To specify who is writing this as this is a shared account, @truthforce writing.
It is pretty hard to grow your community when you are placed at the bottom of the rankings. In order to find our community for example, you need to continually scroll down. The odds of someone finding our community is extremely extremely low. We have maybe 20 to 30 posts a day in our tag which is pretty good for being a specific tag that doesn't have huge whale backing(which is another issue that is hard to get around).
Coupled with the fact there is no such things as being able to "browse tags easily" almost nobody manually navigates to https://hive.blog/trending/hive to see what is trending in that tag, or in https://hive.blog/trending/informationwar. Only the people who understand how to do that are able to do it and that isn't many. Any new users will only see communities and think that is the way things are done and might not even realize what tags are at all and that you can browse through them.
The way that this is currently setup on the front page of hive.blog and on peakd is that only the big communities have any visibility at all. The way this is countered on such places like Reddit is they take a metric of velocity of upvotes and factor in how many people the subreddit has. For example, a velocity of thousands of people upvoting a post(in a community with 10,000 people) would make it to the Front Page of reddit("ALL" as it is called) if a community upvoted that post within a small time window of 30 minutes. A large community with tens of thousands of upvoters(in a community with 100,000 people)might not get to the Front Page of reddit because their velocity of users upvoting it and how many people upvoted it might not meet the % threshold. This gives smaller communities an actual chance to appear on the Front Page instead of it endlessly being dominated by whoever has the bigger number of upvotes. Which Hive is following the same model of only the biggest voted posts appear on the top... AKA the biggest communities with the most money get bigger.
Is it up to us to get the word out on our community it sure is, but working against so many factors essentially makes this task impossible to be discovered.
EDIT: And I wanted to add to this in that the post that @justineh wrote the title was "what do we want from content" and she used this image.
I agree with the sentiment. What is the point of us posting in the communities we are trying to grow if nobody sees it? If we aren't whales to start with we don't get visibility. Incorporating a secition like "communities you may be interested in based on your viewing habits"
Or something like "tags you may be interested in based on X Y or Z".
Or "you follow this person who frequently posts in X community".
Theres a lot of things that can be done to make this better.
Yes, they should definitely bring back browse tags.
The whole community vs tribe vs tag thing is a bit confusing. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.
It would be good for the Hive Community to develop guidelines for this issue.
i don't disagree with you, i was just replaying on the people still use tags of something and not posting to that community. if you have a tag for your community, like informationwar, you should encourage people that post under the tag to post into a community. i seen it on contests that have communities, and almost no one posts in that community.
you will always have someone that is not happy about algorithm that puts stuff on trending and saying that does not mean that this one is good :D it is really bad for content discovery.
but if you want to post in some kind of community and you join it, post with the tag of the community, most probably you like that community and want to be a part of it. maybe i am wrong, i do post conspiracies, not really that controversial...
And you can always make a community that will not censor anyone.
also if a community censor you, you can always reblog it so it is on your blog.
you don't like communities, i have no problem with that :D
yeah because my opinion is big and important :D
i don't know. they are underused, and we still don't have enough people for the full potential of them, but we don't have enough people overall.
i seen a lot of tags misused just because they are popular and you could scroll them and not find what you were interested in, but then we are back to what you said, moderators could censor, and in some cases it is useful and in some...
again i am not that much in to controversial stuff, i rarely have things to say that are censor worthy so...
also i think that the initial idea was that communities will be used together with SMTs.