, and youtube comment serve as discussion areas but I tend to find them unsatisfactory, for various reasons.

I would think that there are many people out there who share similar views to those on this site, but where are they?

Is this really close to 'it', as far as those English-speaking people who are interested in investigating strange phenomena in a rational way, and ideally testing your ideas against people who are skeptical of such ideas?

It seems like such a great idea! Skeptiko was a great place, it still is alright, but that was part of the allure back in the day.

Psiencequest isn’t ranked high enough on Google for popular search terms. That is due to a whole host of problems. Basically we can’t be found unless one already knows exactly how to find us.

[Laird]

Psiencequest isn’t ranked high enough on Google for popular search terms. That is due to a whole host of problems.

What would you say those problems are, Max? We've done a few things to try to improve our ranking but so far have had little success.

What would you say those problems are, Max? We've done a few things to try to improve our ranking but so far have had little success.

I think it's difficult nowadays Laird... the competition is enormous, and often far better funded... now that competitors have such traction, it's difficult to catch up. I know the effort that has gone into my own commercial web site... for instance, when I write copy I have to keep spelling out the important search keywords throughout an article; I do lots of internal linking back to catagory roots, and relevant article pages; the site is very carefully structured, and this structure carefully uses the keywords; unimportant links and text are moved to the bottom of the page source, pushing the important copy right to the top of the page source.
I need to gain inbound links to articles on the site from other forums, from twitter and facebook etc. It takes months of work to see any effect.

What would you say those problems are, Max? We've done a few things to try to improve our ranking but so far have had little success.

Just look at the page source here for popular 'ghost' related keywords:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/9...university

Then look at psiencequest page source, first through the site structure.... then to actual threads... say this thread of mine:

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-a...-from-1888

Compare the two sites effort to push these popular search keywords into the page source

[Laird]

Thanks, Max. I think a lot of the problem is that our forum is relatively new, so it's as you say hard to catch up with sites that already have a lot of traction. The SEO methods that you describe whilst effective are unfortunately kind of difficult to implement on a forum, where content is generated by members and the structure is generated by the forum software, rather than by admins with SEO in mind, but if you have any specific suggestions that you think might work for PQ, then I'd love to hear them.

I would think that there are many people out there who share similar views to those on this site, but where are they?

Many people have no interest in the internet and I myself am beginning to lose interest.  It's like TV - it keeps me away from living in the real world and even if I don't have a reason to use it, I use it anyway just as a lazy way of killing time.

Thanks, Max. I think a lot of the problem is that our forum is relatively new, so it's as you say hard to catch up with sites that already have a lot of traction. The SEO methods that you describe whilst effective are unfortunately kind of difficult to implement on a forum, where content is generated by members and the structure is generated by the forum software, rather than by admins with SEO in mind, but if you have any specific suggestions that you think might work for PQ, then I'd love to hear them.

That’s about right... encouraging members to generate titles & copy peppered with popular keywords, and linking from other sites to relevant psiencequest threads/posts is about as much as can be done.

But I’m quite happy with psiencequest, it’s low volume, high quality content generally from people who have read extensively on these subjects. Compare that to disqus, Twitter, or newspaper sites which are far more popular but have a terrible signal to noise ratio, with a never ending stream of people who are very poorly educated on psiencequest subjects, and have zero interest in being educated.

I recently engaged on disqus recently to point out some issues on Novella’s blog on a GMO article, and a global warming article... it’s simply impossible to reply to all the irrelevant, off topic, poorly researched, personal attack type responses...