Steem Communities Feedback
I have been testing communities for a few weeks now with my newly formed Excel for All Community (https://beta.steemit.com/trending/hive-102332). The feedback I have today is based not only on my own experiences but also those of a few beta testers I invited from LinkedIn that have never been involved in steem before.
We all know I am not a dev. But I do think I am the perfect ‘customer’ for communities on steem. I previously ran a community on Google+ which as we all know, closed. I have been holding off on re-forming a community ever since. The reason being, as a content creator and community leader I am tried of how central organizations run. How the content creator and consumer are only just data for them to sell. Neither the content creator or the consumer gets a piece of that pie. And if you are a creator, unless you are making them money, chances are, no one will ever see your content anyway. I am eager to find an alternative solution. The steem Blockchain and decentralization provide some of the solutions to the problems currently facing web2 and I think this will be an awesome place to set up communities.
So, I guess it’s time for the feedback. I do hope it is found to be of value for the future of communities on steem.
Profile – A users need to go to the wallet to update their profile image and info. This is not very intuitive and not an obvious place to check. Maybe if you could click on the profile picture it would open a screen to update profile. Or a link placed on a person’s blog (which now seems to be called profile???)
Notifications – we need to be able to set the notification we receive. It's very daunting to be getting 50+ notification on 1 post and it would be great to be able to filter them and change the notification settings.
Posting - a number of people missed posting to the community as they selected posts to blog. This error is too easy to make, and I would suggest removing the option to post to the blog from within a community post.
Posting – Admins should be able to set if who can post to the community. At the moment anyone can post, not just a subscriber.
Posting – It would be nice to have the ability to post to more than one community, or resteem to a different community.
Admin views – could you add a view for admin to show all comments (not level 1 posts) made on community posts.
Navigation – its hard to find your way back to communities once you go to someone's blog.
Admin Settings – it would be nice to be able to turn on mandatory tags/category/flares to a post and allow users to sort by the same.
Navigation – The current tabs on a blog/profile are Blog, Posts, Replies, Notification. This is a little confusing as the term post can be a personal blog post or a community post. I propose this is changed to Blog Communities. Within both of these, you would then have posts, comments, replies, notifications.
Stats – we need more stats. However, as an Excel and steem geek, I know how to get these myself and I know what I want as a community leader. Maybe Excel for All could step up here and create a third-party tool?? Maybe @roadscape would like to collaborate with us???
Direct messaging of some type should really be a feature of a community.
Admin rights – allow admin/owner to set the owner account as a beneficiary on posts made to the community.
Admin rights and feature – allow admin to turn on or off guest posts (non steem account posts)
Admin – have the ability to search subscribers list. Add subscribers date of subscription to list of subscribers.
The UI needs a bit of sleek design work.
So that’s about it for the moment. I would like to invite a second round of beta testers before we come out of beta. However, I won’t have time to do that until the end of next week. I do hope we have another few weeks in beta.
I would like to give a special that’s to the Linkedin users that joined me and helped with the first round of beta tests. @excelguy, @diazkongming, @alanmurray, @f-wiyanto, @jkpieterse, @axilizar, @poweraccess, @xlncad, @esterbennett. Many of which are well known Excel experts and influencers and I feel very honored that they took the time to help me on this journey. If you take a look at some of the accounts, you will find some of the direct feedback they gave me on communities.
For everyone looking for a Communities Tutorial I made one a little while back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=FP8Lz0XqYH8&feature=emb_title
nice share
nice share
I had a look at communities recently, I've no idea what it's about or how it works. Have you got any suggestions about posts which outline the idea/ how tos?
I did notice I can't seem to filter my feed by each individual community which needs changing.
Also how do I post within a community?
Any help much appreciated!
I think @themarkymark did some posts on how communities work.
As for filtering your feed, yes thats a great idea
To post within a community, navigate to the community and select new post. this will bring up the posting screen. On the top you will see Posting to [community name] and you will also see the option to oost to blog. Do NOT select post to blog as this post will not be seen in the community. If you want the post to be visible on your blog, after you post it to the community you have to resteem it.
OK thanks for that, I'll to explore further!
Note that this doesn't seem to be the case. As I said in my longer response, anything you post to a Community appears to be posted to people who follow you just as any other post would be. It appears right there in their blog. And this seems to be true whether or not they're reading you on SteemPeak or Steemit.
For example, this original post showed up in my feed and I am pretty sure that you posted it to a Community. I'm reading it on SteemPeak because I follow your account and I think it's guaranteed that I'm not in whatever Community you posted to. (I'm betting that the Community is owned by @hive-144703. SteemPeak doesn't automatically resolve that reference to a Community while beta Steemit does.)
At least at this point, for people who follow you as an entity, you don't have to do anything for people to be able to follow posts you make to Communities.
"Note that this doesn't seem to be the case." - that is because you are not using the beta site. the beta site is connected to the blockchain and steemit and other fount ends can pick up the posts. however, when beta changes to live, from what I understand, this will change.
As I said – "on SteemPeak."
At this point, the useful thing of looking at posts not on the beta Steemit site is that you can see exactly how things are working under the hood, how posts are propagated inside of the blockchain itself. Knowing that, we can make some assessments about what things are possible within the context of transactions issued via the blockchain.
But most importantly, other front ends are already picking up those posts. They aren't able to associate the Community owners with Community descriptors nor apply some sort of tagging or grouping to the content, but they do propagate it and allow it to be read, and that's how we know exactly that a post to a Community is treated just like any other post that an account would make.
In the longer run, this could be a bit of a problem – but it's part and parcel of the fact that the entirety of the blockchain is readable by any observer who wants to decode it. Closed/private Communities are literally impossible. The only kind of access control that will be available is determining who can post content effectively cosigned by the Community as an authority. I think a lot of people may end up being somewhat disappointed to discover they won't be able to, for example, set up a Community with a paywall for reading that content.
It's going to be very interesting to see what people actually end up doing with Communities. I'm actually quite surprised at this point that SteemPeak hasn't put up at least a beta interface to Communities considering how fast they jumped onto Tribes, which have a lot more programming overhead to make work. I trust the guys it SP to have a much better iterative process once they get something up in the first place.
Hi @paulag
I'll give my input on the Hivemind (backend) aspect:
Notifications: good thing is, they are already categorized in the backend, so it's a matter of finding a way to record a user's global preferences and then matching those with API requests.
Currently, only Type 1 communities are being created and these are open access. There's Type 2 - Journal (guests can comment only) and Type 3 - Council (only members can write). There is an issue open on GitHub concerning these, to review the validation techniques. These community types will start with the number 2 or 3, when their creation is supported.
Resteems: I had been thinking about this since I read a post by @tarazkp that mentioned this about two weeks ago. I have written a few notes, but haven't gone that far with it. I think it's a great suggestion that's worth pursuing.
I can confirm that Hivemind currently returns the date as part of the
list_subscribersquery so it's just a matter of adding that "date" to the front-end.Why are these being described as "different Types of Community" and not just different variants of Role assignment at set up? Because from the perspective of the systems that are already in place, that is the only difference. The only difference from functionality that currently is available within the architecture seems to be who can write a reply Comment and it would seem to be much easier to add that as an option than to try and shoehorn things.
In fact, the best way to design this from a UI perspective is probably to build a matrix/table and let people choose from it.
For example:
With each of those columns having a selection button at the bottom and the Custom column having a pulldown that would allow you to set any default to start with. The Reply column of Council should be a pulldown with those two options, because it's certainly possible that you might want a Community where only a few people have access to posting root content but people manually vetted by Moderators could have access to comment.
There would also need to be a fair amount of explanatory text attached to various things, probably via a nice mouseover, but we will leave such discussions to somebody else who is going to be working on that kind of thing.
thanks for your insights @imwatsi. That's interesting about the types
I do not care about stats and since are a stat geek and can lay hands on it yourself gguess that problem is solved.
So far I have no idea how post directly into the community I made or on my blog.
What is a mystery to me is why cannot post in more as one community.
Those hive numbers not make this platform . No one knows what the number means or what community it is. Far of user-friendly.
I do not care who directly into the community I made (which is CCC) shouldn't that be the idea? CCC is a community carried by all members so are the contests hosts. They are members. Same rights for everyone.
I wonder about the administration part...I made the community but can not even get into it. Nowhere I can find a manual how to do it and I am clearly not the only one. More communities deal with that problem and have no clue why a post does not show up in the community or?
"I do not care who directly into the community I made (which is CCC) shouldn't that be the idea? "
there is still a limited rewards pool, as a community owner I feel I have a responsibility to the blockchain to ensure there is no abuse. I also feel comments can be extremely valuable and important to a platform, and it would be nice to be easily able to find these and if there is value, reward them.
How did you set up the community and yet not know how to access it? Are you using the beta site, because right now, thats the only place you can access communities?
@paulag sorry for the badly written respond. I noticed many words disappear again. It seems to be a @esteemapp issue I have.
I wrote I do not care about the stats... Statistics. I managed to come this far any just publishing and up voting. I try to discover more.
By now I was twice able to sign in on beta.steemit.com. in most cases I can not load it.
I added some communities and found the option to start a community (CCC). I did not intend to start it on my account but for @team-ccc I do not have the active key.
I only once saw the option to post on my account or into the community. I clicked on my account and I do no longer see the other option.
The only thing I do now is posting and using the hive as the first tag. That's it.
Nowhere I found a manual. Can be I am not. able to see more options on my cell phone? I already have that experience with steemit.com too.
Sorry to bother you, I am just not such a smart kid and my slow connection doesn't make it easier either to figure things out. At the moment I can hardly load a site or post and am not able to see photos and videos.
Thanks for your respond. Happy day ❤️
Read this article
https://beta.steemit.com/hive-144703/@gadrian/remarks-after-i-created-a-community-bug
He should help you with your problem.
@bucipuci Thank you do much! ❤️
You are Welcome :-)
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Direct messaging is a must have! @partiko actually has/had this feature. Unfortunately @crypto-talk aka Sida sold it away (to BuzzFeed i believe)
Posted using Partiko Android
Partiko got sold?? When did that happen?
Sometime last year. Last Android Update was in June 2019.
In short, it's a slightly different rehash of steemit.com.
I don't really see any reason to use it tbh. Just has a different skin that reddit developers might have casually toyed with 5 years before creating reddit
"it's a slightly different rehash of steemit.com"
Kinda yea. I was hoping to see a totally different theme and UI
The initial release is conservative in terms of design changes. However, the back end has been swapped out to allow for fast iteration going forward. Although unseen, these are big changes, which is why testing on a minimal set of features is crucial.
I have been hoping for great things from communities. We need something to make Steem more compelling. Getting some like-minded people on here is a good start.
we have to start somewhere. and I guess late and basics are better than never at all