Encouraging User Participation - Some Ideas, More welcome

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

@purldator

A relevant tangent was discussed a bit ago, with using trust levels to “reward” users who post to particular categories, or not reward at all when posting to other categories.

This is a great idea - allow mods/admins to identify the higher priority categories, and have more varied and more frequent rewards for those categories. Definitely a good idea.

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

I’m using the in-beta Discoursemetrics.com to track my site data better.

Here is the key issue i have in terms of user participation - I have great DAU / MAU numbers (Daily Active Users / Monthly Active users) - almost up to Facebook levels (in the 60% + level) - but have a huge issue with DAU/ TAU (Total Active Users). DAU / TAU is down at the sub 10% level - which I view as absolutely terrible.

There is a huge drop off for a large number of users who come in, read the site, get motivated to join, join, then drop off.

For some reason we seem to be losing a huge number of after they’ve gone through all the hassle of signing up - which I find strange.

With most of my users on Gmail - I suspect part of the issue is that all our notifications go into the “forum” category in Gmail - which most people rarely check.

@codinghorror - I wonder if it would be possible to implement an SMS gateway API option - for example something like Twilio - https://www.twilio.com/ for some less frequent reminders of interaction. Perhaps for personal messages, and periodic updates - and have that as part of the standard signup to increase engagement.

Here are my stats from DiscourseMetrics.com right now (which is looking better all the time)

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

@BCHK

but have a huge issue with DAU/ TAU (Total Active Users). DAU / TAU is down at the sub 10% level - which I view as absolutely terrible.

Have you compared that to any other forums? discoursemetrics.com looks like a cool project, maybe you could invite them to this topic to share some data with us!

Personally I’m not surprised by the 10% number. Even before I was a Discourse employee I was registered to a large amount of forums. Let’s say I had 50 unique forum accounts:

• 40 forums I only registered on in order to correct Someone who was wrong on the internet. Unless the topic I subscribed to got bumped, I’d never visit the place.
• 5 forums I’d casually check up on every week or so
• 3 forums I’d check on daily, posting if I found something related to me.
• 2 forums I’d be a regular on, reading and posting to daily.

[DiscourseMetrics]

Hi

I’ve had to temporarily hide the Daily Active Users chart for users of DiscourseMetrics (sorry @BCHK!) because I don’t think the numbers are accurate for all forums. I have posted a bug report here: User visit stats are not correct? I’m looking into other ways of fetching the data, but I would really appreciate if someone knows what the cause is for the weird stats in /users.

The DAU stat ends up being almost the same as the 7 day active users stat, so something is weird. How do you calculate TAU, @BCHK, is it the number of users who have ever been active? Due to natural churn, wouldn’t this number always go down as your forum grows?

If anyone else wants to join the private beta, head on over to http://www.discoursemetrics.com

Thanks

[alefattorini (Alessio Fattorini)]

Ehi man, just to know. You ask the api master key to fetch this data, have you write permissions on my forum as asmin? Or just read permissions? Is this a Security issue?
BTW great work indeed!

[DiscourseMetrics]

Hi Alessio, yes the API key gives full access, and it is needed because we use some of the data available in the admin section. It would be nice to have read-only API access, perhaps this will be implemented at some point

Of course, we don’t change anything on your forum or use any data other than what we need to generate metrics.

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

@erlend_sh

Have you compared that to any other forums? discoursemetrics.com looks like a cool project, maybe you could invite them to this topic to share some data with us!

Not yet - I’m hoping that DiscourseMetrics does this soon - includes the ability to compare my site’s stats against the pool of sites (anonymously) that use their site for stats.

Erlend, Wow - 50 unique forum accounts - I suspect that is an order of magnitude more than the average user, if not more.

Its hard to know what the right engagement percent here in the DAU/TAU ratio is - very hard to identify variables to test and help identify the issues. Any feedback on ways to do this would be appreciated.

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

I would really like to have a better way to reach my users. Emails are very low in engagement and responses. My open rate is typically down below 24% - on newsletter type emails to my audience, and much much lower on the forum emails I suspect (but I don’t see an easy way to confirm this - anyone have any ideas on how to do this?

It would be nice to have that tracking of opens on emails done in the Discourse interface.

@Overmind

“According to ZipStripe research, it takes a recipient an average 6.5 hours to view an e-mail, but only 15 minutes to view SMSs and push notifications.”

By the time people open the email, if they do at all, the conversation will likely have died down. Getting users to engage quickly with content will keep the conversation going, keep the other parties involved as well, thus furthering the discussion since the people that are part of it will all be notified at the same time via a method they’ll actually notice quickly.

  publ.com

E-mail vs. SMS vs. Push Notifications: Which is More Effective

Choosing between emails and push notifications, or SMS and pushes, consider the features of each channel. SMS vs text in emails and push notifications.

I

http://info.localytics.com/blog/2015-the-year-that-push-notifications-grew-uphttp://info.localytics.com/blog/push-messaging-drives-88-more-app-launches-for-users-who-opt-in

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

@DiscourseMetrics.com

How do you calculate TAU, @BCHK, is it the number of users who have ever been active? Due to natural churn, wouldn’t this number always go down as your forum grows?

Yes - I’m looking at TAU as total registered users.

As a marketing person - I’m very skeptical of just assuming that your loss of user engagement is a “natural churn”. Who knows what a “natural churn” rate is? As a software developer, I assume that we can always make our platform’s engagement mechanisms better.

My web sites are for chronic medical conditions - so its not like a person’s “interest” should ever really go away.

For some reason we’re not able to pull these users back - and I view that as a problem that needs to be addressed somehow. Its a problem all of us here face - and one which needs to be understood better.

[DiscourseMetrics]

I understand, given your audience that makes sense. I’m not assuming that all loss of engagement is unavoidable churn, but that there will always be a certain percentage of users that will stop posting and never come back, almost regardless of what you do.

If you had a forum for professional photographers, for instance, I think you would naturally lose a percentage every month because they’ve switched jobs or become interested in something else. I’ve been a member of many forums where I was really active when I had that specific interest but not so much anymore, so I guess this really depends on the topic of your community

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@BCHK do you have any thoughts on this today? If you re-read your first post, how do you feel about it now? Different? The same?

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

@BCHK

During the past year my user base on my forum has gone from 1,000 to about 4,000 total users. During that same time the average number of messages per day has gone from about 250 to 600 messages per day.

Jeff - sorry for my slow response. Its funny - but as I think about it, its still a big issue. We are now up to 8.6K users and about 1.2 K messages a day. But still - the number of daily active users is quite low and as a percentage is falling because while people are still subscribed they don’t return very often.

I still think this is a big issue. I still think we need better ways to get people back to our sites.

Have you seen any difference in participation rates (DAU/TAU) in the mobile community using the Android App and IOS App? It would be interesting to know the difference in terms of how effective the app notifications impact returns and participation.

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

By the way - I’m confused. I look at my “about us” information below and 7 day and 30 day numbers don’t seem to be accurate: How could we only have 43 users visiting the past 7 days and 205 the past 30. This makes no sense.

https://www.evernote.com/l/AGrm3qFqBrhH4rvCI2e5E31aw511tkEBP54B/image.png

[Mittineague]

@BCHK

How could we only have 43 users visiting the past 7 days and 205 the past 30.

That seems possible to me (~50/wk). What does your Admin Dashboard stats for New members (new registered accounts, not visits) look like, consistent or contradictory?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Have you had a look at our new dashboard yet in admin and https://yoursite/admin/reports/dau_by_mau?category_id=all&end_date=2018-07-14&start_date=2015-07-11

Looking at your actual data there, stuff looks engagement did get better around 2017, but has remained around 30-34% since, overall these numbers are actually quite excellent and healthy from all we know.

Also looking at new contributors you are getting a very steady amount in.

Not against improving stuff, but overall your forum looks pretty super healthy from our dashboard.

For comparison meta is at 14-21% DAU/MAU which means we are far less engaged here than on your larger site.

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

@Mittineague

That seems possible to me (~50/wk). What does your Admin Dashboard stats for New members (new registered accounts, not visits) look like, consistent or contradictory?

But our Admin dashboard tells me we get almost 200 people per day. It doesn’t seem make sense or am I misreading something?

See this link:

https://www.evernote.com/l/AGpid2GlGvNLT5K8XTFfe0eq8HYfI6YSMw0B/image.png

[Mittineague]

I think you may be confusing new account registrations with user visits. The Signups 214 isn’t that far from 205

I can’t explain the 9 difference. My guess is jobs need to “catch up” with each other given time (a staggered 24hr. schedule?). eg. the about stats or dashboard stats need to grab / lose a day on the ends of the range.

[outofthebox (Carson)]

This is a fascinating topic. I appreciate @BCHK’s experience and insights.

Here’s how I see the situation:

1. Most people experience content overload. Amidst the deluge of information, people gravitate towards the sites that seem to have the most relevant content, as defined by that person.
2. When forums are small and focused, there is a high percentage of participants who find the content relevant and valuable. Also, most of the participants become familiar, building a sense of community.
3. As the forum grows, more content is less relevant and more participants are unknown. Two ways to manually solve for this: Categories and tags.
4. Another approach: wisdom of the crowds, reddit-style, for surfacing the most popular content (similar to “top” in some ways).
5. Another approach: algorithmic sorting of relevance on an individual user basis.

It seems that the “news feed” approach is winning the relevance battle. Perhaps this is too loose, but perhaps it is at least ‘directionally’ correct. It seems that Amazon has a news feed for shopping - my front page has products I am most likely to buy. Netflix has a news feed for entertainment - the front page has the shows I am most likely to watch. Social media… obviously, news feed approach. Google’s dominance comes in part from the speed of query to personalized results that I am likely to click on.

That is, perhaps the paradigm of ‘social media’ vs’ discussion forums’ is an outdated lens for looking at the subject. I think the predominant factor for engagement is ‘I want content relevant to me.’ Whatever a platform does to automate relevance, so that this goal is met without the member having to work for it, is likely to improve engagement.

[BCHK (Bcguy)]

@codinghorror

@BCHK do you have any thoughts on this today? If you re-read your first post, how do you feel about it now? Different? The same?

And Jeff - yes, I still think you need to put some resources into creating a feed algorithm that focuses on showing each user the posts that are most likely to interest him or her… as I mentioned in the link below. Right now my main forum gets about 1,500 posts a day, and I doubt most people read anywhere near that many - so to the degree that we can help users prioritize what to look at, I think we improve the desirability of our forum to those users:

Encouraging User Participation - Some Ideas, More welcome

I think that this is completely inaccurate. Look - please read up on Facebook’s edgerank algorithm before you comment on this. The average person on facebook gets something like 1500 posts that could be shown to them in a day - and read a small fraction of them. Are you really suggesting to me that not making any effort to show to their users the specific Topics / messages that are of most interest to their users does not help in their return user / DAU / MAU metrics? Really? - thats like s…

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@BCHK

creating a feed algorithm that focuses on showing each user the posts that are most likely to interest him or her

This already exists in both additive and subtractive forms:

• additive – the user should visit the category they are most interested in, if they tend to stick to a single category.

• subtractive – the user can mute categories they aren’t interested in from their user preferences, if they read most categories but have a few that they don’t ever want to see.