How Could We Enjoy More Readability On Steemit?
In the Steem system, one of the readability issues is that you can follow a person, a tag (theme), but you can’t filter your feed anymore. If the person is blogging about different themes, you will see all in your feed. Also, the ones you don’t want.
Multi-talented people
For example, I'm writing about “traditional” stock or commodity investing, cryptocurrencies, lifehacking, language learning... I'm also making polls, almost every day and sometimes publishing photo series. I can imagine some people interested in investing hate my polls, others interested only in cryptocurrencies hate my post about stock market or languages, photos. (A similar issue are representing other technical posts about rewards or advances in dApps, see this poll from @rem-steem).
Crypto-news in the RSS reader Feedly.com
Different languages can be also an issue. I'm writing mostly in English but sometimes also in Spanish or German. For some people the one, for others the other can be like spam.
What is the solution?
Selecting the best from chaos
I use Feedly to select the best blogs and bloggers, the most interesting or useful posts when I read news or blogs. An RSS feed is like your feed on Steemit.com, a series of articles or posts you can read in an RSS reader. It can be related to an author, to a section on a news site (“stock exchange”, “cryptocurrency”) or can be the feed of a specific blog. The big advantage is you don’t have to see the entire site, only a part of it in which you are interested.
Crypto-news in the RSS reader Feedly.com
The advantages of an RSS feed are, you don't have to visit any website. In fact, the websites are sending the new posts to your reader. Just like on Steemit.com, where you do not have to visit the pages of the people you follow. You see all their posts in your feed, in a single timeline.
No RSS feed on Steemit?
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any RSS feeds on Steemit.com, on Busy.com, or Partiko.io either. There were solutions and tricks earlier, like the one described here by @mike314-0005 or the other here by @libertylol but seemingly not working anymore. (I can follow only my own posts as you see on the second picture on Feedly.com.)
My own posts in the RSS reader Feedly.com
But this issue could be solved so nicely with RSS feeds. Imagine all users can have 5 (better 10) RSS feeds and a main one. You could follow all posts from the blogger with the main feed. Only one specific theme with the other feeds. I could mark my posts like investing or learning or photography and people could follow only one or some of this sub-feeds.
Using tags
Another simple solution is if you could filter the posts for two factors: user and tag, I mean the actual, existing tag system. Not only follow @billclinton987, for example, but follow “@billclinton987” and “investing” and “cryptocurrencies”. And you won’t see the posts of this user about Steem Monsters or swimming pools or lies and sex or whatever.
The other advantage of RSS feeds is you can read your feeds in an RSS reader. The reader memorizes which posts you have read, which not, where were you going to read the last time. Unlike the feed on Steemit.com where the older posts are easily forgotten, the newer ones are situated always first in the line.
Other nice side of RSS readers (Feedly, Old Reader, Palabre etc.) could be that they could join your readings from Steemit pages and other blogs or news sources. You could use the Brave New Steem World and the old one in the same place. While you are waiting for Steem to triumph forever.
My phone, reading my mind
By the way, another life hack : I had to travel this weekend and spent most time without my computer. This was the first time I had written a blog post almost entirely on my phone. (Correcting it afterwards on the computer.) This was possible with Swiftkey, an application trying to read your mind... With some sort of artificial intelligence it not only completes the words you’re typing, it is learning your writing habits and adapting itself to your use cases.
I think it's genius, is saving about 50 percent of my typing time now. Although I have some security and privacy concerns about letting a program store all my texts I type.
(Cover photo: Pixabay.com)
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvoting this reply.
I am totally agree with your points as I have similar issues as you know. I hate to switch between different front-end. Coz what I get from busy will never get it from partiko. Different front-end may be use different algorithm to show different posts.
And yeah, if I want to read what my favourite author writes, there is no handy way to find them, if they post it 22 hours ago or use different tag, its lost.
Can you name the app you are using on your phone for writing? or is the name is 'swiftkey' itself?
Posted using Partiko Android
Swiftkey is facilitating writing in the whole Android system, in every other software. I used Google Keep this time.
It is the first time I hear you can not only follow a steemian but also certain tags/subjects.
I never found that option and @partiko hasn't it either. So I follow a person and I dont care about the subjects they write.
I read plenty here I would have never read if I had used a feed of my interests only. There are great writers you can only find if you give all subjects a chance and also yourself to improve your knowledge.
Spam is not if someone with a large interest is writing about different subjects but if people keep harashing you with the same story.
I am able to select what is the best for me and I want to be open for new members as well. Those we all know and see and make a big income do not need to be read, but I agree some filters would be welcome.
Posted using Partiko Android
You can only follow a Steemian, but clicking on certain tags you see the posts with these tags. What I's saying is that it would be nice to follow only the posts of somebody with certain tag. Person+tag combined.
I understand what you mean and also that posts with an other subject written buy the same person can be seen as spam.
I never saw the option person + tag... Neither I can search for just the tag.
Posted using Partiko Android
Dear @deathcross
Interesting choice of topic. I fully agree with you and I also believe that we should have a chance to "filter" our feed.
In my opinion the best idea would be to also add second "layer" of importance to all those who we follow. Obviously we all are following number of random accounts and I would love to be able to mark some of them as "priority accounts" and to be able to display feed of all those users only.
We seem to share quite a number of similar interests. Will surely follow you closely.
ps. Wouldn't you think that posting as often as you do is going to put your followers off? Steemit isn't like instagram. Posting every day doesnt seem to work here (in my opinion).
Would you mind sharing link to Swiftkey ? I tried to find it on google but all I found is spam related to "Swiftkey keyboards".
Yours
Piotr
Hi, by Swiftkey I meant the Swiftkey keyboard, which has a very good autocomplete function and has AI (machine learning) abilities.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.touchtype.swiftkey&hl=en
I think 2-3 posts a day on Steemit should be enough, but some days I put 4 and some days, none. It depends on my time. I like dPoll and maybe will try other dApp some day. Some dApps are spamming your channel.
I'm sure there are a lot of solutions, programming variations. I like to read but it's difficult to filter the good content.
Dear @deathcross
Thank you for your kind reply.
Personally I think that you're putting so much of work to create content, but chance is that not many people will read it.
After all most of our followers will hardly ever be willing to invest more than 10-15min weekly of their time to support content created by us. Of course that's just my own opinion, but it would be waste to lose someone like you because of lack of engagement.
Yours
Piotr
I'm much more engaged than you think. Sometimes it is not the result but the way to it. For example, I wrote here a longer post:
https://steemit.com/investing/@deathcross/tales-of-wheat-corn-golden-cross-and-deathcross
And no comment at all. But I'm not disappointed, I learned a lot in the process. I know it is a "niche theme", something for a very small group of people only.
And Dpoll is a small but enthusiastic community.
I discovered Steemit by Google, searching for something like "Bitcoin inflation" or "Bitcoin halving". Maybe others will discover it searching for "wheat investing" or "VIX shorting".
Indeed it may be hard to find audience for those kind of publications @deathcross
Thx for being so responsive,
Piotr
Great ideas, but I think RSS is not used a lot anymore, except by bots. But it is a good idea to be able to subscribe to tags and to filter users by tags as well.
You got a 95.39% upvote from @bdvoter courtesy of @deathcross!
Delegate your SP to us at @bdvoter and earn daily 100% profit share for your delegation & rewards will be distributed automatically daily.
500 SP, 1000 SP, 2500 SP, 5000 SP, 10000 SP.
If you are from Bangladesh and looking for community support, Join BDCommunity Discord Server & If you want to support our service, please set your witness proxy to BDCommunity.
I will say the most important one to me is the using of tags
You got a 23.81% upvote from @brupvoter courtesy of @deathcross!
@deathcross purchased a 76.19% vote from @promobot on this post.
*If you disagree with the reward or content of this post you can purchase a reversal of this vote by using our curation interface http://promovotes.com
This post has received a 29.09 % upvote from @boomerang.