website, contentI’m creating an Israeli crowd-sourcing website for high school kids to find study material.
I want to encourage people to upload high quality studying material, here is what I’ve done so far:
Should I be appealing to peoples emotions and trying to make this about being a group task that we are all doing together?
What is the best way to convey that I am essentially giving users a free platform to help each other and to organize and sort all the required study material for the high school final exams?
Stackoverflow and Wikipedia seem to have succeeded at what you are trying to do. They are quite good at making people do stupid useful tasks for internet points. Going by those you should offer free useful content and hope some people participate.
Don’t be disheartened by low turnover numbers. >90% of the people will get the free content and never contribute anything. That’s just how it is.
In the beginning you will just have to kind of full time add content yourself until the site grows to self-sustainability.
I don’t think there is some emotional trick to make people contribute to your site, instead you need to solve real problems people have.
What you’re talking about here is gamification and there’re plenty of resources free online. In youtube and elsewhere. Social tests on gamified scenarios have been done already so use that information in your favor.
After doing a couple of gamified projects myself, nwp’s answer is pretty accurate, except I think emotion is the currency you want to play with.
Yes, they are internet points, badges etc. But achieving them is hard, and being rewarded for that work is precious. That’s why they appear next to the nick in this website for example: so people can show off they “hard earn” merits. It’s a symbol of respect, of responsibility.
One thing I’ve found works wonders is giving the contributors power over other people. For example, your best contributors should be able to have a say in the website’s management. They could, for example, moderate other users (watch out with that).
Like I said, look up gamification techniques and best of luck.
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