RE: The Other Side of the Coin - Dealing with the Onboarding Issue and Some Ways of Helping
"There is no point in bringing lots of people to the platform through promotion only for them to leave through frustration a short time later."
Bingo.
Focus not on growth right now, but on making a quality core, solid product or service with a solid direction, to start with. Then grow and expand. Lets start off strong with one direction, not fractured into many different directions. I mentioned this on another post comment today.
We also can use with greater inter-connectivity and functionality in the platform before we can think of retaining most modern and millennial users who are accustomed to a certain level of interconnective simplicity. I opened github issues/requests for following posts we like to be notified of comments so we can interact more easily. Right now its only on comments we make, i we make them at all on posts we like. I also suggest. Reblog notifications is another one.
If the feature base can become more socially interconnected, like PMs as well, then that makes people able to share attention and information more easily, and more quickly in the immediate now. This will greatly accelerate the success of the Steemit platform via the community.
P.S.EDIT Great site, rockin it. But,please make FAQ subsections at the top with anchor links to each section if you're doing one long page. Otherwise it's not a fun thing to go through. Thanks for the great work!
Thanks those are great ideas. I still think we can work on both but I see your point. My concern is that if we don't focus on getting new users at all we will never get to the non-beta or completed state. When Facebook first launched it was pretty minimal but they were already working on promotion. I think we need to work on both whist being careful not to sabotage one or the other.
Ok, great example, FB. I personally have no clue, but what was it like? What features did they have, when they did start promoting? I would like to know. And also, take into consideration at that time, the level or bar was lower, as the social media we have today did not exist in 2003-2005. So the features to start off would not be comparable to today's features. Also, FB created many of the social media features we now use. Thanks.
It was pretty empty and yes it was a different time for sure. A lot more text and fewer photos. No advertising or monetisation either. It was really quiet too as not many people were on. Initially I saw it and didn't use it - my brother starting using it very early and I would see his feed and posts and wonder what the point was! It is hard to remember exactly what it was like now though because we take so much of these things for granted now and one of the problems is that memory is very fallible and fluid. Might be a good exercise to use something like the wayback machine to have an objective look.
I also see growth as an organic thing that comes with quality of product or service, and word of mouth in society. It can be helped with promotion and ads for sure. To try to get quantity of users too early may be the wrong way to go about it. It will come. Build it and they will come, as they told Kevin Costner.
Yes absolutely - I think we saw how that works when we had the price peaks in July. Good points as always mate.