Parley Review

As you can tell in my last post, I tried out the Parley interface for the first time with mixed results. I like the potential there to go head to head with Reddit, but there were quite a few issues.

The interface will remind one very much of Reddit, but without the crazy clutter of Reddit, which is a plus in my book. It was very easy to post a link, with a title of the post and a category. A category is basically a tag, but they only let you pick one. This serves to separate out posts more distinctly into separate communities, much like Reddit does with its subreddits. Note the lack of any kind of long description about the link shared. Parley's emphasis is not on the post itself, but the discussion in the comments. The post itself is really just a title and link, again much like Reddit.

The trouble begins in the way Parley interacts with Steemit. I would be more excited about Parley if it didn't show up in my Steemit blog, because Steemit proper is more geared toward longer form posts. Parley feels like it's very early in development as it is very sparse on features. I got myself in trouble because I decided that I didn't like how I capitalized the title of my post. Finding no editing interface in Parley, I edited it in Steemit. Little did I know that would entirely knock me out of the Parley ecosystem because I edited my post in another interface. I could load my post in Parley, but it would not show up in New, Trending or Hot, even if I narrowed the search down to the specific community in question. I was effectively invisible to Parley. Another big negative was after my first post, Parley had me follow a Steemit user without any warning. This is the first time I've been forced to follow somebody without my consent and I did not like auto following somebody.

In conclusion, I think Parley has potential, but still a long way to go. I almost want to have a secondary account for Parley so I can play in Parley without cluttering up my Steemit blog. I may try it once or twice more, but for the most part I am just going to watch and see how it develops going forward. Following the Reddit model could lead to big things for the Steem blockchain.