Ideas to increase Politeia engagement

[xaur]

• Timely inform of Politeia activity via various channes (#24)
• Tipping system
• Batch approvals
• Post-vote updates would inform subscribers about how proposal implementation is progressing.
• Optional email and thorough Tor testing may increase engagement from a few cypherpunks (issue?)
• Global activity feed and personalized activity feed would make it possible to read all missed updates without switching away from Politeia
• User @mentions would allow to ping and be pinged (needs discussion whether to impl it)
• Improve mobile UX
• Adopt longer discussion and voting periods (#117)
• Develop tools to facilitate signing of Politeia votes on offline/cold wallets.

Discussions:

• 2019-01-22: engagement and satisfaction with Politeia so far, suggestions for improvement
• 2019-01-25: UX (decred/politeia#678)
• 2019-02-14: Increasing engagement is an amazing goal, just don't expect too much, US presidential elections with hundreds of Ms of dollars and 24/7 news don't even get 50%
• 2019-02-18: multi-device key management UX, allow to associate multiple keys with Pi account, mobile UX

[xaur]

Batch approvals

I think its multiple factors.:

1. Holidays
2. I see less "whale" voting this time around.
3. maybe people are less likely to vote on things that are "going" well. (coupled with them not knowing about the quorum requirment)
4. Only a single proposal to vote on. They might find it more worth their time if there are multiple proposals to vote.

(chat, 2018-12-27)

Point 4 is interesting, certainly would not be difficult to set batch approval (where once 5 proposals are set to go live they go live the following Tuesday or something like that random example)

i wouldn’t be surprised if over time an informal voting period, like the first week of every month, started happening. Proposal authors are incentive to try and maximize voter turnout and coordinating with one another to have their votes happen around the same time might be one way to do this.
(chat, 2018-12-27)

[xaur]

Taking a comment from #117:

I think people are not aware of two things which maybe leads to them not joining Politeia, based on my own experience.

1. They can comment by simply signing up and paying 0.1 DCR once, even if they do not have any tickets or not enough DCR to vote and still be influential via their comments.
2. Their Politeia account will not reveal how much DCR/tickets they have explicitly.

@sambiohazard do you see places where these are not obvious for the users? e.g. omissions in Politeia GUI signup flow, comment UI, or dcrdocs?

[ghost]

I think since it is not documented anywhere, you only find out once you complete the registration process. Although i think with Denni Lovejoy's proposal being approved, he will document this in one of his videos.

I had my reservations about privacy with Pi, which i found out were due to lack of knowledge how the system is setup. Also i did not know until jz mentioned in chat that voting and commenting are not mixed/linked. This means no one can find out how many tickets i have if i am on politeia, but i didn't knew that.

I am not sure if this is mentioned in dcrdocs.

[xaur]

Good points, stating that clearly upfront can "advertise" the sysstem better and slightly increase engagement. Next step is to identify exact places where the info is missing.

@jholdstock or @s-ben do you see any possible additions to dcrdocs from the two previous comments?

[xaur]

Privacy enhancements for on-chain and off-chain voting may increase voter turnout. I suspect some voters don't vote when vote already goes their way to leave less trails. But higher turnout is always beneficial.