Ideas for contributor retention and engagement

Hey all,

How would you improve the contributing experience to Slant, in ways that would directly increase retention/engagement (for ideas on how to make contributing easier go here)

Our current systems are:

  • User profiles
  • Weekly digest email
  • Notification list
  • Karma Table
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One of the things that keeps me interested in a website long term is human interaction. I’m seeing a lot of people commenting now, which is awesome. I would like to be able to indicate that their comments are useful without actually having to respond with words. Being able to like, upvote, +1, etc. would be a good way to show people that they are appreciated in the community and give them that little dopamine rush.

Also, private messaging would be a great feature but I think we’ve all talked about that before.

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We’ve discussed the fact that public “walls” on the profile page would be rad like turtles, but I may as well repeat it here. :slight_smile:

For me I keep seeing users ask for a way to contribute without signing in. If it is an issue of making sure they are human captchas could be used for non logged in users. With rewards for logged in users being the karma system, a name that stays with them for notoriety and any other aspects we can add like PM and as tejon mentions public walls. This way anyone can contribute (boosting our content) while at the same time allowing for us to build a relationship with non logged in users to hopefully get them to the point of wanting an account to get the other features we offer.

Also as taylorcoogan mentions, human interaction is key, a more streamlined comment system that is more visible as mentioned elsewhere in meta would be great sooner rather than later. It does seem as Disqus comments are the type of system to emulate as so many are familiar with the style as well as the function. It can be hidden and then drop down with a click or visible from page load but the voting and highlighted (best comments) does seem to be pretty popular. A way to sort comments from most popular and newest/oldest does seem to be a pretty useful feature as well. Though how that works when combining pro/con comments with option comments I am not sure.

I think I’m grabbing most of my hints from Jeff’s venues here…

Moderation tools. Hierarchy. Those are essential.

Being a new user and all, I’m not sure how they’re in place, if anything.

This is probably a bad idea for retention and engagement.

Discourse and stackoverflow have plenty of those and in no way they let anyone give any contribution without signing in.

Completely agree there.

There’s already the forums anyway, I’d say no need for this. It could be cool is using discourse as the commenting system, embedded, but I’m not sure this would be a good idea since they don’t promote embedding all that much. And boy, do they have good reasons for every each detail on their roadmap! :stuck_out_tongue:

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