Enhancements to improve fostering of communities in Steemit
So I've been thinking about what could be improved in order to foster specific communities in Steemit.
From all the thoughts I've been brewing, I just logged three issues for discussion on Github.
The first two are related to specific language speaking individuals. I still remember that this was one of the reasons for the downfall of Orkut, as reported here:
The Brazilian invasion: Orkut was not designed to linguistically walled. So when Brazilians took on the challenge of wanting to be the top country on Orkut (yes it was a game the whole of Brazil participated in,) suddenly the rest of the world started to see Portuguese messages everywhere. This led a decline in interest for English speaking users in the US.
We already see a lot of content in Chinese, Korean, and some posts with two or more languages intermixed in. My suggestions are:
Add first class support for languages in posts
This is so posts created on Steemit have a way of determining which language it is written in, and that users are able to pick a language (or more) to see content in.
Add support for alternate language representation of a comment
This is a blockchain level change to deal with translations and multiple-language content. Instead of intermixing content in one post, or allowing translators to repost content on their language, it would be possible to have multiple representations of the same content in different languages (or maybe one day even different formats, such as mobile, etc).
Steemit would then display the user preferred representation on the website.
Open for discussion is how these alternate representations would be awarded, especially when created by different users.
Allow post to destinate all (or most) author rewards to child comments
This third suggestion is when thinking about content were most of the value is not in the main post, but the value is added by the comments, in communities like question-based, writing prompts, or similar. Steem already rewards child comments in a post, but I feel in these communities the rewards to the main author would be disproportionate and discourage the format.
My suggestion is that, when creating a post, the author would indicate that he's giving the author rewards to the child commenters.
What do you think about these suggestions? What is needed to build communities inside Steemit?
I do wish more people would comment on my posts. I try to comment as MUCH as I can because it shows that 1) I've read your post and 2) I'm willing to engage and get to know you, the author. I think those are important things to communicate to others on this platform. And so, I think your idea of designating author rewards to child comments is innovative, especially since comments can help a post's visibility and perceived value.
Thanks. Insightful comments are great. In fact, in lots of discussions platforms (Hacker News, Reddit) is common for people to skip the article and to straight to the comments for better insight.
good idea with the language help!
Awesome topic! I agree with your proposed solutions for handling multiple languages, representation in comments and the option to give author rewards to comments. If I have one major criticism of Steemit, it's that there's not enough real reading and conversation, compared to the quantity of posts.
I've been thinking about how to spark more delving conversations. It's tricky. On one hand, controversial topics make sense because disagreement is the fastest route to interaction. On the other hand, collaboration and inspiration are ideal goals, not bickering. Collaboration is an umbrella goal that conversation seems to me to be a sub-category of. Even a good argument is a collaboration, to my mind. How to attain it is more confusing to me. How do we solve a problem as a community? I'd love to see a future where the answer is obvious.
It would be great to be able to add a like button or emoji set separate from upvoting. This way, I could go around liking casually, upvote when I'm impressed with the quality and share when I feel 100% behind what I've read. I think that everyone would feel more love this way and it would be easier to distinguish between loving your friends and upvoting quality.
Thank you for this thought provoking post!
I agree. There's considerate incentive for upvoting without reading just for curation rewards, and comment rewards which incentives generic "good post" comments.
That why I'm talking about communities, which make people gather around a niche generating real discussions.
Steemit doesn't quite offer the support for communities like subreddits do (tags are not quite there yet) which is something I've been thinking about and may write more in the future.
I was unaware that Reddit had solved that. Cool!
While it currently makes a lot of sense to use a wide variety of tags for optimal exposure, when a conversation is happening it tends to hone. For instance, I'm having a great discussion about mansplaining with @sic-savidicus. We're basically in agreement, but still discussing intelligently. It could be tagged under a variety of topics, but to get others who are genuinely interested in joining our discussion, we'd almost have to have posts going back and forth under a sub-topic instead of only comments on a single post. Individual posts rarely get the attention their content deserves. Connecting interested parties to the conversations that are happening would be easier if posts were individually relevant longer and if participants knew they'd be likely to get a response if they entered a conversation.
Thanks for engaging with me. :)