You could substantially increase your weekly active users, converting monthly active users (MAU) into weekly and even daily users, and increasing MAU as well, by using push notifications to inform users of replies to their posts and comments and other events that are currently only sent as in-forum notifications to most users. Many, many times, I have posted on the forum, sent a comment or reply, and only weeks later seen that there was a response. On the other hand, I will get an email from twitter or bluesky if one person likes my post, and I immediately go on to see who it was. In doing so you will draw people to the forum at the exact time their engagement will encourage others to come back, building up a positive flywheel of engagement.
These features are already built into your forum but are off by default! This surprised me greatly because most online forum—not only feedscrolling websites like X and Facebook, but also forum-style websites like Substack and Wordpress—make it easy or default to get push notifications via email. That builds engagement as I’ve described. Often when I post on Tyler Cowen’s Wordpress-based Marginal Revolution blog, I get a tonne of email notifications of replies and discussions about that topic. It’s a bit overwhelming, but it’s fun!
Users who just use your notification default (notifications within the website, but no few push notifications) probably make up the vast majority of active users and passive users (if not the most active users). If it is possible to identify users who have not deliberately turned off notifications, I strongly suggest that you flip the default to affect those users who haven’t deliberately set a notification policy to send push notifications. This will get a small hit from people who dislike this, but you could mitigate this by e.g., an email in your next digest to inform people of why you are making the change.
I have long thought this was a missing feature on EA Forum; now I know it exists, but is turned off.
@titotal said that it’s not a lot of fun to post here. I agree, and I also think that making it more immediately rewarding to post, by informing people of others’ engagement with their content as soon as it happens, would make it a lot more fun. It will make me personally very happy if you do this!
I agree that emailing users more often will probably get them to return to the site more often.
I’m less confident than you [sound] that this will have a major effect.
Since our team has been focused on software/product for a while and haven’t noticeably increased MAUs, I am skeptical that further work in this space will be the magic bullet. For example, we made significant improvements in site speed and didn’t see metrics improve as much as we expected.
Our team has been more willing to email users recently (for example, about Forum events) and I want to be careful about going too far and annoying users/causing unsubscribes.
Honestly I’m not totally sure why basically none of the default notifications include an email, which makes me somewhat nervous to significantly change this. My guess is that you are a bit unusual in finding lots of email notifications fun, and probably more people would find that overwhelming or annoying.
That said, we do plan to test out making our default notification settings more in line with other sites (for example, making karma notifications realtime by default instead of batched daily) and sending a delayed email to new users explaining how they can customize their notification settings.
We’ll certainly consider changing other notification default settings, but again I want to be careful with this, not just because some people would dislike it, but also because ultimately our goal is not to increase usage. I want people to have a healthy relationship with the Forum, and only use it to the extent that they think is worthwhile.
I feel like changing the notification settings for existing users is probably crossing a line.
You could substantially increase your weekly active users, converting monthly active users (MAU) into weekly and even daily users, and increasing MAU as well, by using push notifications to inform users of replies to their posts and comments and other events that are currently only sent as in-forum notifications to most users. Many, many times, I have posted on the forum, sent a comment or reply, and only weeks later seen that there was a response. On the other hand, I will get an email from twitter or bluesky if one person likes my post, and I immediately go on to see who it was. In doing so you will draw people to the forum at the exact time their engagement will encourage others to come back, building up a positive flywheel of engagement.
These features are already built into your forum but are off by default! This surprised me greatly because most online forum—not only feedscrolling websites like X and Facebook, but also forum-style websites like Substack and Wordpress—make it easy or default to get push notifications via email. That builds engagement as I’ve described. Often when I post on Tyler Cowen’s Wordpress-based Marginal Revolution blog, I get a tonne of email notifications of replies and discussions about that topic. It’s a bit overwhelming, but it’s fun!
Users who just use your notification default (notifications within the website, but no few push notifications) probably make up the vast majority of active users and passive users (if not the most active users). If it is possible to identify users who have not deliberately turned off notifications, I strongly suggest that you flip the default to affect those users who haven’t deliberately set a notification policy to send push notifications. This will get a small hit from people who dislike this, but you could mitigate this by e.g., an email in your next digest to inform people of why you are making the change.
I have long thought this was a missing feature on EA Forum; now I know it exists, but is turned off.
@titotal said that it’s not a lot of fun to post here. I agree, and I also think that making it more immediately rewarding to post, by informing people of others’ engagement with their content as soon as it happens, would make it a lot more fun. It will make me personally very happy if you do this!
Thanks for the suggestions!
I agree that emailing users more often will probably get them to return to the site more often.
I’m less confident than you [sound] that this will have a major effect.
Since our team has been focused on software/product for a while and haven’t noticeably increased MAUs, I am skeptical that further work in this space will be the magic bullet. For example, we made significant improvements in site speed and didn’t see metrics improve as much as we expected.
Our team has been more willing to email users recently (for example, about Forum events) and I want to be careful about going too far and annoying users/causing unsubscribes.
Honestly I’m not totally sure why basically none of the default notifications include an email, which makes me somewhat nervous to significantly change this. My guess is that you are a bit unusual in finding lots of email notifications fun, and probably more people would find that overwhelming or annoying.
That said, we do plan to test out making our default notification settings more in line with other sites (for example, making karma notifications realtime by default instead of batched daily) and sending a delayed email to new users explaining how they can customize their notification settings.
We’ll certainly consider changing other notification default settings, but again I want to be careful with this, not just because some people would dislike it, but also because ultimately our goal is not to increase usage. I want people to have a healthy relationship with the Forum, and only use it to the extent that they think is worthwhile.
I feel like changing the notification settings for existing users is probably crossing a line.