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189 sats \ 21 replies \ @k00b 26 Sep \ on: Why people leave nostr (and SN?) nostr
There are a lot of keynesian-like grand theories to say about complicated situations like this. (njump is down for me so I couldn't load it to read but I'm guessing this overshoots what's wrong.)
The correct answer is probably simple, vague, and unsatisfying: high costs and low value - perceived or real.
For us at least, our UX is bad (ie costs are high). We've focused on making non-custodial work well and neglected UX, because it's hard to make things that don't work well easy to use, and now need to leverage the things that work well and make it easy to use again.
What aspects of UX do you think are bad? Not trying to flatter or anything, but I think the UX is pretty good. Very easy to use both on desktop and mobile.
Wallet stuff, of course, is complex. But I attribute that less to SN than the underlying tech.
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What both SN and nostr have are churn. All products have it. You grow by adding more people than you have churn.
We churn very lowly and slowly, but we are not adding more people than we churn which I attribute to:
- the sign up is hidden
- after sign up, no free posts/comments (you get a free bio but you have to guess that it will be worth doing), so you need sats on lightning to even use SN
- to get full value you need to attach a wallet which is at least a 10 step process - even for someone familiar with lightning ... for someone unfamiliar with lightning they will probably give up
SN is just too hard to start using - time to value is too hard/long. If we want to grow, we need to be able to get someone who is merely bitcoin curious and weakly motivated from 1 through 3 as fast as possible with as little effort as possible.
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Why do you think attracting new users is a better focus than retaining a higher percentage of active users?
From a community building standpoint, both gaining and losing people is destabilizing to the active users. I'd think preserving the valued relationships that have already formed would be more important.
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You didn't say it expressly. I inferred from your focus being on how to improve the adding side of the inequality rather than reducing the churn side.
In academia, we often break down retention problems into a bunch of different stages at which people are lost and try to analyze each step separately to see where the most promising margins are. SN is much more fluid than a university but a similar approach might be useful.
- How many people make an account but never post/comment/zap?
- How many people make just a few posts or comments but don't get much engagement on them and don't continue interacting?
- How many people make a lot of posts and comments immediately but then drop off?
- How many people become regulars with high trust and many posts or comments over a long period of time but then drift away?
These may all be different issues with different fixes and likely some are responsible for far more losses than others. Getting a sense of where the losses come from is the first step of figuring out how to improve retention, though.
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After I finish my taking-forever-refactor, I'm personally going to focus on this new/retain stuff almost exclusively.
I'll rope you all in. I tend to be super vibes focused, am inevitably missing stuff, and your list is a great example of how we can quantize this stuff and guess smarter.
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Woo, that should be fun. Any bets on the statistical significance of DarthCoin interactions on churn?
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We'll need to create an explanatory variable for pre- and post-interaction with Darth.
Hopefully my time sitting on retention committees can prove useful
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Ah, got it. I was thinking of UI, but you're right, the UX, especially for new users, could be a lot better.
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after sign up, no free posts/comments
This is why I make a point of zapping every new SN account (unless it's a business).
People did that for me when I joined SN and I think it made a big difference in my decision to stay here.
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I am on step 3. i signed up w cashapp. i will have to kill this account and start a new one w coinos so i can connect my coinos, sn, and nostr acct.
it is frustrating. im hoping i knock this attempt out.
i want to be part of the convo/ecosystem, but there are a ton of hoops.
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You should be able to add/modify sign-in credentials in settings, without starting from scratch.
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I'd be glad to help.
If you go to your wallets, you can add CoinOS there. Also from your wallets you can remove CashApp (or keep it as a backup - we allow multiple wallets to be attached for fallback).
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The part of this I found interesting was that there are likely far more people who think they want open intelligent dialogue than those who actually enjoy it.
Most find it unappealing and choose to go back to the comfort of just having their priors confirmed.
It's not a grand theory (I don't think), but rather someone's observations from years of watching who has stayed and who has left.
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There could be something in that.
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