I’ve been trying to find a quiet time to have this dapp review done and crossed off my to-do-list. It was weeks ago since I started noticing people I follow using D.Buzz. I’m not a fan of microblogging and never used twitter until I was convinced it’s a necessity for conventional online brand marketing.
D.Buzz is a decentralized microblogging platform built on top of the Hive Blockchain. It’s like Twitter but your posts can potentially earn you monetary rewards based on the upvotes given by other users in proportion to their stake on the blockchain. This might sound so obvious for users that are used to the blockchain but this content was intended to court search engine crawlers to attract people that are not yet on Hive. I know some of my posts occasionally rank better by some mystic Google algorithm.
The selling point of engaging with D.Buzz is it’s drive for #anticensorship #censorshipresistance #nocensorship. As soon as someone makes Buzz, the post is recorded permanently on the blockchain. No one can erase your Buzz when viewed from the records of the blockchain. This gives you more room to exercise your #freespeech without fearing for loss of visibility, or prevented access from your account.
D.Buzz has an active community. You can find its community administrators engaging with other users a norm rather than a rarity. Engagement is a big plus for helping with user retention and positive user experience. This came as a surprise considering a lot of communities on the blockchain have few engaging users.
When you “Buzz” something, you get a limit 280 characters and this includes the characters found in the weby url you may want to share. I find this limit understandable if you’re just buzzing short sentences. What I don’t get is how the characters on the url are also counted within the 280 limit. There’s a circle that gives a visual reminder of your character count at the bottom right of the screen when you make a post. It looks good by the way.
When I first tried to make a Buzz, I tried maximizing my 280 character count. Once I reached 280, I then attached an image uploaded straight from my laptop. This helped with exceeding the character limit but I’m not sure if this was a bug or intentional.
You would also see a field asking the limit of how much payout you want to accept for the buzz. I tried putting it 1000 initially because I was curious about the limit. The extra rewards are sent to the account @null for burning tokens. The team also implemented a disclaimer regarding the implications of having a higher limit to the rewards you can possibly make for each Buzz. As much as I understand the intent behind the notice, I can’t help but think that maybe some content being buzzed in the future could have earned more for the value it brings.
Let’s say an imaginary famous user started buzzing. Why should they be mindful about the payout limit if it can’t be helped that their huge following would be likely to show their support through plenty of upvotes that can snowball in value? Most curation done on Hive base layer aren’t even driven to promote quality content. It’s normal to upvote someone’s shitpost just because you like them.
So what makes it so difficult to comprehend that even short content can still be rewarded highly without quality in mind? People can press like on a facebook post just because they like the person rather than find what their friend’s share meaningful. It’s an unconscious means to show support and to reciprocate this support can be more prevalent especially on a blockchain that rewards people free money.
I still think the notice is a double edged sword. On one hand, I understand why the warnings need to be placed for orienting the general nature of the blockchain as D.Buzz is one of the many frontends they can help onboard new users. The notice functions as a necessity especially for users that want try to game the system by taking advantage of their autovotes. The problem is, there’s no automatic way to tell whether someone wants to milk the autoupvotes they get versus someone that just happens to like buzzing a lot with a high number of followers.
I think the most difficult hurdle to overcome is how the dapp comes across as a source of clutter on the newsfeed on other frontends. It’s been part of the meta game that to earn on the platform, users are more likely to have better chances of getting rewarded if they pursue a long form of content. If we have to compare the centralized competition twitter, a content creator can keep tweeting x number of times per day. However this dynamic becomes spam as buzzes can appear alongside regular blog posts.
There was a creative solution another dapp made to make the posts less distracting for the general users uninterested. If you’ve been around before the hard fork happened, you might have come across a quora like dapp called musing.io. The questions displayed on the frontend of musing will appear as a comment under the thread of musing’s posts along with the replies/answers made under the question. On steempeak, it would look like a single daily post with hundreds to thousands of replies. Even the answers are displayed as “…see this at musing.io”. Musings had a side option to publish their questions like a regular blog post if the user opts to have it posted under their general blogging page.
Because the questions and answers of users are automatically displayed under the comment sections of a regular blog post, this becomes less of a clutter to users using other frontends. I think D.Buzz could pick up and innovate on that example when it comes to the clutter problem on other frontends.
Another thing that caught my eye is the overall simplicity of the page’s design. The logo and choice of colors are somewhat ok. It even intuitively makes you feel at home if you’re familiar with twitter layout. The choice of font and how objects are laid out over the page made navigation simple.
In my opinion, I think D.Buzz could do more on the improving ways to gamify their microblogging site. It’s no surprise that decentralized microblogging site will be a contested area for dapps later on as twitter boosted the awareness for #anticensorship platforms. D.Buzz needs to go beyond trying to make users feel like it’s another alternative to centralized twitter. What I mean is coming up with its own spin off to keep users entertained while engaging the platform.
This could come from issuing tokens for users that they could exchange for custom D.Buzz profile themes, badges, quests, and mini social games as a gimmick. Because D.Buzz needs a community that thrives through engagement, having features that gamify the interactions between users can help with positive user experience. I have some rough ideas for possible features but those are loads of paragraphs to write and beyond the scope of this review.
Conclusion:
Do I think D.Buzz is a good microblogging dapp? I do. It has all the functionalities to make it so but it would still need improvements as there are going to be more dapps that will try to compete with microblogging. Not everyone is a long form content creator or even a content creator to begin with. I think microblogging is a good means to help introduce people new to crypto without committing a lot of their time and money first.
Would I use D.Buzz for my blogging? I’m mainly a long form content creator and it was a struggle to keep the message limited to 280 characters. But I see value in microblogging as some short contents work best through these platforms. You don’t need a lot of words to share a picture of your art piece or photograph as an example of content that could thrive here.
The thing that holds me back to using D.Buzz is having my Buzzes be seen as clutter on other frontends. So until the dapp implements an option to publish my posts where my regular blogs go vs hiding them like how musing.io did it or similar to it, it’s unlikely anytime soon. I’ll just be contented having replying other people’s buzz through D.Buzz.
Has anyone else seen a re-Buzz button?