General community feedback, feel free to post your ideas & suggestions

Quick topic to let everyone reading this forum know that if you don’t already have, you can create an account here and start posting. You don’t need to be a scientist, you don’t need to be a dev, so feel free to create an account and make suggestions. It’s a community driven project.

Meanwhile, I’m creating this topic to add some of my own suggestions and ideas (over time), feel free to add yours too. And If you have a proposal (or an idea requiring it) feel free to create a dedicated topic about it too.

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Ok, so I’ll start with simple ideas that come on top of my mind.

First, I’m confused by what access/role it gives you when you verify your wallet with guild.xyz for Discord.

I have verified my wallet with my Discord username and used to notice that I was in a special category of members in the Discord userlist, but no longer. Still, there are some people who still are in a special category called ‘Member’ but then if I’ve linked my Discord and wallet but I’m not into it, is this something else? Is it then ‘members’ who donated to VitaDAO Membership - Longevity Research DAO and not ‘members’ who linked their wallet and their Discord? Super confusing, when I was actually in a separate user list before (maybe this was taken down to avoid scammers spotting members who hold Vita?).

This brings me to VitaDAO Membership - Longevity Research DAO which I think is a good idea. But as @catthu said on another topic, the name maybe should be different?

What do I propose?

  • Explain (eventually but not necessarily change the Discord ‘become-a-member’ title) on this Discord subchannel what exactly do you get by linking your wallet and Discord username and also based on roles (tokenholder, vitalian, maximalist) because as it is, I did it and I have no idea what more channels (or something else) I gained access to.

  • VitaDAO Membership - Longevity Research DAO This should be called ‘Supporters’ or something alike in my opinion. You are supporting Vitadao research/project with your participation. And if it is a participation, does it give you special perks? It should be explained if so, does it give you vote weight based on your participation? Is there any advantage if you are a corporation? As an user do you get special access on Discord or something else?

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Also I always feel embarrassed to ask “dumb” questions or comments. I don’t know if it is because there is a lack of a dedicated place for it or a lack of high level chat (it’s all very technical). I would like to see debates between average community members getting inflamed about some subject or simply ask about updates and be excited about it.

Maybe this forum version replaced with: https://invisioncommunity.com/ software and having a large part dedicated to the community posting (news / general / press / technical / fintech … )

Anyway, my ideas are perhaps bad, go ahead, I like when people give their opinion…

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Rather than changing forum software completely which I assume would be challenging, maybe some more user friendly theme (idk which software this forum is running on and if many alternative templates are possible). Personally, as an example, I really like the Invision “Traditional view”: latest active topics on the right side, subforum on the left with latest active topic on each subforum. Forums - Invision Community

But that makes sense only if we want to turn this forum in a more end user oriented forum and want to expose links to the forum on the main website for instance (which doesn’t seem to be the case).

But then that brings me to a related point, do we really want to add even more info on the main website. I really like the website as I said before, but the main page is almost too full of information and it’s hard to highlight the latest news. For instance, the latest blog posts (which I assume is a lot of work) you have to scroll a lot to get to it on the main page, while this is dynamic (new) content and the rest is often static content for a while.

Anyway, as always just throwing ideas around, feel free to discuss.

Edit: also if we want to have a community hub forum (if that’s what we want) the forum could have its own dedicated domain (too bad that vitachat.com is already taken, it seems. Maybe vitadaochat.com but it’s a bit longer).

Small design flaw on the website mainpage:

  • Following @philip_rhoades post today, that made me think maybe we should have an introduction / new members subforum.

  • We should have a pinned topic in Proposals subforum briefly explaining the proposal process (numbers of votes, different phases…)

Excellent suggestions!

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Ty, I’m happy to see some stuff I’ve said can be of help and have been heard already, that’s cool, not saying I’m always right.

Regarding this forum, after checking it up I see it’s running on discourse.

Not sure what other people think, it certainly seems effective for workflow to me but also not really user oriented in my opinion.

On the other hand, here is an ips board example, but ips is not free:
https://ipsfocus.net/themes/

Anyway, lot of themes available for Discourse:

Can’t say I’ve looked too much, but couldn’t see one that I like so far.

Apparently Unreal forum also uses Discourse, maybe they use a custom theme:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/

I suppose if we really wanted to change forum software we could deprecate this one and keep it up open, that would remove a lot of hassle migrating, not saying we must change forum software anyway.

Also VitaChat.com is available for … $3k

On a different topic: Super cool to stream 3rd VitaDAO DeSci & Longevity Symposium both on Zoom and Youtube. Zoom is a good tool but not as mainstream as Youtube.

I was thinking that maybe we should have a special event notification on the website for this. Maybe a countdown or maybe simply by putting the live youtube video stream on the main page. I saw that you created a page for it but no direct (easy) link that I could find from the website main page. Maybe suggestions for 4th Symposium anyway :slight_smile:

Also maybe promote a link on reddit/r/longevity I might do that if I think to do it.

Ok I made a post, let’s see if reactions are positive:

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Back to the forum idea, here is invision cloud hosting (easy to deploy afaik) pricing (scroll down for “beginner” plan price which starts at 49$/month and include imo all features needed, it’s possible to upgrade anyway).

I know people here probably like an open source solution but wanted to share it anyway.

We discussed this a bit further (general longevity forum idea) with Laurence Ion on Discord, I find the conversation interesting so I’ll also copy paste it here:

keepx — Yesterday at 5:20 PM
am I the only one who’d like to have a dedicated domain address for the forum?

Laurence Ion — Today at 2:07 AM
Great idea, maybe one forum for governance one for general longevity community discussions?

keepx — Today at 11:15 AM
Could be, but we want to expose general people to governance decisions imo and have them to vote and feel engaged not keep discussions in a niche. On the other hand if we go a single forum approach (longevity discussion / governance talk) and VitaDao become really popular it could be a nuisance if everyone comment on anything. But then again on a single forum I suppose you could restrict access right (read / write) based on certain criteria (not like excluding but based on post counts or account creation date for instance).

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While thinking about my previous monologue of having a dedicated domain for the forum, it’s also true that having all projects under a common subdomain is neat too I have to admit:

https://gov.vitadao.com/
https://dao.vitadao.com

Still, gov.vitadao.com could be renamed to forum.vitadao.com

It’s a governance forum ok, but it also has to be a place for the general public to discuss. I’m still not a fan of the forum layout anyway.

Also, I think a button directing the forum on this page, could fit well:

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Also, I had never connected my wallet to the website, but I tried, just to see, first things that come to my mind:

  • Why is this an option, it does not seem to give me any additional benefit and if I want to vote I still have to connect my wallet to Snapshot, so that got me confused (unless future updates allow you to do stuff, the only thing it allow is to see your balance it seems).

  • The Staking / Unstaking is confusing, as I understand it (and as discussed earlier this week on Discord) it’s only for people who used to stake for voting as I understand it.

After looking for a while in the Discourse themes I found that one that add some life in my opinion, image background is just an example… It’s based on default theme.

I did a small video.

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/815590860

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I know I keep begging about exposing this forum more to the general public (this doesn’t need to be a semi private community like it is now (I’m sorry it really is). It needs to be a public average Joe’s forum to gain people interest(my opinion anyway) with maybe some sub forum sections (but I repeat myself).

That got me thinking maybe there should weighted vote here too, based on whether you just a regular guy or scientist. Before it can be further passed to go to vote on or no, Snapshot. But like I said earlier I’m not even sure about the clear rules of voting as they’re not exposed in a layman fashion in a pinned topic.

I’ll stop spamming posts for a while.

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All great feedback @keepx . Just so you know, we’re in the midst of a www.vitadao.com website redesign, so a number of these pages will be changing on the main website.

Stay tuned!

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Thank you Todd.

By creating this topic, I hoped to spark some conversation. It’s nice to receive some feedback but I wish there would be some other regular people like me who’d feel able to participate, that was the point of this topic. I also tried to spark some conversation on reddit. Really, I think VitaDao is a great project and you have a superb team / working groups. I think we need (not saying there is no effort in this way - like the overlay journal, seems a great idea) to reach a hand to a larger audience, hence my idea of having this forum presented in a more user friendly aspect with also a message toward a broader longevity enthusiasts community with some non gov subforums (general longevity talk / user presentation and so on), I think both can coexist.

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I agree with you wholeheartedly. The issue you are trying to address is something we have been working on in the past couple of months. Discourse is intended to be for token holders and is token gated, and is really focused on the operations of the DAO. It’s not the best tech. solution for wider engagement and that is where we are going with the website in general - to make the DAO more accessible.

Discord is not as common outside of the gamer/web3 world so the forum issue remains a challenge for web2 natives. Discourse is big in DAOs, not in the general public.

We’re re-evaluating our social media approaches based on survey data and user journey interviews, and trying to find ways to onboard a lot more people to the community. Reddit seems like it should be effective, but we’re not seeing a lot of activity there as far as I have seen. More work to be done here for sure.

You’ll see in June some new initiatives to reach out to that wider audience both in messaging on social media, but also in the engagement tools we will be developing for Member Services in the coming months, and of course the Ambassador Program.

Much more to be done!

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(Discourse) It’s not the best tech. solution for wider engagement

Totally agree, Discourse is more like a technical working forum rather than a general all purpose forum.

and that is where we are going with the website in general - to make the DAO more accessible.

On the website yes, but for me this is not a direct interactive social tool to engage with people, you can certainly find help / resources and so on: not saying it’s not important.

Discord is not as common outside of the gamer/web3 world so the forum issue remains a challenge for web2 natives.

Yes, while Discord is great, it’s a chat not a forum (yes also with its own demography) and you can’t have long lasting topics discussion easily on a chat.

Reddit seems like it should be effective, but we’re not seeing a lot of activity there as far as I have seen.

I can keep the sub updated, it’s not much work, can’t hurt.

You’ll see in June some new initiatives to reach out to that wider audience both in messaging on social media, but also in the engagement tools we will be developing for Member Services in the coming months, and of course the Ambassador Program.

Looking forward!

Discourse is intended to be for token holders and is token gated, and is really focused on the operations of the DAO.

That’s the part where I disagree a bit, imo you try to draw a line (I say this in a general term, I have this feeling about Vitadao sometime) when it should all be merged and more accessible to everyone, then you can gate voting or limit some access features to tokens holders for instance (but agreed again on the Discourse argument). I sometimes feel we work between ourselves and nobody outside know about it.

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We recently did a survey of 1100+ respondents from the general public outside of the Longevity Bubble we tend to live in.

74% of respondents didn’t even know what Longevity Science was all about. Of those, 14% were in the healthcare field ! So, we have a lot of work to do, as we tend to operate in our own echo chamber most of the time, and to your point people don’t even know what the field in general is all about.

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