I don't think this is great advice. For one, I don't have enough Bitcoins to spend them in an undiscerning way. Secondly, another powco user brought up that they felt discouraged after posting many links this week, because they felt that others were not engaging in the same way. Posting many links is great for keeping content on the page, but I would prefer a feed where everyone is posting what they truly feel MUST be shared. Thirdly, because I feel this way, I mainly share and boost content that I feel a necessity to propagate, rather than posting in a lackadaisical way as I might on legacy platforms.

pow.co is a website that I have wanted to engage more with, but I have mostly found the user experience of boosting to be very unintuitive and unclear.

Firstly, I don't feel that the term "Difficulty" is used in an intuitive way for first time users of the boosting process. Through conversations I've had with more experienced users of the site, I've been able to get a better understanding of what increasing the difficulty of a post does - and from what I can understand, increasing the "Difficulty" of a post is done with the intent to push it towards the top of the home page.

From personal experience, I found it challenging to wrap my head around the fact that "increasing the difficulty" of a post is done to show support for the post by bringing more attention to it, because "difficulty" is a term that I typically would assume to have an inverse relationship to support. A more intuitive term could be "Support", "Strength", "Emphasis", etc. as opposed to "Difficulty".
Some unit of measurement to the right of this text field would help communicate what exactly is being measured here as well - as a "first-time" user it feels unclear to me how exactly the value in this field correlates to the amount I'll end up paying, even if it seems obvious to seasoned users.

One unusual behavior of the "Difficulty" field of the "Boostpow" window is that as soon as I press the up or down arrow on the right side of the field, the knob of the "satoshis" slider jumps to the middle. One aspect of this that feels unintuitive is that pressing either the up or down arrow of this field results in the same behavior of the knob jumping to the right - but the behavior I would expect to see would be if I press the down arrow, the knob jumps to the left, and if I press the up arrow, the knob jumps to the right. It confuses me that pressing either arrow results in the knob moving in the same direction on the slider either way.
To add to this confusing correlation between the "Difficulty" text field and the "satoshis" slider, is that after initially pressing the up or down arrow once, repeatedly pressing either arrow afterwards has no observable influence on the knob. Why does the knob move when the arrow is initially pressed, but never again after that? I think more consistency between how these two components of this window correlate would make the process much more intuitive and less confusing.

Another gripe that I have with this window is the button at the bottom: "Buy Boost 1375 satoshis". Is this meant to read as "Buy Boost (1375 satoshis)" or "Buy Boost: 1375 satoshis"? The only thing that's somewhat clear in this phrasing is that the cost is 1375 satoshis, but the lack of punctuation is initially off-putting because it's not clear at first that one part of this phrase is an action (Buy Boost) and the other part is the price (1375 satoshis). A clearer way of communicating what pressing this button does would be to separate the two halves of this phrase using some punctuation or a line break with some hierarchy of scale.

I also think first-time users would appreciate more clarity at this stage that their transaction needs to be mined and the effect of their boost will not be immediately noticeable. This also took me a long time to wrap my head around at first. A small window popping up after paying to boost could help reiterate this delay in observable influence to new users in order to help clear up any confusion of "why does the difficulty of this post look to be the same value even though I just boosted it?". And this window can of course have a "Do not show this message again" box for returning users.

And two more nitpicks for the Boostpow window:

No cursor appears when the "Tag" text field is clicked on, which goes against what one would traditionally expect to occur when interacting with a text field.
"Developer" appears to be spelled wrong at the bottom, and typos are never a reassuring thing to see when making any financial transaction, including micropayments.

The icon for boosting is not very clear either - iconography such as the Reddit upvote or the Twitter heart are unmistakable in what they're intended to do - to show support and highlight a post that you feel others should see. This icon just reads to me like a chipped circle. The upwards point at the bottom of the icon is the most communicative part, but it's such a small detail that it gets lost easily and feels unimportant.

Since I'm still warming up to boosting in general for the reasons I explained above, I haven't dived much deeper into the rest of the site, but one more suggestion I have would be to ditch the purple on the dark theme. It's just a bit of an assault on my eyes to see my entire screen filled up with this eggplant color - and I absolutely love purple, but I think it would be best used in smaller doses in this case. You can have color on your website without every element of the site conforming to it. Less is more. And the bright lilac of the light theme is an even greater assault on my eyes that I can't tolerate to look at for more than a minute at a time. I don't usually use light themes though so take this bit of feedback with a grain of salt, but again I would stress that your website can still use all these colors, but less can be more in this case.

One last thing - the F.A.Q. page is really daunting as well. Seeing how long all the answers are at once, especially when I'm seeing answers to questions I may never have an interest in asking in the first place, makes me feel like I may never acclimate to your website due to how much reading and preparation I would possibly have to do. An easy fix for this could be to collapse the answers to all the questions, and allow the user to expand the questions they're interested in order to see just the answer(s) that are relevant to them in the moment. This design can allow users to parse all the questions quickly at first, and then decide which ones they would like an explanation for at their own pace.

Hope this helps.

How Can We Get More People to Use PowCo?

The main reason Pow.Co is slow to gain more users currently is not because it's not a great or useful product or because it needs more immediate polishing but because it's a quite niche product that's inherently difficult to understand and is only available in an even more incredibly niche market.

I am confident that PowCo can see mainstream adoption and be a very useful tool for humanity, but I don't see any way that that can happen quickly. If I had to put a number on it, I'd guess 7-20 years, but that's just a guess.

Currently, there simply are not enough people on Earth who comprise a potential target market at this time to see significant adoption. There are two main reasons for this which relate back to my initial thesis that PowCo occupies a small niche within a tiny niche:

First (and perhaps this goes without saying, but I think it provides a relevant framework for the second point), only people in the Bitcoin Economy can use it. The amount of people in the world who actually participate in the bitcoin economy on a regular is quite small. I don't know if it's 2,000 or 20,000 people, but I would be very surprised if it was even on the higher end of that range. Twetch has ~130k accounts, but there were 11 online yesterday. (They left an online counter up at https://twetch.com/mint if anyone's curious.).

While Twetch has been at least temporarily largely abandoned by its creators, it is but one example of a general (I believe temporarily) declining (or at least certainly not quickly growing) interest or in BSV for the time being, which leads to the next point.

Second, convincing those who are still actively or potentially actively involved in the Bitcoin economy to use PowCo, i.e. potential customers, is very difficult. Even among those that are still active in Bitcoin, the concept of Boost is generally either foreign to them or they aren't yet buying the idea of it yet.

There was a tweet or twetch going around recently that I saw saying something to the effect of "I have yet to see a non-autistic explanation of Boost/Powco", however at this point, I don't know if it's possible to have a "non-autistic" explanation of Boost right now. I.e. it's generally only the autists who tend to be early adopters to these concepts because they are fixatedly analytical with an often total disregard for how strange seeming or largely unaccepted an idea is.

In the long-run, a few people are every so often affected by those around them who use boost and I believe that effect will eventually snowball to mass adoption. There may be ways to accelerate this effect that I will discuss briefly later. We have talked elsewhere about the difficulty of bringing people into the bitcoin economy and using Boost is a similar story even within the bitcoin economy.

As an aside, sometimes for fun I like to tell people outside of the bitcoin economy about the Peafowl Excellence show just to see how quickly their eyes glaze over or they change the subject. This stuff is very niche, but that doesn't mean it has to stay this way forever.

Maybe this post doesn't have enough solutions...but I think understanding the environment in which you're trying to find solutions is important, The internet was never going to be huge in 1994, and if you were trying to build on it with other people, it was very useful to realize the kind of person who is likely to work with you.

Perhaps the solution in the short-run is to figure out what the 'avatar' is for a likely potential PowCo customer. What does he look like? What other products does he likely use? What does he value? How can we identify him/her? Is there a "sales" process we can refine to bring more people into PowCo?

I don't know the answers, but I am making this post as a jumping off point for discussion because I suspect some useful ones exist. If we keep building and using PoW and figuring out how to best advertise it to those with ears to hear, I am confident it will be a huge success in the long-run.