History of Hive COMMUNITIES and what is next (From my perspective)

in Hive Improvement3 years ago (edited)

Was talking with @theycallmedan a couple times last week about COMMUNITIES and I decided it would be helpful to me and perhaps others to take a stroll down memory lane about communities history... and then future.

This is a retrospective view of communities and some of these memories are 2+ years old so I may not remember them super well and since there has been pretty much 0 work on community backend stuff since all the Steemit INC employees namely @roadscape left. This is my post to try to remember all the things we wanted to do with communities but haven't been touched in forever.
I may have some of these memories wrong is what i'm trying to say.

9000JRV07659.jpg

THE HISTORY... from my view

My history of communities is perhaps very different from the developers that actually got it done (I'm not a developer). So take that for what it is.

I remember 2 years ago (this month i think) I was pushing really hard to make communities happen and we (Peak Projects) had been thinking about it for a couple months prior to that, in some way or another on our own platform (steempeak.com at the time). Steemit INC had talked about wanting it to happen for a while before that but nothing (apparent to us) was happening and we knew they had a lot of other things going on and it didn't seem communities was high priority... so we were starting to take matters into our own hands. But it was this month there were some community discord audio shows where some Steemit people like Ned came in and talked about where they stood on SMT and communities and started to talk about renewed interest in communities.
Meanwhile our own team was already talking to a random developer on steem who seemed gung-ho about creating a backend structure and API that would enable communities to happen. We were throwing around a bunch of ideas at the end of 2018 and into 2019 and working with this developer. Hivemind was pretty new and wasn't being used much but we realized that using hivemind to help with this system would be beneficial so we talked to @roadscape. Maybe perhaps our indications that we were just gonna take matters into our own hands was good motivation to get steemit inc to move up the priorities... who knows.

I can't remember all the details but the short of the story is that basically we were told that the backend protocol that steemit inc had in mind to enable communities wouldn't take that much time and perhaps it would be beneficial to wait for it. When it comes down to it we had plenty of other things to work on with steempeak.com (predecessor of PeakD) so waiting wouldn't be the worst thing for us and we much much preferred a decentralized system built on a more solid DB like hivemind would be best for the us and the community.

It did take longer than expected ...We got a taste of communities at that SteemFest in November of that same year and it officially launched about a year ago around this time.

I remember being pretty involved in conversations with Roadscape about what we envisioned for communities, at least by sharing my perspective as a UI person... and then going for long stretches of time not hearing anything about where backend development and where it was at, then to all of a sudden seeing a post about it show up. There was for sure a big lack of transparency and communication between applications, users and steemit inc back in those days that I'm sure i don't have to re-hash. That's why posts by backend developers like @howo and @blocktrades have been so uniquely and wonderfully refreshing i may add. It's such a nice thing to be more involved in the discussion of being able to indicate what apps may need from backend structures... and I'll add that individuals like @howo seem very willing to help make stuff happen even now for communities.

Since @roadscape left I don't think there has been any backend development on community system... that means almost a year?

WHY HASN'T THERE BEEN A PUSH FOR BACKEND WORK TIL NOW?

  1. On a PeakD front we have had other things to do
    PeakD.com can and will be doing plenty of front end changes to community without a need to backend changes. And because there are plenty more front end things we can and will be doing this is part of the reason we haven't pushed for much work to be done on the backend protocols of the the system which communities are built on top of.
  2. Hivemind db was getting a lot of upkeep and advancements so it was prudent to wait.
    The @blocktrades team was doing a lot of work to improve hivemind including increasing the scope of what that db does and speeding it up. So it was prudent to just wait until most of that work was done and the db was stable before we started looking at what other things the db could do to help communities

THINGS WE TALKED ABOUT BACK IN THE DAY

This is where i really want to remember all the ideas we talked about... but in the end it's not a bad thing if we forget some ideas because if we don't remember them it may be an indication that perhaps they're not that needed.

But we do come back to a bit of history when we were building the community front end on SteemPeak we were asking for a few things but the basic response was ... let's just launch an MVP (minimum viable product) and then we'll see how that is received and then we'll upgrade from there.

The things that I remember the most...

  • There would be multiple types of communities. One community type would allow only members to post in the community. Which should make sense because MEMBERS is a backend feature of communities that has pretty much zero use case with how communities operate right now... turns out members function was developed with other types of communities in mind.
  • Another type of community was a community where only members could comment + post. (Aka only members could interact at all with the community)
  • We were also asking for other ways to SORT the growing list of communities. Still not sure if alphabetical and chronological sortings are options yet. I think for example we only have one sorting method and that's a unique algorithm that Roadscape created that would sort based on activity and i think it was very rewards based so not even actual content activity but just voting activity. We haven't gotten another sorting algorithm since then even though sorting options were discussed back then.
  • Different stats were thrown around but the answer was similar: Let's just go with the ones he developed and see if they're good and see which other ones we should do later. The stats we have right now are mostly ... OK, not really the set I would have personally been excited about, but the idea was to not bog ourselves down into polishing but just release it and then come back around. But we had talked about other stat options for the future and we should look back into that and try to remember or perhaps just think of what stats about a community would be the most useful.

SO... WHAT CAN WE DO WITH COMMUNITY PROTOCOL

(love to hear your thoughts)

  1. I think we should for sure allow a community to indicate that they want to be member posting only.
    In a way that's essentially like them saying everyone is muted in the community except for those on the Member list. Remember that the community structure doesn't actually prevent someone from posting or commenting what it does is more 2nd layer... it impacts the API from Hivemind and so if you are muted by a community (through moderators) then those posts just won't show up.
  2. Then of course give communities the ability to indicate they only want members to post + comment.
    In the end a community is a location where an owner (or group of designated people) choose their own rules and have tools for moderation. So we're just giving them a couple other rules to choose from... assuming it is what is best for their owned community.
  3. Is there something that can be done for users to indicate they want to be a member? Put themselves into a queue where the moderators can decide which subscribers should now become posting members?
  4. I think we should have multiple sorting options for communities.
    (There are thousands of communities but only one way to presently sort them and I am not convinced it's the best way to sort them)
    A: The obvious sorting options and probably easy ones are Alphabetical and Chronological.
    B: But sort by number of subscribers would perhaps be even more useful.
    C: Or perhaps number of total posts... or number of posts in the last 30 days.
    D: How about sort a community by the number of users who have posted or commented in the community in the last 30 days. (I'm using 30 days but maybe 7 days is sufficient... in the end it would be nice if the protocol allowed a front end to make 7 or 30 an option)
  5. STATS are a fun area for discussion and it would be interesting to hear what users would want to know about a community when making a decision about a community. Or what a community owner would want to know about their own community. I have some communities and this is what i would want to know.
    A: How many total posts are in the community.
    B: How many total posts written in the last 7 days ... and not posts as in comments+posts but just posts only because we want to know what actual articles will be new not just that one user happened to have a post with 50 comments. (which hopefully isn't too hard for us to figure out.)
    C. How many unique users have written a post ... and perhaps in the last X days. (That seems to me to be a better way of seeing how active the community is... because when it's about comments we don't know if the community itself is active or just that a user has a good following and that user had followers that interacted who could care less about the community)
    With a few more stats then front ends could extrapolate those stats as well... perhaps give some posts/week formula for the community. Or interactions/week (posts+comments)
  6. We (peakd.com) would really love to be able to classify each community by theme/topic so that we can present new (and old) users with communities related to topics they tell us are of interest to them. So it would be a very good time to allow the community to identify X number of topics their community is related to. Perhaps 3 or 5. The number could be debated. It can be an open system where a community could put whatever they want. BUT perhaps a front end could help the communities to choose from a list of common selections. Like ARTS/SPORTS/BLOCKCHAIN etc.
    This would also be helpful when helping to sort communities as well. But mostly helpful to help present a new user with a list of Topics, Communities and maybe even Users that relate to subjects they like.
  7. Classification of Post types.
    This actually is not directly related to the community backend... but i want to throw it in because of how big of an impact it can have on communities and benefit to Hive in general. By classification of post types it means: being able to classify if the post is a VIDEO or PHOTOGRAPH or ORIGINAL CONTENT or LINK SHARE or SHORT FORM.
    That means our users and communities could have tons of tools built for them directed at a particular type of content (if you filter them by those forms you essentially have a feed that rivals youtube, instagram, twitter etc). A community for example could have an area that is twitter-esque or another community could have a section for Videos. In general you'll see that most sub reddits and communities elsewhere on the internet is comprised heavily of sharing content made elsewhere communities on hive may have a very hard time thriving if there is no good system for allowing link shares. Obviously how to treat them in regards to reward pool is another question altogether (they should indeed be treated differently) but allowing the backend structure on hivemind is certainly the first thing to do and I submit that communities will never be quite near as successful if they don't allow for sharing outside content.
  8. Since we are already talking about non community related changes to Hivemind let me throw in another. Language classification of a post... it has already been discussed in the hive core developers meeting but just bringing it back up. Communities have a language indicator already but this is about having it on posts. Putting it into a post metadata is not hard but Integrating it into hivemind would be needed to make it more useful. So instead of getting 1000 posts from the API and then doing a filter process to see which ones are Italian (and find out only 1 is) if it were built into Hivemind we could do a request to the API and pull up the last 100 italian posts directly.
  9. Then the final non-community related request to make communities awesome is to find a way to make private communities... but that requires figuring out how to do Encryption/Decryption here on Hive and that's not a small undertaking i'm guessing. @howo and @blocktrades also once talked about this request of mine back in a Developer meeting and mentioned some ways they thought it would be possible.
    Anyway I don't think this needs to be done first... i think we get the rest of the stuff working first then try to tackle this. But it's not just for communities but now that automated payments are coming out we are close to pay-wall / patreon sorts of solutions... however those types of users usually want a private (encrypted) sort of option. (Maybe even something off chain or second layer... but the important part is decentralized aka not a specific front-end dependent)

RECAP

  • Different types of communities
  • More stats about communities
  • More community list sorting
  • Classify communities by topics/themes
  • BONUS: classify types of posts, language support in hivemind and encryption

Thanks for indulging my stroll down memory lane and sharing some things that could be helpful for Hive communities. PeakD.com is gonna focus heavily on communities and we think as far as social media aspect of Hive that communities is the biggest and best feature. We have seen how much movement to communities is happening to communities since it started. It's a powerful thing and I think the timing is right to put more focus to them and start upgrading the backend will be awesome.

Sort:  

Glad to see the discussion on this going, and looking forward to more communities features being implemented.

Options to set default/recommended/mandatory reward beneficiaries in a community would also be very useful, from my perspective.

One suggestion I would also have is that instead of different types of communities (member-only, open to all, etc.) to make it possible for a community to change its type via its settings. So, for example, a community can start as open to all and then as it grows it can become more restrictive.

Options to set default/recommended/mandatory reward beneficiaries in a community would also be very useful, from my perspective.

This has been one of the main reasons we at OCD decided to have the communities in our incubation who want to, write up curation reports so that both the curators, leaders, moderators and anyone in the "team" working towards improving the community get some rewards back for their time since the framework wasn't there and abruptly stopped being developed for communities. It would be great to add mandatory beneficiaries but we'd also have to be careful with how they are used as to not give the current existing big communities an edge compared to new smaller ones not having the visibility to make it worth posting into them or authors feeling like they don't get anything out of it. Another thing I'm now wondering about this is how it'll affect cross-posts, if people will just originally post into a no beneficiary community and then just cross-post into one that has mandatory beneficiaries. Either way it'll be interesting to see how it evolves.

thanks for reminding me about the mandatory beneficiary feature option... that was actually part of the discussion back in the day.

And yes I have passed along that i also think changing the type of community in settings is important. (instead of deciding up front)

I was just going to mention it. Most of the reason I got into communities was the ability to incentivize mods and the community through beneficiaries. Maybe, the community itself can have its own token. Keep up the good work as I see communities playing a big role around here.

We could work on integrating hive-engine features into the community experience on PeakD. It doesn't have to be locked to only hive-engine stuff but they are for sure the best option right now for hive communities.

I think we should for sure allow a community to indicate that they want to be member posting only

SubReddit 2.0 empowered by tokenisation. Love it :)

Yeah integrating tokenization is a thing that could happen at any through front ends without any hivemind db backend changes.
We are gonna push along these lines and help at least integrate more tools from the hive-engine offerings.

I agree. Awesome.

Love the discussion!

As a new user, there are quite a few things that I have caught myself wishing into existence. Not sure how to classify as FE or BE, so I will just list them out below.

  • A community focused on helping newcomers. As friendly and welcoming as everyone has been, especially @acidyo aka. @ocd and @hivebuzz, it feels like it I have had to spend a lot of time trying to piece together the basics of how Hive and Peakd work. If there is a community like this already, then finding it needs to be easier. If not, I would guess it is because the majority of the community members would be new, therefore the work done by the mods/admins would never be compensated fairly. Maybe some support via a proposal would help offset this?

  • Clearing notifications is very annoying lol having to navigate to another page in order to click a button that "clears all notifications" because of one reply is cumbersome. It would be nice to have the notification flag? disappear after clicking it.

  • A way for people to organize their blog and/or posts. For example, there is an awesome writer that I follow on here @johnjgeddes who has countless pieces to read. It is frustrating having to search linearly to follow his stories. It would be nice to have each of his stories given a folder of sorts.

  • Not a recommendation, more of an insecurity, but I hate not knowing how/where to ask a question. For example, if I have a question about how the value of a users vote is calculated, would I write a blog post and tag @hive or @peakd or do I try to find the best fitting community to post in?

  • Regarding different language posts, although I may not understand the language, I have still found value in many posts. I think being able to filter by language is a good idea, but I would still want the ability to have languages unfiltered.

  • Love the idea about content categories. I much prefer reading things than watching a video so would enjoy the ability to filter video content out of my feed if I choose.

Apologies if some of these things are already in existence and I am just unaware of how to utilize it!

Keep up the great work!

  1. Perhaps the upcoming addition of Community Chat Channels could be helpful... maybe there could be a default one added for all new users. However there would need to be a community of more experienced users all willing to check into that channel to answer questions.

  2. Agreed that we need a better way of clearing the notification. I think the first step would be to make the clear notifications button bigger/better/more obvious.
    However we can't just clear the notification for you because it is you the user that actually do that. One must keep in mind that on blockchain the front end (peakd) actually does none of your transactions... you do them all yourselves using software you chose to use when you logged in... like keychain or peaklock. It's a unique aspect of social media on blockchain: Only the user performs actions, they put information directly on the blockchain... themselves!
    So this does make it a tad more challenging but I'm sure we'll figure out something better.

  3. This involves a product we are going to work on and so we think we have a great solution for this.

  4. Understandable. I'm not sure what the answer is for every case. Who do you want to ask? I guess if it's PeakD you can ask us on discord (which we link in a couple places on our site) but also we have an open chat channel for peakd so i'm guessing that's also a good place to ask about the front end. However a lot of this is about Hive itself and no one owns or controls hive in a centralized way so it's not like other social media platforms where you have one place to message (which they won't always respond because they're huge) ... So who do we ask?
    There should be a better answer for this and i think it relates to your first question, I'd love to see a community start up that was very capable of interacting with and answering questions for new users.

  5. Yes languages unfiltered would continue to be the default i assume.

  6. You're referring to the ability to categorize the type of POST? Yeah i guess ability to see or in your case NOT see a type of post would be an option if we had that sort of backend DB support.

Loading...

A lot of what I'd want to see is covered either in the post or in someone's comment. Beneficiaries, content organization(Collections), the community types and stats.

In terms of stats, here's some things I'd like to have something like a dashboard to be able to see.

  • List of post count from users over the past x days.
  • List of user earnings over the past x days
  • List of highest community curators
  • List of tippers and how much
  • List of muted posts(Had this, still broken)
  • List of how many of a users posts have been muted
  • List of highest commenters in the community
  • List of highest page views of posts in the community across x time range
  • Where traffic is coming from (well basically all the analytics stuff sites normally have)

Also...

I'd like to be able to set up auto-mute conditions. For instance, let's say you wanted to have a videos only community, if someone creates a post and there is no video in the post, the post is auto-muted. Similar thing for images. I'd use that in OCA, if someone creates a post that doesn't have an image, the post is automatically muted. You could have one for if a post has below a certain word count, it's auto-muted, etc.

  • I wonder how much @arcange through the @hivesql DB could help with a few of those options, they seem well suited.

  • And perhaps @cardboard can help with some of the tipping related ones.

  • Analytic related ones (traffic based ones) would likely be a matter of spending more time on the peakd.com statistics which is in the plans... but would not really work to get every website's stats.

  • Not sure which of these would be best for HiveMind DB itself... maybe @howo knows, but i suspect they're not the best candidates for Hivemind but more for something like HiveSQL.

  • I didn't know that there was something still broken for the muted feature... i'm guessing that's something that broke on hivemind or maybe was purposefully removed?

I wonder how much @arcange through the @hivesql DB could help with a few of those options, they seem well suited.

It's quite easy to do for all of the stats mentioned by @midlet, except for the last 2 ones because such data cannot be found in the blockchain.

This a bit irrelevant to the post but the second part of it is something I wanted to discuss with you in a DM recently.

My only pet peeves right now that I'd like to be added from @peakd's perspective and maybe later on hive.blog would include them as well is the fix that I've already mentioned to cross-posts being "front-end only" and not actually creating a new post on the chain that has rewards declined. I'd like to see cross-posts being used more broadly by anyone and everyone and at the same time communities that don't want them and feel it doesn't belong there could easily mute the cross-posts.

On that note, I'd also welcome a feature where it's easier for an account that has the rank to moderate a community to easier be able to mute certain accounts through clicking on a user's name in the post instead of having to go through the community settings page and inputting the username there.

Yeah the quick muting of a user is a front end thing we should add to the list. If you have more of those small suggestions feel free to share directly or here in comments or even a post which may motivate others to share thoughts... we need to collect them all soon.

As for cross-post / reblog to communities we would actually prefer if it was a backend thing and it would be nice to see them decline rewards or better yet push them all to the original post. I am not sure if that is a hivemind change alone may be a hard fork thing and I guess that is somewhat dependent if it's easy enough to get into a hard fork and if one of those developers seems interested.

Also I was not available when you messaged and then forgot to respond ... will do so now.

Congratulations @jarvie! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

Your post got the highest payout of the day

You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:

Hive Power Up Day - March 1st 2021 - Hive Power Delegation
Hive Tour Update - Communities

My good man, this is indubitably intriguing. This whole balance may be shaky, but self-expression is truly important no matter where one is.

would really love to see these ideas implemented soon!

muy buen post felicidades

Being a communty owner/mod OMG i want all those features you just said and more (i will think the more i want and come back here to help with suggestions) but this would really help a lot make Hive better too!

These are mostly backend things... peakd has plenty of front end UI upgrades planned as well

Que Lindo Paisaje

classify each community by theme/topic

this point is very important, I want it to happen.

Something that would be great when the classification by themes is ready; is that a small notice for the communities that have active contests and challenges can be displayed. Many users are always looking for contests and that would help to show it in the general view without having to enter to search in each community.

One big topic would be entertainment which brings up the need for sub categories as well.

It would be good to see some more focus around communities as it is easier to set up, and MUCH cheaper than tribes for beginners that want to get started quickly.

Scot-bot api and tokens can be implemented into communities. Communities on hive is basically at its core a way for users in a decentralized way to connect with eachother and have a place of their own on hive and to have moderating features. So hive-engine has plenty of tools that can add to the experience of that community of users

Love your post just created with my beloved a new community regarding the topics of individual sovereignty, self-sufficiency and spirituality and curate posts which highlight the visions shared and acted upon by individuals engaged with either one or all 3 of those themes. Your post comes with a lot of information worthwhile to contemplate since we are also still considering how we wish to structure the community. We already created it, but will be setting it up first, those interested can already subscribe to be updated. "Mystical Sovereigns", thank you for taking the time to dive into all the possibilities and potentials for structuring a community. Cheers to you with some $wine!! 🍷


Congratulations, @ravenking13 You Successfully Shared 0.200 WINE With @jarvie.
You Earned 0.200 WINE As Curation Reward.
You Utilized 2/4 Successful Calls.

wine-greeting
Total Purchase : 17683.618 WINE & Last Price : 0.280 HIVE
HURRY UP & GET YOUR SPOT IN WINE INITIAL TOKEN OFFERING -ITO-


WINE Current Market Price : 3.484 HIVE

Put themselves into a queue where the moderators can decide which subscribers should now become posting members

I think, we should also give the feature to remove subscribers to empower the community more - for example, the community may grow too fast but later on they only keep those people who they think are more beneficial for the community.

I am having a hard time understanding what removing a subscriber accomplishes... also we can't remove our followers either. We can mute followers and we can mute subscribers ... seems like all the use cases are mostly covered.

Hello @jarvie.

Can I translate this post into spanish ?

Sure... its a long one! Haha

It would be brilliant if we could just click a box and have different language posts appear and disappear. Sometimes I want to challenge myself to read Japanese, Spanish or indonesian posts, sometimes I can’t be bothered.

This would also encourage people to write bilingual posts in order to get more exposure, which is good for getting people from different countries to interact more. We’d have to create a culture of giving tiny downvotes to discourage mislabeling a post as being English (etc.) when it’s not though.

When I saw how you integrated tribes and hive-engine the way I envisioned smts working, that’s what got me excited about hive again and now I’m ultra active on naturalmedicine.io.

Good work always! Keep it up ! Also outreach! We are back to 12k daily active users on hive

I LOVE the "more options for sorting." I think that there needs to be some opt-in algorithms that help you find likeminded communities and people, helping trim a lot of the fat that may be driving new folks away.

I often find browsing most things aside from sorting by "top" is a lot like going to reddit and sorting by New... Not a fun experience. I find myself browsing less and less because of the amount of crap I need to sift through.

Keindahan menjelang malam

STATS ... i would want to know.

This is something that can be easily achieved using HiveSQL. I already provide some in my daily stats (section 7)

Language classification of a post...

HiveSQL already provides such information (and more) for ages. Here the announcement post I made back 2016.

Feel free to contact me if you want to have a talk about that.

I'm pretty sure you've been on the developer meetings where they have talked about languages. Are you not a fan of some of those solutions mentioned there?

Do you have an API that would lead to me being in a topic page or a feed for a badge or maybe even community and then ask to see all Italian or Tagalog posts and instead of accessing 2000 posts via the api to simply filter and find only 1-2 you can instead query an API that would immediately and quickly populate the list and choose from the typical sorting mechanisms like the trenging algorithm or chronological?

Also i was thinking that having a dozen nodes providing hivemind API is helpful for decentralization and for ramping up to having lots more users...so it seems to me it would be nice to be in there.

Yes, I was part of the language discussion at the development meeting. That being said, I don't think a "solution" for hivemind has been proposed or planned.

I do not provide an API on top of HiveSQL because this will add an unnecessary extra layer. Add to that that such an API would be limited to what I think is OK for me, but not necessarily tailored to someone else's needs. This is already the problem you are having with Hivemind where you have to wait for someone to provide you with the API you want.

Any dev can create its own API or directly send a request that fits its wishes to HiveSQL. The one you are mentioning for Italian would take a few minutes to create, including filtering and sorting. I can assist you with this task.

Regarding decentralization, HiveSQL is of course not comparable to hivemind, but it no longer has to prove its reliability.
Nothing prevents you from creating a thin layer that allows you to switch from one solution to another if ever hivemind ever had to implement the features you need.

image.png
Maybe we'll have to look into hivesql for some community stats and see what's possible.

I'm still very interested in focusing on how many Content Posts a community has seems like it usually focuses on content posts + comments... the thing about that is it doesn't really say much about the community itself. Because we know how hive works. Someone that has a lot of subscribers could happen to post in your community and all of their followers comment on that post and not a single one of them is part of the community or could care less about the community or even recognizes they posted in a community but it came up in their feed. Then you have 100 comments and now your community looks like it has 100 activity with one single actual content post? To someone looking for a community and they come in and see 1 post in the community they see a ghost town then they go somewhere else with 20 content posts they see life even if they all just had 4 comments... that's an alive community and the stats do not reflect this in the slightest.

My stats are about posts (what you call "content"), not comments.

On number 7, I would argue saying the reward pool should not treat shared videos, posts, Twitter Tweets, Facebook posts, shared photos, shared memes, links, random things shared from random websites, forums, emails, etc, etc, differently. Don't treat them differently and let the people decide. But perhaps if not enough people upvote a shared item, then perhaps resource credits, the manna, the Hive Power, should go down. Perhaps punish people that way in order to limit spam, abuse, etc. But I believe in rewarding people for sharing. Besides, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, they make billions to trillions of dollars letting us share things on their platforms. Why can't we do the same? Like, is it ok when they do it and not ok when alternative tech do it?

eat shared videos, posts, Twitter Tweets, Facebook posts, shared photos, shared memes, links, random things shared from random websites, forums, emails, etc, etc, differently

Gaining financial value on the work done by someone else is a very dubious thing. Also the legal implications also scare me. You could perhaps argue the value was in the work that was taken to find and share but the person on the other side (the one who created the thing you shared) may not feel the same and who knows... could they say it with a lawsuit? Also do we really want to bring in something that we're always fighting about and our answer is to just bring in more downvoting... that hasn't ended well so far.

Communities really do need the ability to share outside content because no community system that is successful right now is successful without it. However we have to be careful because of the unique reward pool aspect of hive. Then again if you create a good community you will have people motivated by much more then a few cents of limited reward pool inflation.

As a community owner, I would love to be able to include links on like a header or sidebar of a group. I really want to be able to include links to the other groups I run as well and anything else that might be relevant at the top of the screen or on the side. I guess what I can do for now is simply pin a few posts and include the links inside those posts.

Your post has been voted as a part of Encouragement program. Keep up the good work!
Try https://ecency.com and Earn Points in every action (being online, posting, commenting, reblog, vote and more).
Boost your earnings, double reward, double fun! 😉

Support Ecency, in our mission:
Ecency: https://ecency.com/proposals/141
Hivesigner: Vote for Proposal

More community development would be very welcome!

One feature that would be very useful for my communities would be to have folders within the communities that members could direct their posts into.

Yeah and this is a front end sort of solution so it wasn't in this particular post but thanks for bringing it up because I think this upgrade is even a more important development

Congratulations @jarvie! You received a personal badge!

You powered-up at least 10 HIVE on Hive Power Up Day!
Wait until the end of Power Up Day to find out the size of your Power-Bee.
May the Hive Power be with you!

You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking

Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:

Hive Tour Update - Financial stages

Congratulations @jarvie! You received a personal badge!

You powered-up at least 1000 HP on Hive Power Up Day and got the biggest Power-Bee!
See you at the next Power Up day to see if you will repeat this feat.
May the Hive Power be with you!

You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking

Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:

Feedback from the March 1st Hive Power Up Day
Hive Tour Update - Financial stages

I love the emphasis on categories in Peakd and organizing stuff in various ways to make it user friendly. That is SO key to retention— being able to find stuff quickly and effectively.

I currently look to Facebook as a model of what a "user group" could do. Even better than that would be the ability to have tiers of membership or even some kind of paid membership (or access if you're holding a token, etc.) Subscribing to me means, I follow the posts and get them in my feed. Being a member means, I'm able to post in the group itself and show up on all subscriber feeds. That is how I would like to see it perform.

As for the dashboard, sorting is a great idea and in all different ways. I'm personally looking for communities with common interests, and then also ones with active users, and places I can post as well as curate.

i think we're all waiting for people with community building skills and some vision to come in and create some great communities there are only a handful of active and persistent communities right now... but there will be tons more soon is the expectation when they recognize they can build something here they have ownership of and they can share that ownership with the rest of the community if they want.

I'm very interested in doing just that. I'm actually also prepared to create a token (on par Leo) and go the mile. I wanted to do that with SMT's but I was still waiting when my computer fried and I lost everything. (long story, but rendering some islands for Steem Monsters, I fried my drive, GPU and board overnight and almost had a fire LMFAO!) Anyhow, I had big dreams on Steem. While I was gone, the whole Tron thing happened. I'm powering down over there and have really done well this market and see some dreams coming true. Still, I've not had the best experience on HIVE so far. I got 2/3 of 5 posts downvoted by spam prevention bots (basically, demonetization) and was not doing anything sketchy. Seems vigilant, and understandable, but still is very user unfriendly.

I know this platform like my own hands- even though I haven't been here on Hive. I know Steem. I just don't know how to use this interface yet and all the changes since. I want to be able to TEACH my friends how to use it if I bring them here. So I'm all around ALL the dapps, discords, buttons, clicking, testing stuff-- trying to understand it all. So forgive my SWARMING. But if I can find a place here, I'd be glad to help others to as well.

I'd just say this... people have been very successful at creating communities without tokens ... i don't think they're needed and maybe are a distraction. THey have their place but if they become a distraction to what really makes a community successful then people aren't putting time into the actual things that make communities successful.

@jarvie To speak for myself and those like me, Tokens are helpful to folks who have fanbases that want to economize their community. An influencer may want a way to reward their tribe. Or a 'creator community' may want a way to exchange hours of work among themselves. A gamer may want a way for their users to exchange tips. I can think of dozens of ways that tokens improve a community- gamification being one of them. I don't look at them as much as a "currency" as I do a "points system" which is rapidly gaining popularity among the fanbases of influencers.

I agree that money can make community efforts wonky though. In a perfect world, all support would be for the feels and the intrinsic gain. People would do stuff because they really believe in it. And that's easy to accomplish when in situations without barriers. For instance, it's easy to follow a celebrity on Instagram and comment. (they also get lots of spam) That ease makes the need for compensation moot. However, when people are putting in WORK to contribute and understand a platform, such as on Medium, which is hard (Medium is not easy like Instagram) then we are left with feeling it is taking more than the platform is even worth (especially when we can install a blog and own our list.)

Just making marketing-philosophy conversation here. I feel I stand where a balance must be struck. It's striking it that's the challenge. A challenge most just concede to doing and either give up (and go to Instagram) or strongarm (and build a blog.)

Medium complied with their power users requests, but were okay with losing the accounts that wouldn't put in the work to meet them halfway. They're still very niche though but it worked.

I see HIVE as having the capability to get right where they all go wrong. Mainly because the technology was always screaming ahead of others, and the minds behind the whole core community are brilliant. The core team here already has my trust. Where other social blockchains simply have my presence due to their utility.

And yes, a phonecall might help catch me up to speed- may be way faster than texting or online discussion. The discussion is really good content though too >_< lol! <3

Yes i recognize the usages for tokens and I agree with them... but so far for most communities it has been a distraction and a crutch... they have failed to focus on the fundamentals of a community thinking all they need are tokens... the exact definition of a distraction.

Hi @jarvie

Thanks for reminding us of many of the things we wanted to do with the communities, like you I think that the ideas that were projected at the time should be taken up again to finish configuring the communities.

Yours, Piotr

 3 years ago  Reveal Comment

Meaning you'd like to see the full context easier/quicker? Or what do you think a "better reply system" looks like? Love to hear it because i find it cumbersome to have to click on view parent or view original... sometimes i can't quickly think of which one to click on.

I agree, I generally prefer forum style formatting.