Community Feature Development Needs

in Hive Improvement3 years ago

Let's have a discussion about what we think the Community Platform needs in order to help users and community owners and moderators.
In a recent @Hiveio development meeting @blocktrades and @howo were discussing how they would like to hear from others about what may be the more important focuses right now for development.

Also they'd like to find some people to take these issues on for development but some requests are also pretty easy they just haven't been done yet.

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1 COMMUNITY CLASSIFICATIONS BY TOPIC

The ideas is to allow each community the ability to identify X number of topics that classify their community.

Why?

  • Helps when a user is doing a search
  • Gives an option to view communities by topic... organizes them better.
  • Helps for for connecting new users to themes they are interested in.

In general the plan is for peakd.com (and hopefully all others) to ask new users about what themes they have interest in and for us to present them with topics, communities, badges and even users of interest.
Letting the community themselves identify what themes their community cover are important.

2 COMMUNITY SORTING

When we working on communities system this was a "leave for later"... we knew it was important but we decided that we could get to it after launching communities and see how it went... well now it is later.

  • Sort by recently created
  • Sort by subscribers
  • Sort by interactions
  • Sort by posts (not including comments)
  • Alphabetical sorting
  • Other??

This also helps users to find communities. None of these are complicated algorithms that attempt to match a user to a community they are pretty simplistic alternatives to sort through the communities. They won't be better than thematic or search driven filters but they do help.

As a perk these sorting methods could be much faster that the one method that is presently available which is to sort by a more complex algorithm that looks at REWARDS a community has brought about in the last 7 days.

When searching through a huge list of those.

3 STATS

I used to have a longer list of stats I thought a community would benefit from. I'm willing to accept slower growth on this side if it leads to more advancements in the other areas. But I have a couple of desires I think are pretty helpful. Do you have any stats you'd like to see?

3b NUMBER OF POSTS IN LAST X

It would be nice to see how many posts have been added in the last X days so that you can identify what communities have been active recently with new content. Interactions includes comments but as a consumer in a community it does not help me because i come for content not to see someone's comments to a different creator.

3c NUMBER OF POSTS SINCE X

As an example of an easy fix the Notifications tool identifies when the last time you read your notifications. We could use that same tool to identify how many posts were posted after that time/date.

Perhaps this is a front end thing since that date/time already exists. Not sure exactly how it is to be done but seeing what is new may be helpful for many people. Thoughts?

4 MEMBER ONLY POSTING

I believe this is what @roadcape called community type 2... and he mentioned he was mostly done with the design before he changed jobs and left the blockchain.

There is already a member field which moderators can add users to. The functionality of the member field could be greatly improved if this community style existed. There may not be a ton of use case compared to open communities but it does exist and seems like it should be worth finalizing that style.

5 COMMUNITY UI SUB-CLASSIFICATIONS

This is likely a front end system. (Maybe someone has a reason for it to be inside hivemind itself... if so I'd love to hear it)

We would like to allow a community owner to select X number of topics for their community that will be treated uniquely and which their users can choose to classify their own posts with those themes. And the user experience of a community would be to have those X themes shown in separate filtered sections. Meaning you can see all posts done with that theme. This is doable with post tags and with peakd knowing and identifying to the users what tags/topics will be put into what sections.

The issue with front ends is that we have to pull ALL POSTS and then just filter based on those tags. But if we could pull ONLY the posts that qualify that would be a huge help.

As an example a photography community may have a section of the community feed for showing off pictures but others that are for news, how-to, reviews. So photography communities can be more than just about showing off pictures which will always remain the dominant theme of most photo communities. It's a difference of what do most want to READ vs what do most want to ADD. We can placate both sides.

The big question for this is what will moderation of abuse be like. Will it be a matter of muting the post if someone simply tags every topic every time? And maybe muting the user? Is there a better way of letting the user know why their post got muted if they break the community desire to properly classify? We know how often people misclassify posts simply to get more views.

6 LANGUAGE FIELD

This is something being looked into (by the main hivemind developers) already for posts in general. Putting a language field on a post and then keep track right on hivemind. This would allow for community content to be filtered by language.

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Re: Sub-classification is totally do-able. My own front-end (Hyperion) already does this, for example, here's the Leo Finance community, with only #hive-engine in the results:

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In fact, if you want, you can even specify more than one tag, which will cast a wider net (Leo Finance + ( #hive-engine or #neoxian )):

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As it is right now, if you want to achieve something like this without Hyperion, you need to pick a tribe's front-end and search on a different tribe's tag, e.g.: https://leofinance.io/created/neoxian

So it kinda works, but it'd be nice to make that a Hivemind feature. Complicated queries are complicated.

Very cool... that's encouraging. I'm not the developer type but I'm glad to know it's already being done.
cc @asgarth

Those would be very good additions. I have two suggestions.

Stats: It would be great if stats could be on hivemind as to allow to measure across all front ends. Don't know if this is feasible but it would be more accurate.

Languages: I think it would be helpful to bilingual posters if there's an option to allow multiple languages in same post with a drop down to choose language.

What stats would you like to see measured against eachother?

Here are a few out the top of my head that would be helpful.

  1. unique visitors (post)
  2. unique visitors (blog)
  3. time spent reading post
  4. linked from (blog, community, from trending feed, other sites)
  5. Country
  6. time of visit

Views and time are functions of a front end and can not be provided by the blockchain. For example peakd shares info on views to a post and we could do that with communities but it would be only for our site and only for those who don't use blocking apps.

In fact all 6 of those items are not stats that can be given by a blockchain but would have to be given by the front ends.

On related news we hope to show which are the most viewed communities... meaning sort at least a decent number of the communities by how much they are viewed. We'd like to do that with most popular topic pages as well as most popular communities... such as we are doing now with most popular posts.

Gotcha. I suspected that would not be possible at blockchain level. But it would be very appealing for people used to google analytics or the stats in flickr for example. Is a layer 2 solution that would serve stats to all front ends possible? or a p2p stats database between frontends? I don't know. As you can probably tell I don't know much about the technicalities. I just think it would be very valuable to have less fragmented stats.

yeah! great. Communities views sounds very useful.

#5 I think the sub classification is a good idea, and one I have been looking forward to. I think it will require some basic standards.

  1. First tag = Community
  2. Second and third tag classification
  3. tags beyond for the creator to chose.

It is my understanding that when posting via a community page the first tag is auto assigned as the community. The community would then be able to classify the post using the second and third tags.

The community can have as many classification tags as they want, but the poster would have to pick two that he/she felt best fit their post. An example would be a photography post talking about lens choices for landscape photography. The post would be classified in both the landscape and the tools/equipment/locations/howto sections depending on tag choice.

It would be a big challenge to do something like that. The page layout would need to change, there would need to be a method for the end user to find the post that cover say lenses. A page for all post, then sub pages for the tags the community has chosen. Maybe a simple search box that the user selects one or two tags. I am glad I am not a layout designer or programmer.

#6 I like the idea of the language field, I would hope if they do this that the language would be indicated so a translation program could be easily chosen, because I have no real clue the difference between chines, Japanese, or Korean language let alone all the various other languages, some times I can tell it is Spanish or German, but I am not worldly enough to know what language some post are written in.

Great suggestions and very needed if people are to find communities that match their interests.