Rethinking the intro topic

Meta
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We provide the Introduce yourself! topic as an place for people to introduce themselves. I’m now hoping that we can tweak this pattern a bit!

High threshold to connect
The key concern I have is that a person reading another persons intro will have a quite high threshold to initiate an interaction with that person. While it can be done by a private message, I consider it to have two big downsides:

  1. It takes a while to learn about private messages (info here: How to send messages in Discourse)
  2. It is a bigger step to send a private message than to publicly respond to an intro.

Alternative ideas
I’m not sure if I think it makes sense, but perhaps we could have a discourse category of topics for intros, where each topics is an individual’s intro. If we do it that way, then people have the means to respond publicly directly to that person making the intro.

Inspiration from other forums
I think it would be interesting to see how other Discourse community does this.

Examples of other discourse forums:

What do you think?

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Thanks for raising this @consideRatio :sunglasses: and here are some of my initial thoughts.

When people make the first step of introducing themselves to the community - it is quite a big step for them because they have decided to become active in an open source community. So being able to welcome them or show that they are appreciated in some way is good.

In my experience it generally takes the form of a few ‘Hi’ and ‘Welcome’ or ‘Great to have you on board’ type messages. I am fairly new to the Jupyter community and have noticed that there aren’t those sort of messages posted in the Introduce yourself section very often. Instead I see that that people ‘like’ an introduction post.

I took a look at the example links and saw that in the ne04j forum, which has a different structure so that each introduction post can be publicly replied to. This makes it a lot easier to respond to and in a few cases it really helped people in the same geographic location to connect. However I did notice that it still had quite a few introduction posts that had no replies at all so there is this risk is we decide to change.

My thought is that the person posting an introduction probably wants to know - is anyone interested or reading what I have shared about myself? And a key way to show that is by some kind of acknowledgement - be it a message, a like or something else.

Perhaps the answer is consistency, if we keep the existing structure then it would be nice to ensure that anyone posting an introduction receives some likes in acknowledgement. And if we do decide to change to a different structure then also try to post responses to the new introductions.

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I think this is an important topic to think about - though I must admit I’m not sure what the best path forward is. As Sharan points out - there are pros and cons to each.

A few other things I can think of:

  • having one-thread-per-hello still means people can “like” those hellos
  • that said, one benefit of having one thread is that (I think?) everybody who has ever commented on that thread will be notified when there’s a new comment on that thread, which might cause people to engage more