I just created my CATO Community account and, while I realize this is a new thing, I wanted to share some thoughts on my experience.
It would have been helpful to get an introduction to the platform as soon as I logged in that could "show me around" basically. In the invite email that I got from my account rep, he gave me a pretty good overview of what the purpose of this community would be, but I think it might be beneficial to have a page that gives the platform an introduction from the beginning.
For example, I see that I have this title "Stardust" under my name, and I saw someone else with "Meteor". I don't know what this means, but I assume its some kind of ranking system based off of my participation in the platform. Perhaps how many likes I've gotten. It would be nice to know what the rankings mean, and how to improve.
This is just an idea, but perhaps you could also improve your rank by 1) filling out details in your profile 2) reading the Community Guidelines 3) or perhaps accomplishing other objectives that the CATO Community moderators would find helpful.
I'm not necessarily advocating for something like daily login rewards, or giving "points" to someone for reading an article, but I do think it would be good to have goals for community members to achieve (like making your 1st post). In fact, I've seen this done in many other communities where they have a pinned Discussion for newcomers to simply say "hi" and introduce themselves.
Once again, this may be unfair because this community just got started. I completely realize that. These are just some of my thoughts, and I welcome any other thoughts for this discussion about improving the newcomer experience.
