I just finished reading the Frustrated post by iamjonlee and have to agree that misery loves company! Look at all of the responses.
I feel jon's pain. Judging by the responses there seems to be many failures before reaching success.
So the message is persistence...<p>While I'm not ready to call my latest venture a failure by any means, it is much slower to pick up then I thought when I began coding it 8 months ago.<p>So as not to repeat the same rate of adoption I am doing things differently this time. I would like to get you involved from the start. The idea remains the same - a site for topic based discussions, but that's the only parameter.<p>Everything else is up to us as a community to decide. This is a chance to fix (or not include at all) the problems we see with other social communities. We have the ability to add features that "solve problems" instead of just looking cool. Essentially we will be crowd-source-coding a new site.<p>Interested in the project? Here is a bare bones prototype to get started.<p>http://launchpile.com/crowdsource/
I would suggest being more direct in stating exactly what the site is and especially how it can benefit the user. Right now it has a "this is a thing I built" kind of vibe, which is not great for driving signups.<p>Find out what the real problem you are solving is and really focus saying exactly how you solve it.