extremely clever plan for support

[jamesefhawkins]

ok, so we have way too many free users to answer all their questions without spending tons of money, and tons of time finding more people to work here to answer them. regardless, today we already are overwhelmed with questions from free users.

the good news? james and charles think we've cracked the code.

proposal:

• each user in the forum gets 1 point
• this entitles them to 1 question that will get a guaranteed response
• if they are the marked solution to other questions they get 1 point

benefits

• free users asking better quality questions for our team - ie things they can find in the docs, or just wording things poorly
• free users answering each other's questions
• free users having a more reasonable expectation of our support
• we have a new currency that we can offer as a benefit to encourage behavior that we need (for example, feedback on new things we're building)

[joethreepwood]

It's a canny solution, but it could lead to negative WOM. Putting a currency/point system behind this makes it feel like we're turning users into a commodity and why we're not doing that rather than "just" improving support.

We can respond to such questions with valid reasons, and we can be very clear that this is a community support process - but I think extrinsic incentives, while powerful, won't spark as much joy with users.

[jamesefhawkins]

makes it feel like we're turning users into a commodity

Compared to basically not responding though, is an improvement?

[pauldambra]

that's very close to stack overflow except with super admins

so, we'd need to have a good solution for how to respond when someone is giving very bad advice

"oh yah, you just need to use this script to call merge on your users"

SO handles this with downvotes and the very clear understanding that you're getting advice from random people on the internet

We'd be at risk of needing to read everything anyway?

---

SO also handles things by only giving powers to people as their points accumulate.... so what's the difference between a 1 point user telling you how to fix something and a 1000 point user - in SO I can see that social capital as well as the content so I can decide who to "trust"

[pauldambra]

or for e.g. I'm allowed to edit other people's posts on stack overflow because I've been helpful enough times to be "trusted"

[charlescook-ph]

The simpler/v1 version of this could also be to just give people the support points and not give them points for giving helpful answers (if we want to avoid the complexity of managing the SO-style experience)

I suppose a solution to 'marking the correct solution as complete' is have the original question asker confirm whether or not it worked for them, so we don't have to read them all. Obviously won't screen out the 'obviously terrible advice that bricks your setup' but I assume all communities have this issue and it's probably a tolerable risk?

[pauldambra]

you could even make it clear in the UI that the OP hadn't said whether it was good advice or not 🚀

[minekansu]

I really like this gamification direction!! I can see down the line how we can extend these points to bug reports or using beta versions of new products. v2 can have things like peer review component from top users (with a hog badge?) to improve response quality or more points for complex questions.

We can also consider reaching out to a group of engaged users first to encourage them to participate with some merch incentives, e.g. users who submitted high quality feedback in recent months