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Ask HN: How can you encourage users to generate content?

31 points by vital101 ↗ HN
I've been working on a new site for several months now (http://www.shouldigetthebook.com), and I'm to the point where I need user input. The goal of this site is to allow college students to comment on specific courses that they took, and tell other students if they needed the text book. Aside from a few usability concerns that I'm ironing out, I think it is time to get some content. But that's the problem.<p>To get users to come to the site, I need content. To get content, I need users to come to the site and contribute. I'm running on a severely limited budget (I'm a grad student, saving for a wedding, etc), but I'm still trying to offer incentives for entering reviews. I've also tried limited advertising on Facebook, Google, and print papers. People come to the site, but only long enough to see that their classes for next semester don't have any reviews.<p>How would you encourage people to enter reviews?

24 comments

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patio11
You need to answer this question: what need does contributing a review solve for the reviewer? What do they get out of it?

StackOverflow bet big, and won, that technically inclined people would contribute millions of dollars of free consulting if it awarded them with, essentially, the geek equivalent of WoW loot. (Pixels of no importance or cost outside the game but, critically, important to the players.)

HackerNews uses the karma system. I probably write too much, but one reason I write is that there is a little scrolling You Helped Somebody Out Today counter in the top right corner, and that gives me warm fuzzies and a sense of social worth.

If your site has chicken/egg dynamics to it, your content acquisition strategy should be based on giving people reasons to donate you chickens in the absence of eggs or eggs in the absence of chickens. I love Delicious as an example of this: if you're the only user of Delicious, it still has value, because it was a very good multi-PC bookmark manager when that feature was underserved.

You can also seed content, which can be quite cheap if you do it intelligently. For example, I assume you put up pages for classes which you don't have reviews for, right? Good. Rank order those by access and start at the top. Pay people to write seed reviews for the content most in demand. College students' time is ridiculously cheap (an insight which founded the entire discipline of behavioral economics). You can probably get 5 reviews for pizza money.

For the last several years I've paid for content for my website. At the start, when I had no idea what would be popular, I just used my intuition and aimed at obvious high-value targets. As soon as you do that, you'll start to collect Actual Data From Users. Adjust aim, fire again. The beautiful thing about evergreen content (I'm not sure yours is timeless, incidentally, which worries me) is that after you acquire it you get to keep the benefits from it for forever. This means that if you happen to realize "Oh, shoot, I was in a local maxima" that isn't a problem, you just expand away from it. (This has happened to me multiple times and is a story for another day.)

You have other problems with your website in terms of conversion which are bouncing these users, incidentally.

1) The design wastes far too much space and does not immediately communicate a value proposition. I would usually demonstrate this with a color-coded screenshot but I'm on Linux right now and refuse to fight GIMP to do it: less than 5% of the pixels on my monitor display anything related to textbooks when I open up your site. I don't know what the magic right number is, but it sure isn't < 5%.

2) Your site cares far too much about its needs and not enough about the user's needs. Thinking this is not a major sin. Telling the user about it is. "Running a site like this requires a lot of help from students like you" is a bad tact, because it requires people to give to you before you give to them. Most Internet uses are quite keenly interested in What Is In This For Me.

3) Surfacing reviews on the front page is a great way to point out both the value of the service, to establish social proof (nobody wants to go to a bar where no one drinks, nobody wants to post the first piece of content to Empty Social News Service #432), and to reward power users for their dedication. It is frightening how much you can get out of people just to give them a chance at community recognition.

4) "To get started, just click “Find Your Course“." I think there are very few total absolutes in web design, but this is one of them: if you ever find yourself telling people where to click on a web page, and that is not "Click here", you're wasting conversions to no benefit to yourself. You've got hyperlinks. Use them.

vital101
" The design wastes far too much space and does not immediately communicate a value proposition."

This is one of the problems that I'm currently addressing. I'm about 40% through a re-design to address this, and many other issues.

Also, you mention a point system (karma, etc). The only thing that worries me about this is users entering false reviews just to get points.

Thank you though. You have given me many insights and ideas. It's answers like this that keep me coming back to Hacker News day after day.

patio11
The only thing that worries me about this is users entering false reviews just to get points.

This is what we call a "high class problem". (Since HN has an international audience I'll explain that one: it means a problem where the fact of having the problem demonstrates that you're already in a status which arouses envy. For example, "Finding parking for my gigantic luxury sedan was difficult but I finally found one." probably makes sense to the guy who said it it but will not be looked upon favorably by the cashier he said it to.)

You currently have a website with no content, no users, no community, and no income. If you're ever finding yourself worrying about folks gaming your karma system, its because you have a website with awesome content, lots of users, a community people want to be a part of, and probably still no income.

(Sorry, I'm letting my "charge money for it" bias slip through. OK, delete that that one, the point still holds.)

vital101
You're absolutely right. Worrying about those kind of details is along the lines of "counting your chickens before they hatch".
vital101
Can you recommend any good reads on how web site design can influence interaction with your web site (if such a thing exists)? Or any good reads on web design in general. I already know the technical points (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc), but I'm looking for more information on design best practices.
noodle
well, the fastest way would probably be to bribe them.

tell them that at the end of the semester, users with N number of significant content submissions will be entered into a drawing, and the prizes will be XYZ.

once you have content and stop bribing them (or, you don't necessarily have to stop), you'll have the content and will no longer have the chicken/egg problem.

vital101
I feel dirty bribing users as it is, but if it makes the clock tick, then so be it.
noodle
its not the only way to make the clock tick, for sure. but i've seen a lot of communities grow using this process, and it is effective and time-efficient. its not easy at all to get users to submit quality content for free.
jlees
Alternatively pay select students at the university to be your ambassador for you (minimum wage kind of dealie) and reward the most prolific.
x3m
1- Agree with others on paying students to write reviews.

2- You need to improve your UI significantly IMO. From your home page it seems that you would prefer users to register before using/contributing to the site, which I think is not a good idea. Your homepage should be immediately useful to the potential users/contributors. for examples you should have a searchbox(with auto-complete feature for the name of universities and courses at least). Or list of most actively discussed courses, etc.

neilk
If you think of it in terms of 'getting content' you're doomed. At Yahoo they were always yammering about 'user-generated content' like it was 'free stuff we can slap ads on'. Maybe you don't mean anything by the term, but I think such terms do have the power to shape our thinking.

People participate on sites that think of them as members, or valued contributors. Figure out how you and they have a shared agenda.

Some concrete ideas:

1) seed with content -- call all your friends

2) bribery -- tickets, coupons : poor quality content is likely though

3) make the demand visible. Add a feature allowing people to request ratings of certain courses. The person who answers the need then feels more heroic and you can even reward with karma points

4) callbacks -- allow people to enter email addresses to be notified when certain courses are rated. Bonus! These people will be worth asking for ratings in a few months.

5) leaderboards, achievements for being helpful, funny, etc.

6) PR: get articles written about you in the student press. Quality control is pretty lax in most cases. Your issue is the price of textbooks and their ultimate value, which is genuinely controversial. Or, ask your valued members to write letters to the editor on the topic.

vital101
I like 3 & 5. Leaderboards for which college has the most reviews, which user has the most reviews, etc. Reminds me of how NikePlus has little competitions for runners. "Be the first group to make 10000 miles". Perhaps this could be a way to inspire people to add reviews.
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lhuang
Have you tried concentrating your content to a select number of schools? Whats the point of a big-bang strategy at this point in the game?
vital101
That's what I'm going for right now, but it isn't obvious because of the site design. I currently have 7 or 8 schools in Michigan that I'm concentrating on.
lhuang
Is there a reason why you haven't changed the design to reflect this?

Also have you looked into behavioral economics? Anecdotally, I know that this is a somewhat "hot" area for loyalty programs (miles, etc.).

jeromec
I'm going to approach this from another side, and ask you what value should I as a user hope to gain from shouldigetthebook.com? I kind of see what you are driving at, but I view your site's potential and possibly its purpose differently. On the surface you are saying your site will answer that question of needing to buy the book, but does it really need answering? Enough to keep users drawn to your site? One might argue that in this day with all the connectivity and info online there is no course that couldn't be passed without buying the book, unless the professor was a stickler for the exact material in question, and even then networking with other students could assuage the need.

I think the question now becomes more philosophical. What do I want out of the course? Just a passing grade or something I can look back on and reference? When viewed that way your site can be about more than just answering that single, quite subjective, question. What I would do is try to foster discussion about the course. Let's say I want to take an art class. I go to shouldigetthebook.com and see nothing there, but I can leave an email to be notified of others inquiring and/or commenting on the same class. Chances are there would be some good discussion we could have. That's the kind of content you could foster on your site, and users would contribute because it's of interest to them. Eventually users could certainly answer the question of whether or not the course book is needed, but there is so much more that the question seems almost incidental.

alttab
I saw that you said somewhere in here that you are concentrating on 7-8 schools in Michigan. That's a lot of classes, a lot of books.

Maybe you should try ONE school, namely, yours. You could even prune it down further to certain majors or departments. If someone says "do you have it for English as well as Math/Computer Science?" then you know its gaining steam.

The idea of class reviews, teacher reviews, along with "do I need the book?" would be a natural progression as others have discussed.

To get more popularity with your own school, heavily brand it as long as they don't get on your back for using their logos. Because its a tool to facilitate their students they may not care, but because its a tool that could dampen their book sale profits, they might.

Another opportunity to make it easier is possibly integrate with existing school systems. I went to Virginia Tech, and for web developers inside the school system (again, speaking merely from my own experience) they had APIs that you could lock into course/class IDs, and even had an API that could authenticate with University PIDs and passwords. Doing so this way would automatically manage all of the classes and book information - then the students would merely have to thumb up or down if they found the book helpful. When you expand schools, integrating Facebook or other social networking credentials would be the obvious route, but to paraphrase 37Signals, "you don't have a scaling problem until you have a scaling problem."

You have an EXCELLENT idea - anyone who has been to college and has felt the weight of text book costs (along with the economy) would instantly see this as a great opportunity to save some beans.

vital101
I have to agree with the focus on one school. I thought originally that having a few key Michigan schools would be easy enough to manager, but as it turns out, it's really hard. Believe it or when I started this thing, I thought the hardest part would be getting data about schools. In hindsight, that's easy, I should have been more worried about how crappy this site looks from the get-go.
mbenjaminsmith
This is focused on Michigan? I would make that obvious and give people a quick way to move to their school. I was a bit lost when I went to the site and wanted a menu with school names.

Ditto to answering "what's in it for me" for the users in terms of contribution. Warm fuzzies? Recognition? Cash? I would try paid first though, given the time vs cash balance of most college kids.

In terms of delivering a value prop right off the bat, check out britekite's header graphic/animation - I've seen few sales pitches that get the job done as well.

You should add in Calvin, btw, we had the distinction of sending more grad students to UM than UM undergrad did.