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've been wrestling with the new Communities implementation on Steemit.com for a few weeks myself, been active on the Internet in various forms of online fora since there were online fora, and have some thoughts on the same subject. I also bring some technical acumen to the table having worked in online engineering for a number of years. Some of the things you bring up I can explain in some of the things you bring up I can concur on.
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???)
This has always been a terrible design decision on the part of Steemit. They stuck what is normally thought of as the things associated with a personal account viewable externally, settings which can be changed by a user, and the display of activity done by a specific account into a blender, set it to frappe, and then just dumped it out. Some of the things which really need to be in Settings are settable by the user in Wallet and honestly the whole UI is a bit of a mess.
What we really need here is a complete re-factoring of the user experience when it comes to differentiating "who is this user," "what has this user been doing," and "what do you want your user experience to be?" The first two can possibly be folded into the same page as sub-tabs, but all of the personal Settings, including image and info, need to be centralized under Settings.
Luckily, that should be something that's relatively easy for SteemPeak to do because other than historical habit there's no reason to continue to mimic what Steemit is doing.
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.
More accurately, we need an actual Notification system. I've been using GINAbot since the beginning and I have yet to see a website associated with the Steem blockchain which gives me notification of the things that I want to see an activity on things that I do remotely as effectively. You are absolutely correct in that the one time it's particularly off the chain is after a post when all of the automated voting systems kick at the same time and you can easily get well over 100 notifications in under a few minutes – which, in a sense, is a good problem to have but it is extremely annoying. The Steem blockchain has needed a decent Notification system for a long time, however. One that allows for fine tuning of the kind of things you want to see, keeps up with things that happen as a log so that you can review them later, and generally understands the separation between "things that are actionable right now" and "stuff you might generally want to know about."
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.
Here's the problem: from a system perspective, there is no difference between a personal blog entry and a Community blog entry. The only difference seems to be that the Community content can be displayed in a singular, coherent manner on a single webpage associated with the Community. From a mechanical point of view, Communities (as exemplified by a unique identifier which is assigned when you create the Community) are literally no different than any other account which can post to the Steem blockchain, with the only difference being there is a special means of handling displaying their Profile. The Community page. This is why creating a Community costs exactly the same as creating a new account, because that is literally what's going on under the hood.
The deeper problem is that this is another UX issue. When you post to a Community, from a blockchain display point of view, it's as though the individual post had two different creators – the account associated with the Community and yourself. People reading/following you, as an individual, also see everything that you post to a Community. When people go to a Community page and see the posts on it, they likewise see the posts there who have a "shared creator" with that Community account. There is no spatialized differentiation between those two ideas.
Within a Community, there is only a "New Post" button, and once that New Post has been invoked, the "[Post to Blog]" button really doesn't make much sense. This is normally where I would go on it stupid length about some sort of justification for it that I could imagine but I just can't come up with one. I have no idea what they were thinking when they laid out this particular page. Not a single thing.
Posting – Admins should be able to set if who can post to the community. At the moment anyone can post, not just a subscriber.
This is one of the things that, as I understood it, was a core thing about Communities in the first place. While public Communities are perfectly fine as a default, a group which only allows a number of people to post to it would be far more useful for a lot of use cases.
It's interesting to go in and look at the "Leadership" role editing, because they aren't necessarily intuitive.
- Owner - assign admins
- Admin - edit settings, assign mods
- Moderator - mute, pin, set user titles
- Member - listed on leadership team
- Guest - default; can post and comment
- Muted - new posts automatically muted
In a real sense, the only content curation (in the real sense, not the sense that's used on the Steem blockchain) power that exists in the entire hierarchy is the ability to mute a poster. By default, anyone that joins can post but an Admin or a Moderator can mark an account as having their new posts automatically muted.
In theory, you could create the effect of a "closed posting group" by being able to set the default state of a new joiner as Muted and then have an Admin or Moderator unmute accounts they wish to have posting access. That needs to be one of the things that can be set dynamically at any point for Communities.
While we're talking about roles, whoever decided on the UI regarding role titles that they can only be changed inside a given post and not under the Leadership "Edit Roles" link should probably be taken out and beaten because that's not only counterintuitive, it's just wrong. It's bad design.
Posting – It would be nice to have the ability to post to more than one community, or resteem to a different community.
This is really two things, and I feel differently about both of them so I'm going to respond to them separately.
Firstly, being able to re-Steem content into a Community would be extremely helpful. As a curational tool, a Community needs that kind of mechanism – and I would even accept that in order to re-Steem content into a Community, the person doing so needs to add additional commentary, not just a link. In fact, that would be a mechanism that I would like to see more generally applicable around the platform because often I don't just want to re-Steem something, I want to do so and talk about why I'm doing it and while I can simply link to it and quote appropriate parts, it's not really a smooth experience. I would also like the ability to "re-Steem with commentary" and automatically assigned the original post as a beneficiary because that seems like the right thing to do.
Secondly, posting to more than one Community is something that I don't think would be a positive gain for the platform. There is a good reason for that. We have seen how people spam tags and we know that given the way that content is rewarded on the platform, pushing it in front of more eyes – no matter how appropriate it is for those eyes to see – is what people do. Communities allow for conceptual location; that is to say, with Communities content can be located in one place and not in another and it can't really be pushed into that other space. That's a good thing. It allows individuals to differentiate their experiences. You start allowing any post to be "multiply owned" across multiple Communities and you might as well not have those Communities. There will be a lot of people who throw content into whatever they can even remotely justify a post for.
I would absolutely entertain the idea that whether to allow for cross-Community posting is something that should be an option at a per-Community level, but if so I would stridently maintain that the default should be "no," and I would be extremely leery of being involved with a Community where it was set to "yes."
I suppose the default answer to that is "you mean, other than looking at the post itself?" But that goes back to the difficulty of Steem platforms in creating a decent Notification system. In theory, what you really want is to be able to see what activity has occurred in a given Community on posts associated with that Community. You want a way to be able to keep up with what's been going on in there. Whether it be for moderation purposes or simply to keep up with interaction. In a mechanical sense, you want the Community page to actually act more like the standard account Profile page which shows Replies and Comments involving that account.
Ultimately, I think we really need to figure out a way to express more what we want to do with that information and how we need to get it to make it actionable because a Community of any real size is going to start to have way more Comments going on than any one person can really keep up with.
Absolutely, and moreover it's difficult to find Communities in the first place. Aside from your personal list of subscriptions, they just don't exist to be found.
In theory, the Community itself represents the "category" of a given post, and that's probably for the best. But you bring up an important question. Does the Community represent a "sixth tag" that is effectively associated with a given post alongside the tags which are given to the particular post in question, or should there be redundant tags? Moreover, shouldn't tags apply to Communities themselves in order to make searching/finding them much easier, with the implication that all posts in that Community should take them as given?
My own feeling is that the last should be the case, that Communities themselves should be searchable, discoverable, and tagable, and those tags should be considered inherent on all of the content posted into a given Community. (This is also a really good argument for only allowing a single post to be counted as within a single Community, because tag disjoint between Communities is a real issue.)
Should a Community's tags count against the set of five that non-Community posts have? From my perspective, I would think not. Content within a Community could have more specific tags which wouldn't be necessarily useful outside of that context. But now we're getting into more complicated issues of derived folksonomy (which my system originally wanted to represent as "folk sodomy") which might be beyond the scope of most people involved in the design.
I'm not sure that I go along with this one. The right thing to do is probably to remove the term "blog" altogether because it's no longer meaningful and instead talk about "personal posts" and "Community posts," which neatly removes the problem. As a result, you build a much simpler hierarchy to understand. Communities and personal accounts can have posts attached to them. Posts can have Comments attached to them. Comments can have Comments attached to them. Replies are just comments, and aren't really meaningful for Communities because the owning account shouldn't be post-active. And Notifications are things that are triggered by actions which can occur to accounts, Communities, posts, and comments. Navigationally, it might be better to refer to Notifications as "Activity," because it's much clearer.
What kind of stats? As someone else who has been involved in managing online communities for a very long time, I've never really found much use in having numbers shaken out. They really don't help me. If I'm involved with the community, I already know what volume of activity we are experiencing because I'm reading it. Most of the other kinds of numbers that people say they want aren't really useful for administration; they are purely for marketing. And I'm not really sure I've ever seen them be particularly useful for marketing purposes, either.
So the real question is what do you need to know that interaction with the community wouldn't tell you?
Oh God, please no.
To what end? And more importantly, to what advantage? We already have two fists full of direct messaging, semi-ephemeral communications systems, most directly represented by Discord. Anything in the world that would be implemented would need to be immediately and clearly more useful than Discord – and that is just not going to happen. It's just not.
Moreover, there is no technological or useful reason that a personal messaging system should be associated with the Steem blockchain. It is a long-term, distributed, content database and direct messaging/personal messaging/live messaging systems are completely ephemeral, generally centralized transient content.
Plus I'm not sure I trust anybody involved with development right now to put together a decent personal messaging solution that even matches the availability and functionality of IRC.
Might be useful in some cases, I suppose. Though really only in situations where the admin/owners are engaged in active classic curational activity, finding content and bringing it to the Community itself. For the general functioning of a Community, where content is created by self-motivated community members, that feels a little sketchy. You could make the argument that the Admin/Moderators should "get paid" for doing the job but I would be uncomfortable with that.
As an option available for Communities, sure. It's definitely one of those things I would want to be clear, front and center, when I went to join a Community. I don't want it stuck down in the fine print that the Admin are taking a 75% beneficiary cut of anything I post to the Community. And you know just as well as I do that somebody would try to pull that scam.
But while we're specifying that it is a Community option, we might as well give it the possibility of delegating all content posted to the Community to an arbitrary set of accounts.
That's not what the Guest role as currently defined actually means, so there's a bit of a disconnect. Moreover, I don't think there's any way that non-Steem accounts could post to a Community anyway because you must have a Steem account in order to post to the blockchain – and as we've already said, posts to a Community are just the same as any other post. I don't think that we will ever see non-Steem account posts being allowed into the blockchain because there isn't really a mechanism for it. And if there was, it would violate the whole premise of the system.
Add to this "about 15 more basic administrative functions that every single group/mailing list/community system has had since the 70s."
Really, what we need is some sort of timeline from the developers of at least one of the interface platforms for the Steem blockchain – or at least a Trello board – which talks about what sort of features they are looking at developing in the short term, because as it stands Communities aren't really an effective tool for anything they've been pitched for at this point.
Maybe everything is on hold until SMTs roll out because we have definitely not heard the last of some sort of tight integration between SMTs and Communities. You can count on that. A bit of a problem, but there you go.
There are a lot of issues with Communities and they need a lot of work. It would be nice to hear about concrete plans by developers regarding actual usability. I would love to hear about that.
I don't expect it.
as always, a very detailed response. The aim of my post was not to criticize every aspect of communities but to give feedback. Agreed, you have way more technical and other experience than me, and you think things through way more than most. I hope the dev team read all of the comments as it does provide useful insights.
You know, I'm really quite surprised that the SteemPeak devs haven't announced a very bare-bones implementations of the Community page very strongly inspired by the beta Steemit implementation – and with a public Community attached where discussing the Community implementation would occur. It seems like an obvious thing to do.