Growing Tor
What can we do to facilitate the growth of our user base? How do we increase the rate of user acquisition and retention?
From Arthur's notes:
- We should work on improving the download page. We can do A/B testing, but we need to consider how to do privacy-preserving metrics.
- Karsten is doing highly relevant work on measuring website visits and downloads.
- Let's talk to expers on growth at other companies who have successfully scaled up, such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, MoveOn, SumOfUs.
- We can produce an organizations' guide to setting up onion services, along the lines of Alec Muffett's work.
- Share buttons (Twitter/Facebook) on Tor Browser. It's important to make sure the buttons aren't violating privacy!
- We should create ready-to-use banners (with embed code) to make it easy for people to promote Tor. Maybe we can gamify Tor promotion? Produce a leaderboard or badges to show who are the best Tor promoters.
- Create scripts that allow super-easy setup of various kinds of onion services. Integrate with Let's Encrypt?
We also discussed how to work on education and promoting Tor's values:
Open questions:
- Onion services are perhaps the least understood by the public
- How do we promote and facilitate "legitimiate" use cases of onion services?
- Can we post a simple online refutation of myths about onion services?
- It's hard to get real "users" to talk to reporters about Tor. How do we do this?
- We should do more to develop and promote educational resources for Tor teachers and trainers.