I have been thinking a lot about what motivates people to create an account at Daily Kos. For many of our users, it’s to write a story that will hopefully be widely read, or to write a comment back to an author, possibly even an elected official. Others join to participate in comment banter, and to be part of our fun and intelligent and animal-loving progressive community. Some days, you just gotta tell everyone how cute your cats are:
Or that you just saw some amazing wildlife!
Maybe my favorite stories are personal ones about making a difference, or sharing some specific expertise or experience you have. Seeing the work people do to make our world better from the inside is always interesting to me, whether that’s about GOTV, improving the lives of kids, protecting the environment, helping people eat or get health care, whatever it is.
But not everyone likes to write. We still love you, those of you who read and lurk and follow along quietly. There are people who visit every day and read multiple stories a day who have never made an account, or rarely log in to them.
Part of what I do is to wonder, why don’t they make accounts? And then to wonder, what’s in it for them?
Subscriptions are one answer — the ability to read Daily Kos ad-free. (If you’d like to do that, make an account, and there’s an icon that will appear in the upper right corner that has a menu that will allow you to purchase an annual subscription for $40.)
Another is the opportunity to influence what stories will be most seen in the community by recommending them, and to show appreciation to authors by recommending comments.
An area where I think we can do better is to create a more obvious payoff for following your favorite writers, topics, and groups. We have a page called “My Activity Stream” from that upper right menu, and that shows stories from your followed content. But I think it’s poorly named and hard to find. (I can say that, both of these things are my fault.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about other ways to make it easy to find your favorite content — maybe you get a sidebar with some of the latest. Maybe if you’re logged in, your home page would be built differently. Maybe you get a notification if an author you follow publishes a story. There are so many stories here that it’s easy to miss good ones that are of particular interest to you. How do we ensure that you never miss the stories that are most important to you, even if you… don’t drop by every hour hoping for something good? To me this is potentially a big reason to make an account, to save those preferences and to ensure there’s always something ready for me. But, we also need to communicate that this even a thing you can do.
We have some ideas. But I’m super interested in yours, too. Does this feature seem useful to those of you who come here often? What does your ideal personalized home page look like? How do we help you find all your favorites? How do we help you find new favorites? (Have you even found the stream page? If so, how do you use it?)
Obviously… while I can ask why people who don’t have accounts haven’t made them, they’re not going to answer me here in the comments. Simply no reason to do it? Too many accounts? Couldn’t think of a username? Worried about privacy? So as a proxy, I want to ask all of you — why did you sign up for an account, and what were the obstacles?
(Also: thanks to everyone who wrote comments about why and how you recommend and don’t recommend in the earlier stories! That was extremely helpful!)