RE: Utopian proposal: Creating an Utopian tutorial page
I obviously have a real passion for designing tutorial content, of one sort or another, and I find this to be a very interesting idea.
It does really bags and questions, including the big one for me, "how do you imagine that someone would create and update tutorials on the system, including for projects which aren't necessarily hosted on github or part of the current Utopian ecosystem?"
I would love to see a narrative walk-through of how you imagine someone to conceive and then execute a tutorial under this proposed system. It doesn't need pictures or sketches (though those are nice), but just like telling a story which explains what the idea really is intended to feel like.
At least one of the issues I would like to see touched on in such a narrative would be how you envision someone creating a tutorial and then discovering that it really fits into an ongoing series of tutorials that they didn't plan to do at the beginning. Can you retroactively gather tutorials that already exist together? Do they all have to be your own?
This gets down into some other ideas about curation in general, but I think a little focus on tutorials and providing a way to get into the Utopian world is certainly not necessarily going to go amiss.
Good points! Well for the first big question, this page will still be part of Utopian and Utopian is dedicated to opensource projects, I do not think that we should include tutorials on non-opensource work, it wouldn't fit with Utopian vision.
Of course the implementation would be incremental and use as much as possible the current platform. Users would still need to connect to Utopian and post tutorials in the same way, with the difference that they can associate the post to a series (this could also be done later via the edit function.).
The main idea is not about changing the way to create tutorials, it's about giving visibility to the good ones. Let's be honest there are a lot of shitty ones, just there for milking the bot. Such an implementation would have a sorting algorithm that would make sure that the tutorials which gained a lot of support from the community came first.
As just the first example that comes to mind, would a tutorial that uses entirely open source tools to make assets for Unity, which is technically a closed source platform but which there is a large interest in building games in, be a valid tutorial target as you see it? It would promote open source projects, the toolchain, in the pursuit of creating a closed source target – which someone might make enough money doing to invest back into the open source projects which allowed them to do it.
There's a huge grey area in that kind of space.
The tutorials/walk-throughs that I rather enjoy doing using closed source 3D modeling software to create effectively "open source" objects or to add content to open source projects like SteemPi fall into the same sort of thing.
Sturgeon's Law applies to everything – 90% of everything is, in fact, crap. Promoting the good content, I thought, was a pleasant side effect of operations on the steem blockchain and, by extension, why voting is possible through Utopian.
Having said that, perhaps the problem that you really want to solve is a more general one – the question of actual curation, or "how do I get content which is good and interesting for this particular audience in front of this particular audience?" which to be frank the bulk of tools on the blockchain are really quite terrible at. Not excluding Utopian from that, despite its other benefits.
I love tutorials, obviously – don't get me wrong. But I think solving the broader problem might be better for tutorials and everything else that Utopian does.
(Another question that is inadvertently brought up along the way is if there are a ton of shitty content postings making their way through Utopian, why? Isn't that what the mods are there to interdict? If they're not accomplishing that, what do we need to do starting there to kill that part of the problem at the root?)
A lot of work is done to solve the quality assessment problem but that is way harder that you may think.
As for the gray area you're mentioning, I invite you to write under Utopian Discord > Public Poll > Platform and make a proposition to take the gray out.