So when tribes were first announced I was really excited. Around that time there were tons of back to back announcements of new developments and products. Of all of it though the thing that got me most excited was Nitrous.

It's been a minute, but in the past I've done my fair share of mountain top screaming about the REAL problem with Steem being the user experience. I was so excited about Nitrous because there was talk about adding additional features to Condenser. In my opinion, this is sorely needed and THE MAIN reason for Steems stagnation. More than the economics, although that was a big problem as well. More than Steemit selling, more than bidbots, or whatever your favorite thing is to blame. Mine is the user experience on every Steem application.

Which again is why I was so excited by Nitrous. When tribes started popping up and they all were just slower buggier versions of Steemit with filtered content, I didn't really care because they were brand new, gotta give em some time, no biggie, but it's been a minute, and there have been updates, but nothing that really changes the user experience or gives me any sort of reason to actually use the tribe sites.

Quickly after tribes were born Steempeak integrated them into their site. Not only that, but they are literally THE ONLY site where you can get a quick snapshot of all of your rewards on a post in one view. It's not a secret that Steempeak has the best UX for a Steem frontend currently, so what reason do I have to ever go to a tribe site?

This becomes even more important now that ads are in the picture and what that tells me is that even though we're all on the same team to a point, there needs to be competition for those eyeballs, which brings me to the main point of this post.

If you are not offering anything exclusive to your site, your site has no reason to exist.

Currently the only function of the sites is to act as a filter for the content associated with that tag, but as I mentioned, if that's all you want you can view it on Steempeak, and have a better experience while still getting that same function. As a stakeholder of tribe tokens, this is kinda poopy.

So I didn't write this post ONLY to bitch, that's not my style. I want to urge tribe founders to think hard about what they can offer in the user experience of their site that will fit their individual genre and make sense exclusively for them. As you can see in the image above, I've prepared examples.

So let's start with LEO, it's all about investing, but probably 99% of the people posting there are mostly interested in investing in Crypto, of that 99% probably 90% of that are interested in Steem and tribes as well. Currently there is no place where you can get charts for tribe tokens that show the tokens performance over their full timeline. I think that would be incredibly valuable to the community. It would give people a source of content since there are so many would be TA specialists in the community. Imagine if the Steem Leo frontend was the first and only place where you could access that info, but you could also get info about other crypto as well. This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. This is something that makes sense exclusively for Leo, matches their genre and merges seamlessly with their content. It would give me a reason to go to and use that site.

_{Ripped from Artstation.com + a few Steemians}

So these are just examples to illustrate my point not necessarily firm ideas for features. That caveat stated, for CCC, what if it was more focused on visuals. I know all the content there isn't visual, but I think proportionally it's probably higher than most other tribes. I may be biased as an artist, but I also think this could just set it apart from other sites and at a glance let you know what sort of site this is.

When thinking about what PAL could add, I wondered if there was an embeddable Discord widget and of course there was, several actually. So while I think this would be a nice addition to PAL, honestly I think it would be good for just about every tribe since it would allow us to use discord like most of us do already but stay on the site. Again, with ads, you DON'T want to send people away from your site.

So these are just some quick ideas I came up with tonight, I just want you fine folks to really think about this. I'm not trying to poo poo all over your stuff, I want to help make it better.

If you're a user here on Steem and you're holding some tribe tokens let me know what you think in the comments, would some features like I've mentioned here make you more inclined to use tribe sites, are they things you'd like to see? Maybe I'm crazy and just in my own little bubble.