So what I've done here is reproduced the whole post in its original sans-graphics form. Below each stanza/section, I'll comment on how we're doing today vs then, and to keep things clear, I'll comment in bold.
I figured that I'd share my first impressions with the steem community and staff and make sure that my suggestions are known. A+ work here guys!
I still consider the concept and and much of its execution to be A+ work.
This platform is SO GOOD that I'm entirely compelled to talk my head off about it, and (I think significantly) give some criticism and suggestions for the future direction of this project. At some point later, I'll blab about my own work, but the fact of the matter is that this absolutely demands some recognition online for the level of quality that I'm seeing here both in the posts and in the design of the economics. In my mind, this has always been @bytemaster's biggest strength: His incredible grasp of digital economies overall, and in the example of BitShares, masterful use of the concept of virtualization outside of the domain of computing.
So, please don't take my suggestions as ripping on this incredible piece of work. It's not. Steem is at least the best reddit-alike I've ever seen, and might be a hell of a lot more. As @innuendo mentioned, Steemit is a fairly unprecedented step, in that it truly is non-zero sum. In my mind this is accomplished by the content, and by @bytemaster's careful economic curation. Now, with all of that said, for the past few years I've been working on the "edge" of the web. I like this platform, and I want to see it become all that I'm sure it can be, so I'm going to give a number of criticisms, observations, and ideas for the team and the community. No predictions of doom if my ideas are not implemented, either: This is a question of going from strong to hella-strong (or maybe really from hella-strong to diamond-tipped tungsten).
- In fact, I think I have a lot more faith in the 100% interest rate remaining. But I think I'm an outlier in this. The reason is that I'd like to see the experiment carried out a bit further. That said, we cannot kill the platform to continue the experiment and I know that price wise we must have reached the precipice of that
Comments Vs. Posts
Comments are de-prioritized. It might be a good idea to make this site a little bit more Medium.com -esque because of the way that the economics end up working out. While I haven't been around here too long, I have a feeling that comments are somehow disincentivized vs. posts, when both are content that the site actively seeks to monetize and the community benefits from. The way to solve this is:
- Allow commenters to assign tags to their comments
- Allow commenters to give an introduction to their comments, just like for posts.
- Essentially, make comments indistinguishable from posts. They should appear in the categories they are tagged in just like posts. This would have the effect of encouraging people to comment on each other's work.
- Comments should show up in the blog, not just posts. Again, this is to get more people commenting. People don't hit up reddit for the posts, they hit up reddit for the comments, methinks.
- Keep the Content Under Your Roof, Don't Outsource Hosting: Content is Steem's value
- If anything the imbalance between posts and comments has gotten worse. This is much to the detriment of the platform, because many times comments on a post add more value than the post itself. This should be a priority.
I'm so excited about SteemIt because of the way that it keeps users connected to their content. Currently, users need to upload content (videos, audio, etc) to external platforms for it to be usable on Steemit. Long-term this will dilute the value of the platform overall and causes conflicts of interest. In keeping with the user-driven nature of the site, it would be interesting to try out the concept of a global, user-run CDN for Steemit.
I'd be pleased as punch to collaborate with the community or company behind Steemit to make this happen. It's not as hard as it sounds, though it's also far from easy....
Of my recommendations, this one is the most serious. I think that steemit derives value from content, and therefore needs to get content back under its own roof, post-haste.
In the Slack channel, I saw some mention of using IPFS to do this, and I'd like to recommend against it. IPFS simply isn't as good a solution as webtorrent or maidsafe or another distributed, peer to peer solution .
Don't Censor, except when the law requires
Lay off the censorship button. Good job handling pornography gracefully thus far.
ZOMG, please fix your editor
TBH, I think that STEEM offers a great business model (less harmful) for porn. I think we've missed out on both profit and the opportunity to do good by treating it as we have. That said it should also be noted that it's very nice to not see anyone spread-eagle on the front page when load it up.
I think that steem shuld be looking at zeronet's distribution mechanism, and at beating the API into a sensible shape. It's not sensible right now, and that does untold harm to the platform. gRPC or Swagger would be ideal. The current non-standard, "I drank a fifth of whisky, and then another, and then another, and out popped this API" is holding back the platform badly.
Except that's not my final comment. I just realized that there's something else that needs addressing:
This text-entry box defaults to a size that promotes snippet-content. Instead, make the editor a focus of development efforts.
It should be something that users can drag photos, videos, and audio files directly into to share them with the world.
Once again, I've got to cite Medium as a place where the editor is done well. Get to know their editor, and copy/improve it for Steem.
OMG I hate this editor. I have to resize it every time I want to do anything....
*Seriously. This editor. There are a bazillion 100% OSS markdown editors in javascript on github. Pick one. Implement. Live long and prosper.
The editor is gladly very, very much improved from its original state, and I am pleased to report that I no longer hate it.
Statistics
Giving users easy access to stats about their content and about aggregate traffic for the site as a whole is a good way to drive user growth on Steem. I'm pretty sure that the more users show up here, the higher the site's value is, so this should be something that gets worked on sooner than later. Financially rewarding high-traffic content is probably a good idea, too.
I strongly support @fyrstikken's position on this matter.
Social Networks
There's a lot more under the sun than Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn should be here, at the least. Reddit, too: Since Reddit focuses on links and not on content, Steemit content is perfect for Reddit!
Why not store Oauth authorizations for my social media accounts in the front end or even encrypted inthe blockchain and automate the posting of content onto the big 4 social media systems:
Images
How do images happen on Steemit?
When I wrote this I was largely ignorant of the true purpose of image hosts. I am no longer ignorant of them.
How do I update my profile photo?
Seriously we should fix this
Clarify Tagging
Most other places on the web do tags with commas between them, with each tag holding equal weight. I'd like to recommend something a bit different. Users should be able to tag in a weighted fashion. The first tag will carry the strongest category association, and the others will carry successively weaker weights. You don't need that many words, though, you could inform the user of this like this:
"Tags on Steemit are handled differently! The first tag you make will be your content's primary association, but since content often fits in several categories, each successive tag carries a half-weight."
I still think tagging needs to be improved though I do see this now:
If (When) you successfully get all your content under your roof, move onto content from Reddit, etc
Nobody wants to host big 4k video files, MP3s, etc. because of the cost involved. If we can figure out a good way to do it, this will grow the Steemit community and make Steemit the go-to host for such files. This is NOT a bad thing: Look at Youtube.
My recommendation for this in the short-term is webtorrent
Interactive Content Types
- Voting
- VR Chats (via something like http://www.convrge.co/ (which is sadly shutting down)
- Live meetups of people talking about a certain topic
- Topical Chats, either by tag or by single-section.
Now, I know I've proposed a metric shit-ton of features. My thought on getting them implemented is this: Recycle. Use as many open source projects and tools as you can, and look deeply into WebRTC. A large portion of those features can be accomplished without server load, by using webrtc.
I still stand by this. There's more awesome sauce we could pour onto the front end, and should.
The key takeaways
Much of what I mentioned in post #1 has been addressed, and I've developed only one additional beef with the platform, but it is ENORMOUS. Steem's API is TERRIBLE. And no, I cannot just rewrite it. I can't, for a lot of reasons, but one of them is code obfuscation. This needs to gtfo the platfrom yesterday. Good god, childish, unprofessional, and something I expect much better than from people as awesome as those who built this platform.
Finally, I'd like to plug an online-friend. I think that steem has a ton to gain by tapping into @bluechoochoo's insights on social media as a phenomenon and that Steemit, inc could do much, much worse than offering her a goodly amount of SP as a consultant. But, then, it seems we will be breaking the long-term nature of SP, so holding it isn't as much of a commitment to the community as it used to be. Good thing? Bad thing? I am not sure.