Blogroll Customization!
Now that we have already generated enough contents for ourselves, I think it's time to propose a solution for the growing mess, especially when it comes to an account's blogroll. And this is only 3-5 months into Steemit for most of us.
Problems with a linear blogroll
At its current state, blogrolls are entirely linear. You'd have to scroll up / down, and there's no real good way to differentiate content. In my own experience and understanding of thy way people use the platform, posts take different shapes and forms:-
- Shortposts (these are usually stuff which are shared around, like TIL, newslink, Youtube videos, playlists etc.)
- Longposts (these are usually personal essays, blog entries, dissertations, etc.)
- Different people will have a different ideas on how to categorize their own stuff.
As we make more blogposts, the amount of scrolling and brain juice to filter out relevant info would be too much. Blogrolls are an extension of identities, and I think giving users the power to organize their content will be an important part of building a community.
It would also in a way, make accountability easier.
Blogroll customization
We may need user-defined containers. For example, I would like to be able to partition my blogposts into different containers like "My writings", "Photos", "DJ Mixes". The names of containers should be entirely up to the user. This is quite like how Youtube channels categorize their videos into different playlists. Pinterest has something similar going on as well.
With this, blog owners should be able to organize their own stuff (and makes it easier for followers / even non-followers).
I think such an implementation will aid Steemians through the always evolving activities on Steemit. I could foresee people wanting to generally categorize in two ways - one major category for the evergreen stuff they've produced, and another major category for fast moving, more disposable, day-to-day stuff interacting with the community.
What are your thoughts?
Great idea!
I think this would be an awesome way to personalize your steemit profile, and to improve the experience for the writer as well as the audience.
Especially if someone writes a lot of different content (like me and you) it can get quite crowded and hard to find specific things you're interested in
Yup.. I'm liking Steemit's simplicity so far though, and I hope the team will continue keeping it simple. I think 3 containers will be good enough :)
I had a chat with a couple of people at SteemFest about this. I would like to be able to organise my blog in the same way I organise my art portfolios ( I have many). I will regularly sort through and put my best work to the top, take out work, keep separate portfolios for different reasons (interviews, selling, workshops). I want to show my best work to my followers and potential new followers, plus be able to access things easily. At the moment I have to do a search if I want to access one of my past posts as I have way too many posts to scroll. Even a 'pin to the top' function would be nice.
Yup.. i think it'll be a very "sticky" feature for a blog :)
Absolutely, the more people you follow the harder it becomes to track favoured posters amid the short posts and the resteemed posts, something similar to the above would be ideal
Now i'm already hitting my limit.. some say 120 people is the absolute limit of the human brain.. so yes, some "shape" to the blogroll will certainly help with memory, etc.
I like this. Perhaps if the buckets were auto generated from the tags on the posts?
I think that may be a good start (and maybe also cause less tag abuse that way..?). What I'm thinking here is more of a simple create folder --> drag/select posts
Hell yes! Totally! Personal page customization is a must going forward. If not this way, another way, but something where we can choose what data to display, and not a standard blog list page. Sections, categories, customized content adding, will make our pages more attractive and easier to manage content to find.
I'd go with simple containers.. (knowing from user experience in a couple of sites, complexity and millions of custimizations shouldn't be in the vanilla product ;) )
Yes, absolutely. Youtube is a good example (as you mentioned) with a customized landing page!... I think we also need to develop steemit's search functions overall. We have a huge mess of information that should be easier to browse and re-discover. This is definitely on their radar, right?
Yup I know a few people who really wanna invest in Steem, but is holding back atm due to "wasted" content (difficult to search / categorize). But that's just a technical hurdle..
Same here. I'd bet that hurdle is on the horizon!
I definitely agree organizational features are needed. I'd even be happy to see a simple tag cloud in the right sidebar. It would show only tags that user had utilized, and clicking on the tags would filter to show only their content with the tag in question.
I'd hope this would be a fairly easy feature to implement, even if just as a stopgap while more detailed customization options are in development.
Something simple would be enough, I think. So far the feature rollouts have been satisfactory :)
It was great when Google Plus finally implemented "Collections", can't live without them now.
G+ never managed to capture me.. what do you think it's best for vs fb/steemt?
I see it as different markets, FB is about connecting with people you know and the people they know. G+ is all about finding people you don't know but who share some of your interests. Steemit is a little bit of that, but more geared to blogging than resource sharing. The gamification has meant that for me, at least, I switched 90% of my time over here, feeling like I'm neglecting my friends in G+. Lately all I post over there is links to here. But I have nearly 5000 followers there, and with affiliated links, I could reach several times that number.
It would be interesting if I could design my own covers for the groups. I write a series, so I'd like the series cover and the links inside. I also write using different characters, so a cover for each one of those crazies as well. The book author types might also like the idea.
This will greatly improve user-experienced.