Is there really any value in ActiFit?

in #steemit6 years ago

There’s so many dApps showing up; one here and one there and what do I think of them? They are great and I’m generally positive about all of them IF they add something of value to the STEEM blockchain.

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Does Actifit add anything of value? Not to be negative, but the best I can come up with right now is, ‘It could do’, or ‘it has some potential’.

I’m seeing more Actifit posts appearing on my feed and rewarding tokens and votes for running and other activities is a great idea except all we are seeing as viewers is, ‘I ran 7450 steps’ and earned some tokens.

To be blunt, its’ just not interesting reading and dare I say, it’s less interesting than even @steemhunt posts.

@steevc wrote an Actifit post that included some content other than ‘I ran blah blah steps’ a few days back and my feeling was that this is a cool new dApp that you can integrate your running stories around.

Little did I know that @steevc had to post it from his phone, and then go back and add the extra content by editing the article in Steemit or some other Steem editor. This is far from ideal.


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Yes phone apps are all cool and great for little titbits of information but does it make for good reading or just plain boring statistics?

@bingbabe got all interested when I mentioned Actifit several days ago. As an avid runner she would likely gain most of Actifit tokens in existence in a short period and I would love to promote this to her.

I would like to suggest to the @actifit team that you create a desktop application or some web interface that we can link our activities too BEFORE they are posted to Steemit. You idea is awesome but it’s not complete yet.

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Seeing a couple of lines of text and day after day is going to send me to sleep. I unfollowed someone last week due to being tired of reading about @steemhunt posts.

The question is to people who are posting with Actifit on a daily basis with little other than your stats is, 'do you want to risk alienating your audience'?

I am not going to unfollow anyone who posts using Actifit and maybe I am being a little outspoken on this topic, but if someone unfollows you who is deemed a regular you would probably want to know why.

Several months ago, something else turned up that was related to answering questions and we got this flurry of one line posts that were of little value to anyone.

It quickly died a death never to be seen again. I can’t even remember the name of it, it was that unremarkable.

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I would hate @actifit to head the same way as that. If any @actifit representatives are reading this, the please heed the advice.

Your idea is great and I love dApps, but what it produces needs to be read worthy material and worthy of our votes.

Running journals can be interesting; you can be accosted by thugs, have plant pots thrown at you, have hungry man eating dogs chase you down the street or witness cows being abducted by aliens during your run, or ALL of these things on a good day.

What if you could merge this outstanding interesting content inside an Actifit wrapper. Food for thought?


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You can enter some text when you post from the app, but you cannot upload images yet. I think dapps could become an issue if people overuse them. I had concerns that we'd get loads of tiny posts from Zappl, but it's not really happened. Some people think Steemshot posts are low value, but I've seen people pad them out and the allow for multiple images. I'm not so bothered about Steemhunt stuff. I think we need a Steem UI that has filters. Dapps include a signature in their metadata that could allow their posts to be filtered. I might also not be interested in posts with certain tags, e.g. football. So far things are manageable even though I follow quite a few people, but that could change as this platform grows.

Typing your journal on a phone is far from ideal though, on a pad it may be better but who lugs a pad around during their run?

As a poor runner, I would probably risk a bad leg again to give this dApp a go if it had all the features in that I suggested. Its got great promise and I added this post to their discord group.

Maybe someone will respond and hopefully tell us all that these features are incoming.

I had a response on one of my posts to say they are working on it.

The image support on mobile or the ability to edit on a desktop before posting?

This is what he said

Oh, filters would be a great addition to any Steem UI! The ability to filter out (or in) a type of posting, without following or un-following a whole account would be priceless!

Filters would be great!

Posted using Partiko Android

Yes, I agree. I usually double up and use the actifit post as my post for the day, so I'll be talking about whatever I've been doing or what interests me (currently thinking about your sixties challenge) and I change the title to reflect that. It does require a double act - post from phone, edit on tablet. Yesterday the pictures arrived much later as I posted on the train on the way home. Which raises another problem, that the posting time gets later and later everyday and it gets past my bedtime and I have to leave it for aday to get back to posting at a reasonable hour.

I mentioned to @steevc that I'd like the option to do a weekly summary instead of a daily post, as well as the editing issues. Another issue that @steevc aised is that actifit doesn't use steemconnect, you add your posting key directly.

I have thought about setting up another account simply for the dapps and using the VP in a simlar way to chops.support. At least then no one would be irritated and there would be some good coming out of i!

I have thought about setting up another account simply for the dapps and using the VP in a simlar way to chops.support. At least then no one would be irritated and there would be some good coming out of i!

That's one way, albeit a little extreme. Hopefully it will become something better than it is now.

I use @actifit, mainly because it doesn't take too much effort to have it running in the background when I do some sort of walking/biking... However, just like my video game streams and my steepshot/random photos, I'm pretty conscious that people who follow my account might not want to see these things... so I always post them from my alt account (@msearles).

However, I think it will be a multitude of different things (like @actifit) that will bring people into Steem. We have to remember that Steem isn't necessarily a blogging/writing platform (Steemit is....), and one person's interest might be another's shitpost. However, something to keep in mind is that we all benefit by bringing in as many users as possible into the system, and not everyone wants to write a short or long form post.

That said, I would prefer that people are considerate (until filters!) enough to post different things from different accounts!

“Bringing people to Steem” That’s a good reason man!

Posted using Partiko iOS

hey @slobberchops,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and concerns about Actifit.
I've gone through some of the comments already, and saw some responses aligned with what Actifit has planned, so I will try to respond to your inquiries/suggestions:

  • Actifit's mission is to get people to move, to become more healthy, by rewarding them on the Steem blockchain.
    Although Steemit is a blogging platform, Steem does not necessarily have to be the case, nor Steem dapps. The current Steemit front end interface is unfortunately too cluttered and does not provide means of proper separation of content based on communities/dapps, which is why some posts could be a nuisance to users.
    With hivemind, the anticipated change by Steemit, the promise is this will be resolved, which we believe will be quite helpful in this situation. We do have other alternative plans for the long run, it really depends how hivemind will eventually land.
    We also already created our own front end for the sole purpose of displaying Actifit content.
  • Coming back to the topic of blogging, we do love to see enganging content from users, and hence for now the min 30 words requirement of posting via mobile, yet we are also planning on modifying the reward mechanism to add additional value for such rich content, along with other factors as well. A general change and improvement in rewarding mechanism is under works, particularly to better cope with the anticipated user base growth, especially after HF20 goes live and our ability to onboard people outside Steem environment in larger numbers.
  • In terms of editing via phone, yes it could be a bit of a nuisance, although many are successfully posting great content via phone. Partiko app itself has been doing pretty good as well, and all content goes via phone. Yes we are working on enabling photo uploads from mobile, we should have that available soon. Most importantly you could also re-edit your post after posting it from the phone, and completely wipe the whole content if you do not like our template, and write your own. This is actually another solution to anyone who's not happy with the format, and who wants to avoid creating alt-accounts. We do recommend though including even short info about your activity within the post.
  • Editing from desktop before posting does sound like a nice idea, we can actually consider that as a future functionality, so as you can login to actifit.io and continue editing your post.
    Again, thank you for the post, and if there is anything I missed answering, please ask.

Thanks for taking the time to respond :)

planning on modifying the reward mechanism to add additional value for such rich content, along with other factors as well

I like the sound of that, I'm all for reading something substantial.

Editing from desktop before posting does sound like a nice idea, we can actually consider that as a future functionality, so as you can login to actifit.io and continue editing your post.

I hope so, this is the deal-breaker for me. Phones are too small to write anything substantial on. My wife runs a minimum 5 miles a day and this would entice her to use Steemit again.

Till the moment I have just posted 5 @actifit post.
All I tried to edit them afterwards in order to explain my journey and give some more than 30 words...
@actifit is currently under development and I am really interested to see how it evolves...Nonetheless, would be very helpful if they explain what are their plans of future as a roadmap....Also, another problem I see is that you have to wait for the end of the day if you want really to account all the activity and so, at the same time there is an avalanche of post in your feed...
The implementation of adding pictures will be a good upgrade, for the moment...

I was thinking about this today - because you can only post once a day my posting time is gradually getting later; I'd like the option to post when I've reached 10,000 steps (just once that day) and keep posting times before my bed time!

I'm hoping they visit this and respond. I would love to see what they have planned.

I'm highly engaded with actifit for a while now with my second account, posting almost daily. Also I have made a small delagation.

The idea is great!

You are corect to question the value of the project. Is there going to be any value of this tokens?

There will be at least some value in it. At least there should be the possibilty to redeem them for steem, or upvotes. Partiko is doing this at the moment. So this is the minimum they can do. But I belive the token will have much better use.

On the subject of the same post popping out, and the apperance of spaming, there is space for improvement. Totally agree.

Now the time will have the final verdict :)

Posted using Partiko Android

Is there going to be any value of this tokens?

Who knows, people like collecting stuff and its something extra besides the vote you get from them.

On the subject of the same post popping out, and the apperance of spaming

I'm all for these dApps, they barely existed when I first started here 6 months ago, but we need something to read that's interesting.

FOR TSE: I didn't get back to this post in time to upvote it ... so I upvoted a comment here instead.

As you know, I'm totally with you on this opinion. There's enough crap on Steemit that it doesn't need to be encouraged ... and that's all this does. It reminds me of second graders lining up to get gold stars on their foreheads before recess. That same juvenile mentality.

You notice I specifically excluded things like this from the content I'm looking to curate when I mentioned that subject in my group Policy Papers. I mentioned "your Acti-fit Report Card" by name.

I mentioned years ago that I won't shop at Walmart ... that "Target is as low as I'll go on that food chain." And that got me in all kinds of outraged trouble from people who think Walmart saves them money goddamn it!!!

But that was years before all this crap about how they treat their employees, how they're one of the biggest users of "government welfare" in the nation," how they've helped gut American manufacturing by importing all this shit from China, how they systematically ruin small mom-and-pot businesses in the communities where they squat -- for a while ... etc. So I feel totally vindicated, thankyouverymuch.

I still don't shop there. And I never will. I go out of my way to avoid them. So ... outrage doesn't stop me. Clearly. And this Acti-fit stuff is in that same class of "things I won't touch with a bargepole." Thank you for the support on that point.

I probably won't unfollow anyone because they post their Acti-fit report card (but it sure is a temptation.) But you can also bet your bippy I'll never read it ... or vote on it either.

Interesting... , though I put this in the same class as SteemHunt, its not quite the same as the post can be edited after you use the ActiFit portal and more content and story can be added.

@bingbabe (my wife) is a compulsive runner but cant be bothered with Steemit. She did her second only post last week (with my help), which was an ActiFit one.

I added a load of pictures to it, some information about what happened, and a stalker report. As a lone woman she gets plenty of unwanted attention.

I think if enough info were to be added then the post could be viewed as to have some value.

You may want to assess Tasteem reviews (restaurant ones), in the same light.

They are a dApp, and the poster can make some easy rewards if its comprehensive, but is it really interesting as a reader?

I do these all the time, as I eat out regularly.

I agree entirely - it adds nothing of value. I've limited posting from it only when I come top 10 on the leaderboard.

I've actually just created a second account so I can shitpost all I like from it, including my actifit updates.

Posted using Partiko Android

I've actually just created a second account so I can shitpost all I like from it

It shouldn't have to be like this, I hope they listen and I'm glad its not just me who thinks this could be so much better than it currently is.

I dunno... I think it's fair enough having one account for self tracking stuff and another for yer more creative or philosophical musings.

Posted using Partiko Android

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I personally don't use the app coz I don't excercise a lot but I think it's a great idea if you're really active and want to track your progress.

I know there are a bunch of sad red fish who post non related rubbish everyday and use some sort of auto device to move their phone so by late morning they've done over 10k steps and get a nice upvote from @actifit which is pretty much the only upvote they get. It's this type of crap that destroys the app and Steemit.

Yes, my whole point, but if there was proper content with it that you could add, it would not be the crap you are talking about.

I looked at Actifit but was put off with the lack of integration with other fitness apps. I wear a fitbit which records a whole bunch of stuff beyond time and distance. Also I don't always take my phone out with me when I head out.

I felt the app was rushed to get it out but seeing @mcfarhat 's post below I think that anything that gets people active is a good thing.

I think you are talking about musing.io. I think they have done a lot to make it better and less obtrusive to other users. I don't visit it all the time, but I was just on there the other day and there are some decent questions being posed and answered. I do agree with you though. There are many dapps coming out now that still need a little more polish. Let's Eat for example is a great app, but I don't like having to post my info then go back into Steemit and move the pictures from the bottom of the post and do the editing there. @steevc's activfit post is more of what I would expect as quality content from Steemit users.

It was musing.io, I couldn't remember. As for @letseat, I know @eroche is going to SF3 and I'll be hunting him down regarding his incentive.

I have some ideas for him and Irish people are always cool. I have worked with several.

There may be some benefit to Actifit, but I can't see any to me as a consumer of content on steemit. Zero.

I know you like short answers :)

Interesting post! Read as I am in the process of moving from my old iPhone to my new Android, and one of the things I was planning to do with my new phone was sign up to Actifit!
But like you, I'm also fed up reading just a bunch of stats, so I was planning to run my Actifit reports along the bottom of an interesting post about my walk or climb - just as you suggest. And I didn't realise that you couldn't do that! Boo hoo...
Glad you raised the topic anyway. Very interesting replies. I might do as @bengy cleverly suggests, and use my alt account. I set one up a while ago and regretfully, never got round to posting from it.
(I actually set it up by mistake while trying to sign up to busy.org.)

I'm hoping an ActiFit moderator or dev will answer some of my questions. They have acknowledged the post already (I have sent it to their discord group). Lets see what they have to say.

It would be a shame to just use an alt account to post stats that nobody cares about just to get votes and tokens.

Yeah you might have a point about the alt account, though I could maybe copy it and add it to other posts... hmm.
I have had contact with Actifit mods before, and they are very communicative.

I didn't even realize it was a dapp! I have generally just ignored these posts.

It certainly makes me wonder how to incorporate things like this into Steem. I like the idea of Actifit, but not the current execution.

Posted using Partiko Android

They seem to have taken on board what I said, so lets see what happens.

To the question in your title, my Magic 8-Ball says:

Outlook not so good

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