A Series About My Experiences On Steemit, What They Do Better And What Minds.com Can Lern From That (VII)
1. More group chat
I never really used it, but on Steemit, chatting with other users is a major success factor. You get more and better known, the sympathy kicks in and over time, you'll find a lot of high-profile aka high-frequency users reading and upvoting your articles. Minds has chat functions, too, and they are even better than on Steemit. The downside I see is that the chat is too hidden. Not the individual chat, you get that in the top right corner - yes, I've noticed that - but the group chat, which is the central piece of a dense networking environment with like-minded users.
As it is with other function, this too can lead to a funnel of interests and opinions, where you end up in your personal filter bubble without noticing what is going on outside of it. This needs to be kept in mind when considering changes to the chat function and highliting it within the Minds environment.
So far, the group chat is well hidden behind several clicks. First, you have to be a member of a specific group, then you have to go to the list with your groups to click on the one you're interested in for a chat and finally, you have to find the "conversations" button to actually get there.
This is a lot and I bet, the fewest users have found it within the first 30 days using Minds. Given the importance of a busy chat, the group chat function as a whole should be moved somewhere to the start page or to the personal feed page. There, not the entire chat needs to be displayed, after all some users are member in dozens of groups, but it is enough to present a button that says "434 new answers in the 'Conspiracy' chat" for example. Now, you know that the conversation in the Conspiracy group went on after you have left the last time and if you are curios what went down after leaving, you click on the button and get there directly. I think this might improve the permeability to the chat rooms enourmously and thus increase the user activity.
Looking at some of the chats, there seem to be a lot of links to Minds articles posted by users. That is ok, but it can clog up the system. The best method to reduce this and improve the actual chatting experience, perhaps a little price tag for posting a link might help. After all, users are looking for publicity for their content, which is why it should be worth something if they can post a link there. So, maybe a price depending on the number of previous links posted within half an hour might do the job. If no links have been posted, the price is zero and for every link within the past 30 minutes, the price goes up by 0.1 token.
That's both not really expensive, but also enough to keep the chat clean from getting covered in spam.
2. Opening the database for external developers
One of the things, I really miss and that I enjoyed very much on Steemit is the flourishing environment of third party projects that are based on the Steem blockchain. This is something, I have never seen anywhere else in that density and variety and is absolutely exemplary. Usually, those are users with some coding skills who use the platform and realize that something is missing. For example a Stats sites. Several users created one and there is a real competition going on about which one is best. Steemworld https://www.steemworld.org/@steemchiller is just one of them and arguably the most powerful one. These stats sites and other projects around the blockchain can only exist, because the database is open by default. This has plenty of disadvantages - just think of your data if you post personal stuff - but it gets beaten by far with the potentials that open at the same time.
It's nothing short of brilliant and also not just limited to stats pages or search alghorythms or other small things like automated posting or upvote services. Since the blockchain is open, you can even create your own Steemit derivate. (They call them "condenser" there in reference to steam). Such a condenser may be about blogging and chatting, but there is now also a video platform, a sound platform, a porn platform and what not. These voluntary developers can even help you in finding errors and analyzing problems, like for example finding spammers and users who abuse the system by voting in circles (which is very prevalent and damaging on Steemit).
These voluntary developer activities are truly impressive and it is all driven by enthusiastic users who have the programming know how of pulling off such a project. Usually, the project include some sort of business model where you pay for the service either directly or indirectly by giving the user account of the project more voting power. Or they just do it for free. In the case of Steemworld, @steemchiller as creator thought about creating an additional project which aims to sell or auction advertisement space on his stats site, which means that users can create content and then buy an ad on his stats site - this of course with the Steem currency. In fact, such an auction model could even work outside of the Steem environment. This would give the Steem currency a lot of steam to stay in the picture.
Anyway, I do understand that Minds has a completely different approach. The seperation between on- and off-chain does make a lot of sense and I do not know what really good programmers with financial punch in the background can do with the information stored publicly on the Steem blockchain. But I don't think Minds should (and at the and can) afford to stay out of this game completely. For example, it would be very interesting to have some sort of a Minds-Video platform, which would be an integral part of Minds, but also exists independently from it. Or perhaps users should be rewarded, if they agree when activities like upvoting and blogging/commenting is publicly accessible.
After all, you can create an accound on Minds and then browse through a lot of content and draw connections. I am sure, you can also create a bot that does this job. The result is the same as usual: Some external private-or-not entity has all the content on its server and can draw the conclusions on the level of data mining.
At the end of course Minds must not sell off, of course. But given the overall potential of opening parts of the system while being unable to prevent certain consequences from happening irrespectible of the on and off blockchain status, I think as a next step after having transferred the system to a blockchain, opening segments of the system to external developers should be considered next. The developers will know what to make out of it and the users will love it, just as they did and do on Steemit.
In short, these were the suggestions of today:
1. More group chat
2. Opening the database for external developers
A summary to come tomorrow.