WhatsApp for human connection? or Are Discourse chat and channels used?

[Bas (Bas van Leeuwen)]

@merefield

That’s depressing.

No it isn’t? It’s a way for me to stay in touch with dozens of my friends?

It’s not for everyone I guess

@merefield

I resolved that by turning off notifications from WhatsApp

You are most likely in the minority, and more importantly for the current topic: probably not representative of the average in the target audience

@Renato_Mendes

My most urgent need is to get paid; but I’m trying to fulfill this need with literature and writers because I am a writer and would love to have a place where it’s possible to discuss literature and everything related to it in a manner that’s less serious and demanding than academia, but deeper than normal social networks (where you don’t go deep at all). Something as light and fulfilling as a great conversation you might have over dinner with your friends.

If you are truly just building a community for people out of your own personal desires… then yeah, it might make sense to move to whatsapp subgroups.
You lose a lot by moving away from an open platform, but it might help to foster a sense of belonging and help to prevent people from forgetting about the community.

@Renato_Mendes

Agreed. It might be a great way of meeting them where they already are and inviting them to check the deep community stuff, all the while they will still be connected to each other and, therefore, inside the community.

@Renato_Mendes

How steep do you feel the learning curve of Discourse forums is?

It really really depends on the target audience. Tech audiences have no issue with it at all, people that shy away from computers might find it a bit more challenging. Discourse is successfully being used by thousands of communities though.

@Renato_Mendes

I’m writing a sequence of 8-12 onboarding weekly e-mails, so new-comers can smoothly get the grip both of the software and our community culture/potentials while also incentivizing them to take a couple of actions (such as posting a text they wrote, answering a question publicly, giving feedback etc.) on each e-mail.

I would love for you to share these! Privately if needed, via PM (or you can Whatsapp me… )
We of course do a similar things with the user tips and Discobot, but by its nature it has to be generic. I’d love to learn how you tailor that to your users!

New User Tips

In the latest beta of Discourse, we introduced user tips explaining the most important features of Discourse (enabled by default; to disable it, navigate to your site setting and search for “enable user tips”). [Screenshot 2023-08-01 at 6.41.57 AM] At this moment, there are user tips for: first notification topic timeline post menu topic notification level suggested topics admin guide: getting started (shown to admins on new sites) Screenshots [Screenshot 2023-08-01 at 6.47…