DApp of the week: Musing.io

Welcome to the first DApp of the week, a post series where I will look at one DApp for the Steem blockchain in depth. I won't just spend a few minutes with the DApp, but instead really try to use it for a little while, find out what works, what don't, and what can be improved.

This first week we will be starting with the Musing.io DApp. This is a Question & Answer (Q&A) DApp where users can ask other users about anything at all. In the same way, anyone can answer these questions, and of course upvote others who post a good answer.

If you are familiar with Quora, then you know what it's like. The two big differences between Musing and Quora is that Musing runs on the Steem blockchain instead of a regular database, and it rewards the users to participate. Anyone with can upvote any question or answer as they wish, but the Musing curation team also spend a lot of time making sure that good contributions get upvoted.

The entire DApp runs on the Steem blockchain, and all questions and answers are stored as custom Json. This means that the questions and answers are only viewable on Musing.io or potentially other DApps who look for this information, and you won't be able to view it directly on Steemit or Busy.org.

What's good about Musing.io

There are lots of good things about Musing. They have a fully functional product, so you can log in with Steemconnect and answer a question right now if you want to. The interface is nice and clean, I have yet to discover any bugs or problems in the few months that I have been using it, and it's an overall nice app that does what it promises.

Both questions and answers get published as comments unless you select it to also be published as a post, so Musing won't spam your feed if you decide to use it. This was a problem during the first few weeks of it's life, but this was changes ages ago, so you no longer need to fear that.

The Musing curation team is working hard at rewarding good contributions, so people who make a good effort in answering questions can often find themselves with a nice upvote. I'm talking several dollars worth of upvotes for a great answer here, but just cents and pennies.

I have probably earned a few hundred dollars worth of Steem by answering questions on Musing in the last few months, so it can also be profitable. If you want to make money there, then be prepared to actually put in a lot of work, because you will need to spend a lot of time to write a quality answer if you want to get good upvotes from the curation team. But it's a great arena for those of us who enjoy teaching other people stuff we already know.

What could be improved with Musing.io

Like with all DApps, there's room for improvement with Musing, and I will use this section to share some of my opinions on what could be improved upon. The main problem I typically have when using Musing is the huge amount of spam on the DApp. You would not believe how many spammers it attracts! If you go to find questions to answer, you will need navigate between hundreds of shitty, low-quality questions before you get to a real one.

Just look at that screencap to see what I'm talking about. And while a few questions like this would not ruin the user experience significantly, seeing hundreds of these every day does. I typically see 10+ questions along the line of "What do I need to do before starting a business?" every single day. So there are probably many hundreds of these on the Musing DApp already.

Anyway, this is my biggest problem with Musing, and I would really love for the developers or curation team to find a way to hide or delete spam. It's really ruining the user experience for real users who think this is a great platform to learn and teach, and don't really feel like spending too much time looking at spambots.

Apart from the spam, there's also some "missing features" that I would love to see added, such as:

• A feature to mark questions as "already answered", and be able to link this to a similar question that has already been asked. As I said above, Musing tend to attract some users that ask the same questions ten times each day.
• The ability to filter for only finding questions that no one has already answered. This would when I want to find unanswered questions that I have the answer to. Right now these are pretty difficult to find unless you sort by "All questions" and scroll to look for them.
• The ability to downvote/flag answers that are plain wrong, or maybe mark them as wrong. I don't really like it when people are writing answers that are incorrect, and we should be able to do something about this. Right now the only solution is to write a reply, but these are rarely read by anyone.
• The ability to report a question or answer to the moderation team. Right now we need to report spam, plagiarism etc. on the official Discord channel, which is a big hassle compared to how it would be if we could just mark it directly from the Musing UI.

These things are not meant to say that Musing is a bad DApp, but rather as a list of things I would like to see improved, and that new users should be aware of before getting involved with the DApp.

Is it worth getting involved with Musing.io at the moment?

Yes, it's absolutely worth getting involved with Musing at this point, despite the crazy amount of spam / low-quality content there. If you have a question, try asking it there. You just might get yourself a good answer (as long as the question is not very niche specific), and maybe even an upvote or two.

Musing does not currently have their own coin or token, but all upvotes give you Steem, so that's great. It might even be better when they implement their own SMT, and I will certainly try to get my hand on lots of "Musing coins" once they release that.

More DApps of the week

This is the very first DApp of the week, so this section will be updated every time I write a new entry into the series. I will publish a new DApp "review" next Saturday, so give me a follow to make sure you don't miss it.

Thanks for stopping by!

I hope you enjoyed this post. This is the first post of the "DApp of the week" series, so please give me constructive feedback if you got it. Was it okay, or did you feel like I missed some important information? And thanks for checking it out.