5 steemit fixes I'd like to see OR The first rule of steemit is to write about steemit.
I couldn't decide on a title so take your pick :)
Let me just caveat all of this by saying that Steemit is a crazy great platform, with amazing potential. I love being here. And as they say “come for the rewards, stay for the community.”
Since arriving in December, I’ve noticed a few things that I think would help the platform as it grows and I’ve been meaning to write a post.
And if you don’t want to read any of it, I’ve included some pictures of mountains….because mountains are awesome.
I fully admit that some of this might be already being worked on – I don’t hang in the dev circles. :)
5 steemit fixes I'd like to see (but have really no business demanding)
1. Finding good content
The trending page is a hot mess, the hot tab is a steaming pile of poo. Surfacing great content is consistently the problem I find with the Steemit platform. You could dig around in the folksonomy or hang around on discord and dig through promoted posts, but neither of these solve the problem. Individual curation efforts help, but sometimes a more global solution is warranted.
I get that this isn’t an easy solve and I’m not sure any of the big social platforms have solved it either. Pinterest might be the closest…
2. Finding good people
I know we’re all faceplace haters, but they have done a good job connecting people. There has to be a way of better way of surfacing people you might find interesting. Highlighting people that your followers have also commented on etc. This would be a great way to use the reputation score for something.
3. A WYSIWYG editor
If we’re going to attract more people to the platform, making editing easy is something that needs fixing. Even just starting with simple formatting. Learning everything else to go along with Steemit is hard enough for new people – telling them they have to learn another way to input their creativity seems like an easy fix. Let creators be creators, rather than worrying about how to make their posts look great.
4. Trash posting (or quick posts)
I’m not a dmania/steepshot hater. I think there is a place for all services. However, given the amount of effort put into great long content on the steemit platform, it’s disheartening to see a shitty stolen from 9gag meme get massive upvotes. I wish there was a way to separate these from our main feeds somehow and somehow adjust the value of those posts.
Personally I’d like to be able to post a meme once in a while, or perhaps just a quick photo from my phone – but I don’t want it messing with the quality of my feed.
Perhaps a new tab called…shit posts ;)
5. Rules rather than cultural norms (I’m sure I’ll be blasted for this one)
“Let the community sort it out.” I know Steemit is meant to be a self policing platform…but…as a new user it would be helpful to have clarity around certain elements of the platform. Maybe even let the community vote…like they do on witnesses. Personally I think that all of the drama with whales recently is off-putting for a new person (it is for me).
For example:
Self voting: Is it ok? Sometimes? It depends? If people don’t want self voting, take away the feature or nerf the value of the vote. If people are allowed to self vote, quit complaining that they do.
Using bots: @grumpycat is going to get you…. Actually I’m glad there are steemit whales out there policing the system. They provide a great service. However, as the platform grows there’s no way they’ll be able to be in all places all the time. That will mean some people will find a way to get around the system. If the rule is under 3.5 days, why not just bake that into the code.
That’s it…. Take everything you read here with a grain of salt - they're just my opinions.
All photos are taken by me. If you like the photo or/and post drop me an updoot or a comment!
If you want to see more make sure you follow @jfolkmann
Thanks!
To answer some of your points:
HF20, which will bring communities, hopes to solve some of these issues by creating communities, along the lines of Redditt, which will have human admins that will have the power to hide crap content. The steaming turds will still be on the blockchain, but invisible to human users. I'm still curious to see what will happen in the undergound sewer that will be created, whether it will be out of sight, out of mind or completely neutralised.
So, no more trending and hot messes and you can go to the community pages that you are interested or even just curious about to see what's new and find people of interest. That should deal with your points 1,4 and 5.
Points 2 and 3 are technically front-end issues and tend to take second-place in a platform that is still in Beta but there is a basic WYSIWG on posts that you get once you have attained some level of posting/rep here. It is easy to miss if you don't know to look for it. Finding similar people will be easier in communities
Thanks! Good to know the community stuff is coming. That would certainly help. Can't wait to see what the photography community will look like :) I'll help if I can! I don't know who you know...
Doesn't really solve 5...as the rule thing is still messed up.Feels a bit arbitrary that people who bought in ages ago get to make up stuff as they go.
As for front end - I think it shouldn't be second place. UX is just as important as back end stuff. But that's just my 2cents :)
Thanks for all the info. Appreciated!
Disclaimer: I am not involved in this in any way, but I do hear talk. I recommend that you go and do your homework on SMTs if you want to get involved.
For #5, communities will make those rules and enforce them, not the whales, and especially not those who have identified themselves through their behaviour for the bad actors that they are.
Photography will be so huge, it will probably be broken into subcommunities and those who have worked all along to create those subcommunities are likely to get drafted.
UX is most important for end users but you can't have a shiny product that can't perform in the backend. UX is not left to last because it is undervalued by the developers but because UX can really fuck up your back-end, too. Back-end must be stable, then you can look at what works and how. If you've been on Facebook for years, you will know that it was really basic, ugly and clanky in many ways for a long time before they really started to focus on the UX tweaks. And then people started to hate them for different reasons, lol.
UX like WYSIWG are actually the most problematic, because that is the main backdoor for anybody to be able to upload malicious content onto sites. That is why Facebook still gives only plain text and you didn't have GIFs for years. So there are very good reasons why developers don't go there and frequently, it's about protecting unsophisticated end-users who don't know not to click those links or enter their passwords
All good points. Thanks for taking the time.
I'm curious about this basic WYSIWYG editor - can you tell us more about where to find it and when we can expect to reach a level of attainability?
I know Busy.org offers a WYSIWYG editor. Personally I find that once you learn the markup it's easier to use the code in the flow of writing instead of clicking buttons, but it's Just Another Thing for newbies to learn.
I can't remember exactly when mine first appeared and I don't know what the exact criteria are but you may well have one @derekkind.
I'm assuming that you are on PC, not mobile here. Click your "Post" button and look here
Click "Editor" and it will appear. You can toggle between WYSIWYG and Markdown. I also prefer markup but newbies won't have the WYSIWYG anyway. Probably a bandwidth issue
Oh, interesting, thanks for showing that! :)
I do not have that yet - if I had to guess I'd think it would appear along with the ability to change voting percentages, at 500 SP?
I seem to recall that I got my WYSIWYG before I got the slider
At least now I can keep an eye out for it!
I agree with every single one of these! Also, I'm glad you posted this...I know us little guys don't feel like we have a lot of say or even have a right to an opinion (I know I feel this way)...but maybe we are wrong. Our opinion counts just the same, we are adding good content to the platform and are even effected more by these things then the big whales. I even agree with @grumpycat 's mission......I just wish he was a bit more accurate with it. Great post!
Thank you. The good thing about the platform is that we can have an opinion...but the question is will anyone listen ;)
I think you make a lot of good points. One thing that I've been that I've heard recently, which ties in to your last point I think, is that not only do large whales have YUUUUGE vote values, but that also applies to their witness votes. I'm already on the fence about how just investing a stake can give you a massive voice (sounds like money = speech), but to also let you buy / sell top slots on the witness list seems absoloutely broken to me.
(I think the witness vote weight thing is indeed the truth... But if I'm misinformed, please let me know)
Either way -- good points. And as always, thems is some nice peaks.
No idea. But yeah - yuuge votes unbalances the platform. I hope it's not that way.
Good thoughts. Totally agree that it's a great platform compared to most other social media, and totally agree that there's still a lot of room for improvement.
One note, I've only used busy.org a couple times, but I did notice that they had a "suggested users" sidebar that recommended people they thought you might be interested in following. I have no idea how they chose which people get displayed there, but it's interesting at least!
I definitely am with you on the last point too. Like, some whales think self-voting is terrible and you're horrible if you do it while other whales do it all the time and say it's fine. How the hell are you supposed to decipher what to do!? That said, I also would want to be super wary of creating more rules in the platform because one of the beauties of Steemit is that it (in theory at least) is self-regulatory and allows free choice.
That is one of the beautiful things about the platform - but if people are making arbitrary rules and flagging for those rules, then make them actual rules. Not ...my opinion weighs more because I bought in at the beginning.
True, that's a fair point. It's set up so they can make rules, but there's not official place where you can see what the rules are.
Came for the pics, stayed for the words.
Anywho, yes overall I agree with you. While I help with one of the curation projects, there's just so many posts I see that I don't even think about curating, that have tons of money on them for something that isn't worth it. I honestly never go on the trending page, because only a few are legitimately worth being there. I think having all of these projects that help curate it is helping, but for now I think it's the best answer until something official would happen. But I don't know how it would work,consistently and effectively.
All of this rambling to say, yeah. I agree,ha.
It's a big enough issue someone has to be thinking about it. If they can solve it it would be massive....
What annoys me the most is the trending shitty posts that get highly upvoted and the really good content that no one gets to see.
Frustrating for sure.
The best thing I've read on steemit so far....
I like it. Very much. The first rule of Steemit... Fact is I have a post following the first great rule of Steemit in the hopper:)
And I agree with your 5 items. One I can comment on is the Editor. I use HackMD dot io . It's almost WYSIWYG as you and I know it. And it's web based so there's not an enormous footprint on your machine.
Thanks for a very usable post. With great photographs.
I use hack as well - but it seems like something that should be built in. I think anyway.
I don't agree with the quick post part. We all express our creativity into different ways, some peoples like to make posts with just some words...and it can be surprisingly good!
Fair - however those type of posts are few and far between. I find when I put just one photo they don't do as well as when I write full on stories.
These are good ideas, and I agree with much of it, though I don't know how it will all be implemented. I just have one thing that I really want to see, and it's very simple, because it already exists in the markup: make it quicker to make images clickable. I don't know that clickability needs to be the default state of an uploaded image, but most of the photographers are having to take a few seconds to alter the markup on every image to manually make it clickable - not a big deal at all, though it adds up, but also not a big deal to add an option to generate the link automatically, maybe?