Communities brainstorm.
You want my thoughts on communities @guiltyparties, then you'll get them.
In a nice way. 😀
Communities have been a great addition to hive from the simple blogging site that existed when i first started on the chain three years ago. Back then it was impossible to be seen or to find interesting content among the wave of shit that floated through one viewing stream for everybody to sift through.
They add a lot to the system but still have a long way to go in my opinion. The main two problems that i can see is the lack of incentive to run communities and moderate them combined with the fact that they are very contained within the existing sites.
If i was on a different platform with a large following i can't see the benefit of moving to hive and trying to build here apart from the threat of being cancelled from the other platform. This is a very real threat but one which people won't react to until it is too late for them.
For me the end goal of communities would be to have them on a separate page to the main feed and be able to customize them to a much larger extent. I would love be able to pay 20HBD and create the sports.hive community. One with my own landing page and options to make it look different to the art.hive community.
To me this would look a lot like what @leofinance are building right now with your own site page connected to the chain.
- Community
- Trending
- Sections
- Sub sections
- Ad revenue option as standard. Simple yes or no option.
- Sign-ups directly on landing page. Google,facebook, keychain, metamask
- Token? Maybe, but definite removal of 7 day voting window. We need a solution to this as it is a disincentive to producing quality content. You wan't evergreen content to draw in viewrs over time and create more ad revenue.
- Analytics
These are all highly theoretical at the moment and are more akin to the long fabled smt's than communities but it is where i feel that we should be aiming for.
If you had to ask me for three points that are quick and easy right now and would improve the community experience.
- Integrated ads on your community page to fund voting, moderation, participation. (Option 2: 5% Beneficiary to community to fund curation.)
- Better content discovery. Sub sections, search features, options to configure the page set up. Make it a home.
- Community post not to show up anywhere else unless shared to main blog by user. I love apps like @actifit but would really prefer if my daily posts didn't show up on other peoples feeds. It's not what they want to see. If i post to a community the post would be a lot better if it only showed up in the @actifit community or other specified communities like #sportstalk or anywhere else tagged in the post but not onto the news feed unless reblogged form my account. It would allow for a lot more posting if we didn't have to worry about spamming other peoples feeds or mixing content from other sources than or main posts. I could add a lot more photos posts or @d.buzz without annoying the people that follow me for proper content.
Tools are the most important thing right now. Tools which make utilizing hive faster and easier. We have the technology to compete with any chain and beat most of them hands down. What we don't have are tools for regular people to build on hive.
Communities can be a huge push in this direction if we could start to think of them as separate entities built on hive and create the tools for people to do that.
Like wordpress allows us to build simple websites, #hive could be used to allow people to create an immutable community on the internet and customize it to meet their communities needs. It would take hard work and a solid roadmap in that direction but the first few steps could be taken now to allow this and open up the chain to millions of new users.
If i could build that monetized sports community then it is up to me and my team to go out and bring in the users ourselves. Every community suddenly becomes a marketing team for #hive and adds more value to the system through the revenue it brings in. Imagine a thousand @leofinance sites and the buying pressure their ad revenue would create. They bought $750 of hive this month. At $750,000 this month we would be looking at a very different token price.....
This is part of the communities brainstorming challenge and are part of my wider views on the subject of hive and how we can build for the future.
Participate
- Write a post listing your top 3 improvement ideas for communities
- Tag 3 friends in your post who you want to challenge + copy these rules into your post
- Come back here and link your post in the comments
I would like to hear the opinions of,
@tarazkp
@jongolson
@whatageek
on the subject as they are all users with a lot of knowledge and high standing in the community.
https://twitter.com/niallon11/status/1324098339856654338
Thanks for the shout out man...I'll do my best to respond :)
So when I first saw that communities launched, I thought it was about as user friendly as pulling teeth. It was an awful experience and I'm still not sure they have nailed it.
Calling something hive-484578494 just scares people away, on a user end, the community should have it's own URL or redirect at least. But that again is the powers that be refusing to cater to the every day user.
I think if communities will be a thing, they need to have a USP and not just rely on 'it's decentralized'...It's scary because you see all the banning and censorship that takes place, yet people still flock to traditional social media.
So communities needs to have a reason why people will want to join....I think it comes with tokenization of them. SMT's won't happen anytime soon, so Hive-Engine plays a big role.
We're just building, every day, trying to improve our tribe, token and community in large. But things would be a lot better if we always remembered the end user...Not the blockchain savvy one...But the everyday person.
Spot on stuff.
On the ads point- what about an option where ads displayed within the community are ads from members only? That might be cool.
I'm thinking about how my wife is into Nigerian Dwarf Goats. Facebook has a couple of communities on there but people are not allowed to sell animals, but that is what everyone actually wants to do on there. I am always trying to figure out a way to get them on here. That's a good 1,500 or so active users right there. That could expand to dozens of other breed groups too, of course.
The biggest concern I have is onboarding. Many of these people can barely use Facebook. I worry Hive is way out there for them. Admittedly, I haven't really studied what HiveOnBoard is doing and if that is feasible for the layperson.
This isn't necessarily helpful to your article. I'm just sort of spit balling a common use case and marketing opportunity. There are just so many little community niches we could be tapping into but we really do need to have a polished product to compete. Otherwise folks will just get frustrated and leave like we have seen so much of.
Yes, yes and yes.