A Series About My Experiences On Steemit, What They Do Better And What Minds.com Can Lern From That (IV)
So far, there are 13 suggestions if I counted them correctly. I will now add another few.
1. Muting users on a mutual base
I don't know how this is handled here, but I assume the muting rules are the same as in most places: You mute somebody and then you won't see anymore that users content. This is also how it is on Steemit, but this causes a lot of trouble, because of the powerful downvoting option. The power with how much a user can reduce the payout for your content is based on the amount of Steem (=the currency) this user has in the system. If the user has a lot, he can cause quite some damage to your account. If the user has extremely much, he can run amok on the platform. This unfortunately happens on a regular base there and if you are affected, it is really not fun to be there. And after all, it costs you a lot of money playing the rabbit in the corner against a hungry wolve. So far, Steemit hasn't found a solution to that and for various reasons, I also don't have the impression a solution is preferred from the side of the developers.
Minds can do this better before the blockchain madness begins. And this with the simple trick that mutes are mutual. So far I only know Twitter where this is the case, but I really recommend this to be something, Minds should consider as well. Perhaps a paid non-mutual muting could reduce potential fallout. For example, on Steemit there were several users who took home most of the reward pool. Others attacked that to limit their profits a little bit. With the mutual muting, this could not happen, although you can argue that the downvoting with the purpose of limiting extremely high payouts is a necessary feature.
Overall though, the mutual muting is much better, since after all you want a user out of your life and out of his mind. Mutual muting therefore should become the standard option when muting users on Minds.
2. Cleaning up the notifications menu
This one is another aspect where Steemit is far ahead thanks to its front-end simplicity. There are only articles and comments and as notifications, you only get the list of replies to your articles and comments (comments in your and in other articles). This list is its own category and when clicking on one response, you get redirected directly to that response. Isn't that clean?
The solution on Minds on the other hand is not just unhandy, but it's also confusing, has too much information and too little relevance. Overall, you get six different types of notifications, most of which don't really give you any meaningful information.
1. We can argue over "Reminds", but it's essentially not necessary (especially, since the comment to the reminded post don't go to your own content, but to the person's reminder, strangely).
2. Are "Votes" really that important? I mean, it doesn't even tell which content it was. Just a nameless link with an URL that doesn't give anything away but 23984723487. Either you add what the content exactly was or you leave it away.
3. The one for "Subscriptions" is not much better. How about an option to sort your list subscribers by date? That would be enough and for anything else, the counter is on the main page.
4. I wonder what useful information the "Groups" tab is supposed to offer. Somebody posted something in some group I am a part of. If the group is important to me, I look it up directly and if the user is important to me, I have his content in my feed already. There is no reason to add this to the notifications. It only clogs up the system.
5. "Comments" could be a cool feature. But then again, it suffers (almost) the same insufficiencies as "Votes". After all, you get a hint about where something got added. But the worst part are comments made popular articles, where you have to endlessly scroll to reach the comment. How about a shortcut to the comment? Would that be possible? I'm sure you'd save a ton of time for your users Bill @ottman. (Thanks!). But all that still hasn't answered the question of whether a comment in an article where I was active myself has any relevance to me.
6. "Tags" is the only really important category among the notifications, because this is usually when a comment in difference to (5) is interesting for you. Free of insufficiencies is this one not as well, since you get as much information about the place of the tag as in the case of Votes.
Bottom line: "Reminds", "Votes", "Subscriptions" and "Groups" can be removed - and should be removed to clean up the menu and reduce it to the necessary part. "Comments" and "Tags" should be merged by simply only displaying notifications where the user has been tagged. If not, it's not important. The only thing that needs to be done for that is to remind everyone about the fact that they have to add the username (like @ottman), if they want somebody to read it or even a response.
Given the importance of notifications for the communication on the platform, the user experience on Minds would become much better with these changes.
3. A place where I can look up my comments
Getting responses to your comments is a fun thing. Not less fun is it to see that you got a few upvotes for them. On Steemit, all your comments were listed and you could directly see everything relevant about it. But where is this on Minds? Should I go to the notifications, or is there also another less disappointing way of looking them up?
The user ergonomy is really not a thing here on Minds. Please improve that a little.
4. When content gets shared, the comments to the shared content don't appear below the original
When realizing that, I was a bit surprised. The subjective experienced densitiy is very important for users. They like it when there is much going on in one place and prefer to add to that rather than commenting to something with only little prior activity.
That's why I find it very counterproductive that comments to shared content only appear to the shared content. The consequence of this is that if somebody with a big and active following shares something, the creator might never find out and that means: He might never find out that he has an audience. Very strange and in the interest of successfull networking, this should be changed asap!
5. The main menu doesn't go away on its own
Not sure if this is just a bug, but in difference to the other drop down menues (notifications+wallet), the main menu with settings+FAQ needs a second click on the account avatar when you want it to go away.
The intuitive way would be that you click somewhere and it goes away.
In short, these were the suggestions of today:
1. Muting users on a mutual base.
2. Cleaning up the notifications menu.
3. A place where I can look up my comments.
4. Comments to shared content don't appear below the original.
5. The main menu doesn't go away on its own.
More to come tomorrow.