One of the problems is simply that Steem is so much smaller than Twitter, etc. And keep in mind that Facebook, etc, were forced upon humans in a wide variety of ways. They had a lot of help making it go main stream.

Look, that's just silly. Nobody forced Twitter or Facebook on anyone. That is conspiracy theory of the purest ray sublime, and it confuses wishful thinking (because it creates a powerful enemy which you get to oppose, making you a hero) with reasonable, sensible observations of the marketplace, where Twitter and Facebook provided an experience for users that gave them something they wanted. And continues to!

You can make no progress in understanding how systems work or should work without actually understanding how they do work. Both historically and currently.

I reiterate, nobody forced anybody to use Twitter and Facebook. They dominate the social media landscape where MySpace used to rule by dint of simply being better for user purposes than their competitors, and one day they too will pass into the history of experiences of users as better platforms and tools come along.

This has to be the core of understanding before you can actually make anything better.

What is Usenet?

See, this is why we shouldn't let anyone younger than 30 pretend to be software engineers and work on social media platforms. There is a vast well of ignorance about what has gone before, what has worked, what has failed, and an insipid lack of the ability to reflect because they have no idea of what has existed.

Asking me "what is USENET?" here is like jumping into the middle of a conversation about kayaking and asking "what is a canoe?" It's a literally that elemental.

USENET was the original, federated, highly distributed, highly parallelized communications medium, long before Mastodon or blockchains or a twinkle in anybody's eye. The only thing that really preceded it was email, literal email, and the cognitive division between email and USENET was the specific differentiation between narrowband communication and broadcast communication. Email was for talking to a specific person or small group, USENET was for talking to the public and large groups.

It provided a federated platform on which client software would hang, allowing users to interact with the continuous flow of information across the network, channelized into groups based on common interest, most interfaces providing a lot easier and more immersive ability to get into those conversations. Hell, the Markdown notation that we use to designate a conversational quote is based off of what involved this common convention and emailing USENET.

Busy.org and SteemPeak are both far better UIs than basic Steemit, but neither of them are even remotely as useful as Gnus from 1994. Neither of them, and no social media interface for any of the players in the space right now, provide the kind of experience for filtering, sorting, and discovering content that we took for granted on cell-based interfaces over 20 years ago.

It's embarrassing that developers don't know that. It's embarrassing that users don't know that, though at least marginally easier to explain.

I say that to say that I know some of it might be tough to do, and yet I am guessing that Steemit could probably do better in regards to finding ways to give users more customization options which MySpace had.

Nobody wants MySpace back, because MySpace was complete crap.

But we're not talking about customization issues like making your background sparkly and playing annoying songs as soon as someone touches your template, we are talking about the system being responsive to you making clear indications about the stuff that you're interested in and helping you find that, read that, experience that, so that your time with the network isn't wasted.

Again, it's not about making pretty pages, it's about making a user experience that gives people what they want.

If Steem does not already have groups or communities, then perhaps that would help. I thought I heard some people talking about how that new feature would be launching with HF21. I will be looking around to see whatever happened to that.

Wait, you have no idea that none of the Steem interfaces have groups or communities and yet you feel like you have something to add to this conversation?

The developing group has been talking about adding some sort of community mechanism to the platform for over three years now. They reported that they are on the verge of doing so right now. However, none of the documentation or description that they have released as to how that is supposed to work actually makes any sense, what I can make out of it suggests that it is more focused on creating spaces for the use of SMTs than actual content organization and aggregation just as Tribes is, and nothing that I see being kicked around actually strikes me as useful organizing principle to address any of the issues that we've had with discovery or user experience since the beginning.

These are real problems. Problems that we are not going to see the solution to. The current design was clearly heavily inspired by Reddit, but without implementing the one part of the platform that actually makes it compelling and useful to people – subReddits. It's that caliber of thinking that we have come to expect moving forward.