There are occasional, beautiful moments when a new user shows up in an established community and reads the Help Center, gets a feel for preexisting social norms, and asks about things like navigating duplicate questions. It's mindblowing. What leads a few users to do this and not others? Are there dials we can turn to increase the number of people who do?
New users' first contributions to a site, by their nature, often require improvement. There are different methods of dealing with this, and I am looking for evidence that would help understand which are most effective, where "effective" means "this person becomes a positive contributor for the s...
As a normal user and/or mod, I found myself writing a ton of meta posts whenever something crossed my mind. Now that I'm a CM, the hardest thing is letting the community/mods handle those things themselves whenever possible, and figuring out when it is best for me to step in. The more folks that use SOjp, the more meta posts I draft, and the fewer meta posts I actually post.
Internally, we use a lot of Trello boards in order to stay organized. This works exceptionally well for what we need it to do. The quirk is, I keep depositing things that I need to do in so many places which results in so many fields in which to graze - you have to be careful not to starve while you decide what grass to eat.
> It certainly isn't the case that all interactions [with strangers] go well, but it seems to be the case that all of us ... tend to remember the couple of times that it didn't go well and we actually forget all the times that we chatted with someone where it went very well.
- Michael Norton (Harvard business professor), talking about this research on how interactions with strangers affect our day
@jmac i struggle with that too, especially (oddly) on the tiny little stuff. if i'm the first person to stumble on this weird little bug report or duplicate feature request, should i leave it for site mods or just take three seconds to handle it?
i still lose sleep about the time four years ago a few of us got really silly and asked a question about manatees on skeptics, which (correctly) got closed. i felt SO GUILTY and worried SO HARD that they'd think i was this new hire making fun of them.
i wrote this whole meta post and they were like "...it's fine. don't worry about it."
But I had a "bad" experience with Skeptics on my first week. They were really cool and helpful, but it took me a while to get over the "Oh my god now they know the new hire is dumb as hell" feeling
