Potential Solution for Trending Page

Looks like we are back at talking about the trending page. Personally, I'm not affected much, since I rarely check out trending pages, but a visitor will unlikely be impressed by our trending page.

Yes, we will have Hivemind communities, and that will be a great improvement in content discovery, and a personalized communities feed.

But... We will still have the personal blogs. Not sure how prominent will they be after communities will make their appearance on the main interfaces, but even community-related posts will still have tags and be indexed as normal posts.

So, the trending, hot, new and promoted pages will still exist, unless they will be removed. And I don't think removing them is a good solution.

A much better solution would be to extend the same level of feed personalization we have by subscribing to various communities to regular tags.

How can this be done?

Here's an idea. It is not the only one and may not be the best:

Have a page/section in the profile to add preferred tags (something like a list of interests on other social media websites). The preferred tags can be pulled automatically from the most used tags and fill a list, or the interface can define a custom set of tags (already used or not) to allow a better diversity of selection and maybe exclude tags which are pushed to the top because they are added automatically or for rewards. The user could be allowed to enter a custom tag or not. Depends on the interface and how they decide to handle this.

Then, when users select the trending/hot/new/promoted pages, posts are filtered out based on their preferred tags set on their profiles. Not sure if the blog feed should be filtered out as well based on these preferred tags, if this should be an option to select in the interface, or to leave it as it is now.

So, if for example a user has "science", "astronomy" and "cooking-recipes" added to his/her profile, only posts having one of those tags will appear on his or her trending, hot, new and promoted pages. And that has no relation to the communities he or she has subscribed to. That's a different thing.

If the user selects a certain tag, this selection takes precedence compared to the settings in the profile.

For example, if the tag "introduceyourself" is selected, posts with this tag should be shown, not those with "science", "astronomy" or "cooking-recipes".

There is, of course, a very good question that remains.

What is a visitor shown before becoming a user and seting up a profile?

I see two potential solutions here. The one we have now doesn't work.

With both solutions the interface would have a predefined set of tags they would like to show on their front page.

The front page isn't or shouldn't be about trending, hot, new or promoted. A visitor should not have access to those pages from a menu on the front page. They will become available after the visitor joins and fills in his or her profile, including the preferred tags (mandatory step).

The front page is about showcasing the best you have. And that is not auto-generated content, be it for burning or fixing the SBD peg.

And here comes the two potential solutions.

One solution, and the one I would choose, would be to add on the front page posts curated by reputed curation guilds which curate great content in various fields, and NOT particularly for the curation reward.

SteemPeak would have a head start in this area, as they already have a way integrated to check out popular curators and their selections.

They would have to redesign the front end to include a filtered version of that, by their chosen tags. Either on the page, or with a menu link to a separate page.

Update: I have to applaud the @steempeak team one more time. Looks like they already implemented my first solution above. Seems I haven't been logged out from SteemPeak in quite a while and wrote this post under the impression of the steemit.com main interface. I love how SteemPeak managed this. The part about preferred tags above still isn't implemented, unless I missed this one too. :)

Here's how the SteemPeak front page looks like for the visitor:

If visitors get smart and try to explore the site, they will continue to only see content curated by reputed guilds, unless they create a new Steem account or log in. Steem news or exploring content by tag is only available to logged in users on SteemPeak.

The second solution would be to show trending posts in the tags you selected, but with a few extra rules:

• all auto-generated posts filtered out (added in time to a sort of mute list)
• the possibility to exclude a post from the front page manually

This may seem like censorship, but again, the posts are on the blockchain, they are only excluded from the front page, because they are detrimental to the image of the interface or to Steem, granted, in the opinion of the moderator(s).

In both cases, the front page of the interface will likely be different than the trending page of the user, if he or she would choose the same preferred tags as featured on the interface front page.

That's because the user's trending page would not be moderated nor contain only posts chosen from reputed curation guilds. But still, it would be based on the preferred tags set in the profile, so it would be a great improvement compared to today's trending page (and the rest).