For August 2018 #115
Comments
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Hey @HarryMacfinned, To some extent we never really pushed for much marketing, we kinda just always found that word of mouth and honest recommendations by regular users is the best approach for now. I am not saying that your activity on reddit is necessarily bad for Bisq, no one can know that for sure I guess. I think it is important for us to feel comfortable with rejecting compensation requests and not to experience it as something personal, because this is the way that we decide on what DAO does. |
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@alexej996 @HarryMacfinned |
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Thanks Alexej and Manfred for your comments. This is a first answer to some points raised by Alexej.
atm, concretely, on the github, the ambassador task is still tagged as "help wanted" (I verified it one minute ago -> bisq-network/roles#35 ), and reddit is still mentionned :
This is just to say that my work on reddit is absolutely not an isolated initiative from myself (I even didn't want to jump at reddit at first) I have no idea about the possible % of fake accounts on reddit, but when I see that https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/ displays 916k subscriptions, https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/ 186K subscriptions, etc,
This is just not the case. The Dieter_von_Bisq account got also >1000 upvotes for posts. And >100 upvotes for comments. In one month. This is not a sign that readers fell annoyed. I got even some "thanks" comments. From the poster's side, yes, it is indeed "so much".
Several pseudos said that they will try or retry Bisq. And some did.
I agree definitely with this way of proceeding. Every stakeholder questionning himself about spending BSQ for marketing may have a look on this open-source list : A comprehensive list of decentralized exchanges (DEX) : https://distribuyed.github.io/index/ This month I jumped several times on comments after questions about "name me a DEX ?", "name me an exchange without KYC/AML ?". And some answers just naming "Bisq", but with nothing more. In some case it will suffice. In other cases, this will not suffice. For clarity, I will also add that on a personal POV, I'm not especially interested about marketing on reddit (or elsewhere). Actually, I jumped in reddit because I felt it is a plus for Bisq, because I saw questions about Bisq on reddit without answer, because ambassador role was expressly asked, and because Bisq's founder encourages me after the 1st week, because Bisq has actually little presence on several great medias (bitcointalk, twitter, reddit). I may complete this answer with other relevant points, but I think I'll stop here for now. It's long enough ;-) |
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@HarryMacfinned |
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1/ I agree it's a good idea to fix a budget, even approximately, for things we want to be done. 2/ Concerning reddit, I forgot to give this link : https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US 3/ If we vote for instance on a marketing budget proposal, I think we could vote for several channels. Anyway, I think Bisq has to exhibit its vitality on some external channels (not just our own internal github/slack/forum). 2 additionnal general remarks on budget/numbers : 1/ For the numbers themselves, my feeling is that, atm, it's interesting to convert fuzzy BSQs in real growth. (Growth coming from all tasks : developers work, design, good docs, good network, marketing, etc) atm Bisq has linear growing + volatility. Good months and less good months. As a user I'm happy seing so much projects poping up. 2/ For the numbers, as said in another discussion, we can also keep in mind that, with the proposals and with the monthly vote, we can put the numbers at 0 at any moment. |
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Closing as complete, see #107 (comment) |
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@HarryMacfinned |
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@ManfredKarrer and @ALL It was already my intent to take the stakeholders vote in account. Last month, I requested compensation for a significant amount, because it was for a big work, and it seemed thus fair to me.
So I think this will bring the associated comp. request in the 2500-3000 BSQ zone. As I already told it above, I'm not specially interested on the reddit animator role. If 2500-3000 BSQ is still considered as too much for the reddit animation as I do it atm, it will indeed be kind from stakeholders and appreciated to tell it here before the next vote. |
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Thanks @HarryMacfinned for the reply. I would appreciate if those who rejected or voted neutral post what they think is appropriate what we should spend per month on Reddit activities. I will not vote on the next request here to leave more influence to the other contributors. I just did not want to "downvote" the last request as it was not sufficiently discussed. We are all in a learning phase how to run the DAO and to start earlier to discuss to find consensus might be a good way to deal with it. |
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I think 2500-3000 is more reasonable, but again, this is just my opinion. Since this compensation request was accepted, we can simply vote in future with this budget in mind. |
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When I first began itemizing the Twitter Admin role in June, I argued for 1,500 BSQ per month for carrying out those duties at the level that I do. I don't have exact numbers about on how much time I spend there, but on a typical month, it's many hours spent monitoring, reading and responding what others write about Bisq, carefully crafting Tweets, following up on engagement with those tweets to see how they perform, paying close attention to the wider "crypto Twitter / Bitcoin Twitter space" and so forth. I would argue Twitter is our most important communication channel with current and potential users. On normal months where I'm fully available for the work (the last couple have been exceptions), we're reaching in excess of 1M people with our efforts there, and you can see these stats in my monthly reports on the role. I have a hard time seeing how our efforts in r/Bitcoin and r/Bisq subreddits exceed the value of our Twitter efforts by 3x (the 4500 BSQ originally requested above), or even 2x (~2500–3000 BSQ, as suggested by @alexej996 above). It could be that I've dramatically underestimated the value of my Twitter efforts and should ask much more for them; it could be that I am underestimating the importance and value of our Reddit efforts; or it could be that @HarryMacfinned has overestimated the value of the latter and should ask for fewer BSQ. I do not pay close attention to our efforts on Reddit, nor have I seen any quantifiable / objective information about the reach and effectiveness of those efforts. I'm happy to be convinced that they are so valuable, but based on what I understand thus far, and according to my gut instincts about the whole situation, I'd say 3K BSQ is too much. My sanity check on this sort of stuff goes as follows: given our working valuation of 1 BSQ == 1 USD, would I pay someone 3000 USD month to carry out the activities we see on Reddit? I would unquestionably pay someone 1500 USD / month to carry out the activities we see on Twitter. Without tooting my own horn too much, I would pay a lot more. It is now essentially a professionally managed account, we've tripled our follower count since December 2017 (from ~5K to ~15K) and increased our average monthly impressions by more than 10x in the same time range (from ~100K/mo to 1M/mo) in the same amount of time. Those are the sort of numbers that I think a team would be hard pressed to produce without an experienced Twitter account manager dedicating themselves to the task. Even then you probably wouldn't produce the results, because you need the person writing the tweets to be deeply connected to the domain, know the audience, etc. Perhaps my 1500/mo figure is off by a wide margin after all. I'd like to hear the opinion of other stakeholders about how much they think our Twitter account management is worth per month. The last paragraph is a bit of a ramble, please forgive that, but it does capture my (clearly somewhat conflicted) thoughts on this matter. Thanks. |
On a typical month, it's exactly the same on reddit. But reddit's search engine is unfortunately not very powerful and only searches thru the titles. To search for "Bisq" in a subreddit, you have to search in that subreddit.
Concerning the stats on reddit, I don't know atm about tools which may give a synthetic view as with twitter stats. On another point, when I begin with reddit on july 22th, the Bisq presence on reddit was (and still is) hardly comparable to the presence on twitter. I presume that probably both channels didn't got the same care.
Efforts in r/Bitcoin are very very small. This morning the daily BOB made 56 views on r/bisq and at the same moment 522 views for the 6 crossposts.
Posting in r/bisq is imo necessary because r/bisq is Bisq's basis in reddit. My strategy atm is to crosspost the daily Bisq Offer Book to potentially concerned subreddits.
This calendar is evolving :
The goal is to, once a week, send a reminder to all those subreddits, that Bisq exists as a marketplace, to give them an example on what is on the market, and to provide links to join. In a typical day, this represents 2 or 3 posts per day + 6 crossposts. In august (count v0.8.0 in) the numbers were : 50 posts, 150 crossposts, 70 comments. It may also be worth signaling that :
When I did my first estimation for this role, I tried to find points of comparison in order to fill my comp. request properly and fairly. So for posting a bit more than twice, longer posts, I require(d) roughly twice. I remention also that this estimation was coherent with the hours spent and with my other role (support). I may well understand the remarks about the budget versus the audience.
(If we continue discussing this audience topic, another place than here maybe more appropriate.) I am a bit more annoyed about the remarks about the budget versus the work done. I'm also interested about answering @cbeams question about it's own figure, but I'll do it in another post (since it may have also other concerns). |
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I didn't realize that twitter activity is payed less than reddit. If Chris values the time spent on these things 1500 BSQ and yet it gives us so much more than reddit, we maybe shouldn't invest in reddit so much at this point. It might make more sense to have less activity on reddit then twitter if it isn't as profitable to do so, not more. I agree with Chris that we shouldn't be paying more for less value to the Bisq. |
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Lets make a though example: You have a budget if 5000 USD per month for promotion, where and how would you distribute it? @cbeams performance on Twitter is great and easily more worth then 1500 BSQ - though it is very hard to estimate and I think it is easier that we ask ourselves what we want to spend and use a budget instead of trying to find the real value. @HarryMacfinned Could you imagine to lower your efforts on Reddit in the way that it matches a budget the stakeholders are assigning for Reddit activities? I definitely appreciate that we get more presence on Reddit but I also want to keep it in right proportions to other expenses (Twitter, dev efforts, support,...). |
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I'd be happy to try this kind of budgeting approach. It'll have it's own pitfalls, of course, but it may be better than the more arbitrary calculus I've been using around Twitter. I think the important thing around these conversations is to keep progressing and keep trying new things until we land at a workable equilibrium. As I've said elsewhere, these are hard problems we're trying to solve around compensation, and though it can be a bit frustrating to do so, I think having these conversations are vital to getting there. Thanks everyone for your candor. |
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Part of the reason for Twitter's effectiveness right now is months of savvy management by @cbeams to get to this point. But valuing marketing is hard because you can put the same considerable effort in month-to-month but get wildly different results. You may get nothing for a very long time as you build an audience, whereas you'll get relatively huge results for the same work with a huge audience. We're past that dark period for Twitter, but I don't think we're there yet anywhere else. This means it's unreasonable to value marketing work on a developing platform by results, but it's also unreasonable to value marketing work on an established platform by results. Marketing needs to be valued by effort/hours put in. But because marketing efforts have varying levels of impact, unlike delivered code (for example), we need stakeholders to agree which marketing work is best to do in the first place. Which means, as @ManfredKarrer suggested above, that we need to collectively determine a monthly budget stakeholders find acceptable to spend on marketing. Personally, I did not vote for this proposal because I didn't think the Reddit work was worth that much. @HarryMacfinned I value the time you're spending there, but at this point I see Reddit being more useful as a support forum than as a marketing tool. Reddit can be hugely powerful as a marketing tool, but that power (in my experience) comes from targeted posts & comments in HUGE subreddits (like 1,000,000+ subs). That's the only way get any attention there. Otherwise, with a small following, you're basically in a room by yourself talking to yourself (even if posts there are getting >100 views, they're getting little to no exposure outside the subreddit...which means there's a near-zero chance of going viral). Contrast that with a platform like Twitter: even with a small following, you're still talking to yourself most of the time BUT you're in the same room as everyone else, so you have a decent chance of going viral with any single post. YouTube also has this benefit. Once we have a monthly budget, we can determine how many platforms we can financially support marketing on. Then we can determine which platforms those should be. Where do our most probable new users hang out? Twitter is an obvious one, email should be another one, but I'm not sure about another one. Reddit may show promise, but frankly I've never seen anyone interested in Bisq link to Reddit. Maybe YouTube? Also I think we should also consider partnering with existing channels for exposure instead of trying to build our own channels. Twitter is crucial, and we've nailed that. Others are questionable/TBD. Perhaps it's better to spend time getting interviews on the many great podcasts & YouTube channels, doing guest blog posts, etc. on channels that already exist. The bang-for-buck factor will be through the roof, and if we pick smartly, we'll KNOW we're reaching the right people. Bisq has a stellar brand and the trust of many of the smartest, most prolific figures in Bitcoin—we should make use of it. |
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@ManfredKarrer wrote :
Concerning @cbeams 's performance on Twitter, my opinion since the beginning (and as Chris himself expressed it somewhere in github, saying "I would pay more for the job"), is that this role (as achieved by him atm) is more worth then 1500 BSQ. I know enough about twitter to say that. The case with reddit, as I do it atm, is that the role is quite a whole.
[It must however be pointed that the pure views metrics is not the whole picture. Bumping in small but motivated subreddits (eg bitcoin national subreddits may also pay)] In reddit, what could be lowered/cut separately ?
The reddit channel itself doesn't seem to provoke enthousiasm here. I'm also very happy that we had this discussion now. And I thank everybody telling their opinion in advance. It's really better than at a end of month votation. Some post-scriptum general remarks :
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@HarryMacfinned That does not mean I am against promotion on Reddit as I think it is still a big channel where we can find potential new users. For reducing the efforts to meet a smaller budget I would leave it to you how to do it with the highest efficiency. |
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Hi,
I think that the value of reddit as a tool to help Bisq grow is limited and I would propose a monthly limit of 500 BSQ.
The work as a reddit ambassador does not require a high level of qualification either.
Joachim
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Summary
6900This compensation request :
Some tasks are a bit new. I did my best for fair single evaluations.
Apart from single evaluations, I have also a global evaluation goal, which is simply to have compensation request inline with time spent.
This month (like june and july), my time spent on the Bisq project was full time.
Contributions delivered
Roles performed
Substantive reports
Support staff | L1 Support Agent roles#64 (comment) | (BSQ requested = 2000)
Evaluation is based and intended in line with : previous compensation requests, For December 2017 #24 , and other support compensation requests.
Reddit ambassador | Ambassador roles#35 (comment) | (BSQ requested = 4500)
Evaluation is based and intended in line with : comparison with other work (support), time spent, comparison with analog existing role : twitter admin -> Twitter Admin roles#21 (comment)
NB : If I continue with this role, I may/should ask less for the next month(s) (~3500 BSQ). But for this month, the starting of the thing ate me really a considerable time, and I request compensation for that specific phase.
Nothing to report
Other points
I'm participating in the support, and I'm playing an ambassador role on reddit. Like for other people concerned, this requires staying aware and participating about Bisq's life on all the places where I have access (slack, forum, etc).
This eats significant time. This time is (partly) integrated in the respective concerned BSQ requests.
(This being said, I'm still far from being aware of the whole).
I publish also daily the Bisq offer book + F2F offer book on the Bisq discourse forum + some other sparse promotion. This publishing being part of the reddit daily publication is thus integrated herein.
I published some issues (desktop etc) on github. I worked and helped also on the translation proposal managed by @ripcurlx .
I'll probably take one holiday week in the second week of september. Without internet. So sorry, but (apart moral support ;-)) no participation to Bisq from me during this period.
Contributions in progress
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