Counterintuitive wisdom from "Design for Community":

"Go to the front door of your site and start clicking. Take the most direct path to the post button—the button that a user would click to commit his post to your site. Count the clicks it takes to get from start to finish. The more clicks it takes, the better the posts will be."

We are so trained to "reduce friction" wherever possible. But the implicit tradeoff is toward quantity, rather than quality. The author also talks about leading users through existing content before they are prompted to contribute their own. This encourages people to internalize the community's culture before disrupting it with their own untempered perspective.

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and people think im silly for suggesting easy is not always better🤷

It always says a lot to me when a newbie in an IRL group is willing to initially be quiet

Make your users compile from source. Then the posts will be stellar.

That mimics real life nicely. Almost every social situation has some sort of initiation process, even if it's self-imposed.

Try before you buy has been around for ages.

Not sure what is meant about many clicks. It’s never about the clicks but the effort you’ve put into something. Also, it’s never black and white. Some apps benefit from reduced friction and others from expanded effort.

Nuance. Nuance everywhere!