When people start participating in a new community, they usually know little about it. The only way to understand how it works is through trial and error. The most important thing to do to make this go well is to provide quick and clear feedback on every action of a user.
There are three types of feedback:
- Positive feedback happens when other users react positively to actions of the user.
- Negative feedback happens when other users express disapproval of actions of the user.
- No feedback is the situation when the user does not receive any reaction from the community to their actions.
Timely positive feedback is the foundation for engaging new users. Negative feedback conveys information and is better than no feedback at all. The absence of any reaction to a user’s action or a reaction that is difficult to interpret is something that should be avoided at all costs.
If your community already has some regular users, you need to bring to their attention all activities from new users before providing feedback yourself. The end goal is to make sure that all new users receive some feedback on their actions, hopefully, by other users.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.