Considerations for a future steemit.com landing page... Goal retention of new people
Right now the trending page is the landing page for new users. It is also potentially a big turn off for many would be new visitors here. They may not be excited about crypto-currency, or anarchy like many of us here.
Source: @carlos-cabeza with my text overlay
So what can we do?
There are of course a lot of things we can try. I've had my own experimental suggestion popping around in my head for a couple of weeks and want to share it and provide some potential mock ups.
One per tag by votes
Source: @carlos-cabeza -yes I like his work
What if the landing page were a feed that was sorted by number of up votes (not payout) and had one item per tag. You could cycle through the tags again as you went through them all. You could also set a up vote threshold so that anything below X amount of votes (10?, 20?, etc) does not count and is not shown. This would keep it from being spammed by inactive tags.
I went to trending and tag by tag picked the HIGHEST vote article I saw on that tag. If it was an entry I'd already had from another tag I skipped that tag. It was already showing a lot more variety and I only did this on a 1024x1024 image. If it keeps going it should be quite varied. I even found some posts I MYSELF am interested in that I missed by doing this little mock up.
- Sort by tag
- Sort by vote
- Start with first tag
- If has a post not already displayed with votes above threshold within time frame display it.
- If tags have not already all been looked at advance to next tag and go to step 4.
- Go back to step 3 starting with the next most up voted post
That's it. In my mind it would not be too difficult to implement and test, but I haven't taken a look at the steemit.com source. Web coding is not my expertise. I could likely determine how to do it but there are already people working on it that have actual skill and experience in this area of programming.
What do you think?
Your idea would provide more variety of author and subject than what now exists, but I might prefer your idea combined with a ticker for new posts. I've begun mostly avoiding the Trending Page and searching for gems in New and in my feed or specific tags.
Oh yes. I stopped using trending after the first week I was here. I switched to New, and Hot until the Feeds was implemented. Now I use New and Feeds, and in really rare cases I'll use Hot to see if I might have missed something cool.
Yet I avoid the trending page because it is not very useful. I am proposing something for a Landing Page. That doesn't necessarily mean the trending page needs to go away. It just means we need to have something wit a lot more variety as the default page new users encounter when they visit steemit.com.