Default View for Communities
I think the default view for a community should be New not Trending.
With communities, we have introduced the concept of subscription, which inherently implies:
- All content posted in this community matters to the subscriber
- Keeping up with it should be made easy
Because signal to noise ratio is low in communities, the Trending page loses relevance. A trending page makes more sense for a high level page (e.g. Homepage) where trending posts from trending communities can be highlighted, from among many posts.
This can be used to help people find interesting communities to join, but once they join, the concept of trending won't apply. They will want to "keep up with the community."
Currently, when a new post is made in a community, with the current default view of Trending, the post's visibility is limited. It's kind of a chicken and egg situation. New posts won't get to "trend" unless they get engagement, but they won't get engagement because they are not visible. And people have to switch over to New to see this new content.
I think a default view akin to New will:
- create more natural content consumption and community curation
- increase visibility for new posts
- increase engagement as a consequence
A way to track community content
I also think that we should introduce a "floating count" beside each community that one has subscribed to; like the one we have for notifications. So we can see how many new posts have been added to a community since we last viewed it.
Implementation
I have a few ideas for implementing this in Hivemind so that the backend will support this. It's preliminary studies at this point, but it seems like a relatively easy implementation. I wanted to get feedback from you all before opening an issue over at GitHub to discuss/suggest this.
So what do you think?
I agree with a focus on new postings. I think communities could also benefit from being sortable by recent replies. Perhaps not a default view, but a toggle.
I think we’ll see more top level posts that are queries or conversation prompts, with the replies and nested comments forming the actual “meat” of the content. It would be nice to have this type of engagement receiving “new” placement options as long as the discussion is active; similar to a forum style.
Could add a sorting category called "Activity" that does this.
Interesting ideas. I like them.
Also, there's a new feature I will start working on soon that caters specifically to discussions/conversations, I call it discussion rooms. It proposes adding a section for holding discussions within a community, where each discussion (or "room") has a realtime rolling thread experience, like a Telegram group. I shared rough ideas about it in this post.
Agree!
While I tend to agree with you that posts in a community sorted by New would be more useful than sorted by Trending due to much better signal-to-noise ratio, I think there still will be a lot of variation from community to community. So I think a setting that each community can set for itself will be better. I imagine a bunch of such settings that will allow for a community to customize its space and make it a good fit for its particular needs.
What do you think?
Excellent point. It should be a setting that each community can choose for itself, according to its own needs. I agree.
Yea, I think this is the best solution. Give the community owner the control to set defaults, then users can go in a customize.
agreed