The Traversal Test

How hard is it exactly to find the content you are looking for on Steemit? Well, it certainly isn't easy. That's for sure. But to quantify things, I have thought up of a test. I call it the Traversal Test.

The easier it is to access desirable information, the happier the end user

Traversal Test:

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1. Come up with some query.
2. Find mechanism to enter query.
3. Examine top 10 results from search.
4. Apply formula to get final score.

Formula = Relevant Results / # of Actions

Basically, we are trying to measure how easily and accessible information related to our query is able to be obtained. Platforms with high scores on the Traversal Test are more user friendly. Platforms which lower scores are less user friendly and require lots of work to get desirable content.

To give some boundary on performance, we'll say that a information serving platform with a score above 1 passes the Traversal Test.

Results:

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I have applied the test to several different platforms on and off the Steem blockchain to how they fare in terms of the Traversal Test. For Steem posts, a relevant result needs to be younger than seven days (to be able to vote on) and should be a good match to the query (This is a little subjective, but if the article or page addresses the query than it passes. For non-Steem posts, a relevant result simply needs to address the query. We start all measurements at the root of the page. The number of actions includes clicks, enters, and other actions the require navigation or processing of data. Typing the query doesn't count as an action.

The query we will be using is the following generic statement:

The Price of Bitcoin

This is generic and crypto enough for Steemit to have the content to sufficiently answer the question. Relevant results should talk about the price post-crash (February) to be consider a relevant source of information in our calculation. The final results are in the table below:

Platform	Steem?	# of Actions	Relevant Results	Final Score
Google	No	1	8	8.0
YouTube	No	1	6	6.0
Facebook	No	2	3	1.5
Medium	No	2	2	1.0
Steemit	Yes	2	0	0.0
Busy.org	Yes	1	0	0.0
D-Tube	Yes	1	0	0.0
D-Live	Yes	1	0	0.0

Given that Google is a search engine, Google gave us a lot of links to places with the current market price, which is good, since that is what we are wondering about. In fact, all platforms did a good job of retrieving related articles, posts, and videos to the actual query, but the difference was that a lot of the information out of those queries was outdated.

Even worse, a lot of the material searched on the Steem blockchain was months old. As someone looking for good content to upvote seeing such search results is really discouraging. Results younger than a week should be pushed to the top with the option of being able to see older stuff as a feature rather than be forced to see the inverse.

This forces many users to use the default feeds and the rather weak tagging system to discover content rather than using a direct query. And that's a ton of clicks and a lot of effort that frankly most people won't enjoy be forced to take. You have a keyword search in place but don't utilize it correctly and this is copied across all of these platforms. Which is kind of a shame, but not really all that surprising.

Granted this test is very rudimentary and I have put only 5 or so minutes of thought into the whole idea. But given that I'm not the type to perform deep investigative journalism and spend months researching, it gives a good enough picture in some areas that Steem platforms are lacking.