- positive: A very interesting discovery I just made was to type the headline of my last post into the Google search engine: "Why Marriage means freedom" and already appear at number 9 (!) in the list, even scrolling further down to find another hit. This is remarkable and demonstrates the scope and the immensity of peakd's content. (From this result I'd conclude that an interested person who found something by using a search engine might want to land on my page and comment or share.)
This means that the realisation that people are forming the habit of no longer actively typing keywords into the search engines/search fields themselves, but instead only going to the pages recommended by the algorithm. This is something that cannot be blamed on a platform.
If the user gets into the habit of being lazy and no longer wants to research and search for himself, he turns from an active user into a passive consumer. However, this could be helped by making the search field on a platform extremely prominent and encouraging users to think for themselves again. You could provide them with a much more attractive search field than is currently available on Hive (can't speak for peakd). I would describe it as quite pathetic and hope that this offence might have some effect ;)
- Somewhat in between of negative/positive: Also on Hive the algorithm determines which posts to find (new, hot, trending, muted, payout - with "trending" as a default. I wonder why the "muted" category is being included - gives me a bad taste right away).
But what if you approached searching for content differently? Or did we all give up on the user who wants to look for himself and instead rely on the already strong habit of "being served"? Was this not something where the curious internet user once started and wanted to become other than the average tv-watcher?