Tangled In The Content Cables - Improve The User Interface Or We All Get Lost!

in steemit •  7 years ago  (edited)

IMG_4172.JPG

The bottleneck called User Interface is becoming tighter and tighter each day because of the increasing number of users. A User Interface (UI-this is how Steemit looks to you) has a great influence on the User Experience (UX-this is how you experience Steemit).

Let me show you why:



Do you know what was going on here lately? Or do you feel like me...

Most of the time I have the feeling of missing something new and important. And the feeling of missing good content and the chance of making new friends.

Maybe this is my own fault, since I haven't got the time to be here all day. I have a family, I have a job and content creation needs lots of time too.

I want to make friends and followers



So I have to take the time to read your content. I have to know what's going on in the community. So I have to take a look at "TRENDING" and "HOT". But also in these categories content vanishes somewhere in Nirvana before I had the time to take a look. In "New" posts are just new for half a minute. So are my posts.

My posts aren't visible



Just like yours to me. I am glad joining two Facebook-groups I can promote my posts in.
Wait a minute? I need Facebook to make my Steemit-posts visible??? Maybe when Facebook goes into cryptos I will promote my Facebook-posts on Steemit? No that wouldn't work. They wouldn't be visible enough.

My feed is chaotic



The more people I follow the less I see the posts from those I would call important or friends. But I don't want to look like "oh she only wants many followers but doesn't follow anyone back." I wanted to clean my closet out. But I had to realize that this is nearly impossible to me.

Indeed my followers are closer to my heart than the other users. I do want to take a look on their content. But my feed is a mess.
I would love to sort my feed by "friends" and "news" (where I can put in the people that are my personal VIPs) and "all" (where I can see all posts of the people I follow).

I though try to sort content



But when I chose a category like "Steemit" to see what my friends and followers think or to get some news, I might see many memes or a picture of a cake with the Steem-Logo on it. This might fit to the category, but it was not what I was looking for. I enjoy reading some text. So maybe I just should unfollow everybody who is posting memes? But not everyone who posts memes does always post memes. And sometimes I also enjoy looking at memes.

So what I'd like to do is not just sorting but also sorting posts OUT



That should be possible on the whole platform. For example: When I want to read a longer, thoughtful post about a topic, I want to sort the tags DMania and Photography out. It would become much easier to find the content I want to see and friends and followers with the same interests.

My fantasy looks like this:


Show me all posts including the tags "A","B","C" and excluding the tags "X","Y","Z". Show me only posts, that are not older than 7 days. Sort by: increasing/decreasing: actuality/user reputation/upvotes/replies.



These are just some ideas, but to me the most urgent ones that need to be implemented. With more and more users on Steemit, content will be more and more invisible. And this creates developments like paid voting bots, resteem services, scam and upvote phishing. The best way to grow is by finding a target group for your posts. And niches. That means it has to be easier to make your content more visible not to all users for just a few minutes, but the ones who are interested within the seven days they can upvote it. At the moment it's more like: "Steemit, show me some random posts!"

This can't be solved with an increasing number of apps around Steemit (don't get me wrong, I admire developers... but why doesn't Steemit.Inc grab the best ones for improving the platform itself?).
I don't want to use 5 different apps to make Steemit usable for me in BASIC functions. So I am not talking about DTube or DMania here.

I really wish we soon will see important changes. Probably everyone except me already knows that these changes I wish for are coming. And I am the only one left who doesn't know about it.

Because I was too tangled in the content cables. ;-)



main image: [https://pixabay.com/de/chaos-ordnung-kopf-gedanken-3098693/]

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!
Sort Order:  

I can totally understand you in every aspect. I also feel sorry sometimes if I don't follow my new followers or somebody who posted a nice comment under one of my videos.
But I can't follow everybody because my feed would explode. I'm not following that many people but from most of them I'm trying to see every post and I'm still struggling because we also have the Discord chat and I need to produce my own content and of course I also have to work as well...
That's a point at least for me where even a better UI wouldn't make much difference to me. But I like your idea of separating between "news" and "friends" or whatever you would like to call it.
Like you mentioned that there is already a filter for only video like DTube and only memes like dMania. It shouldn't be a big deal to create a customizable UI where you can switch your preferences on tags daily / weekly as well.
We have a guy in our group who is very fit at utopian and if I understood him right it should be really easy to create something like this.
I will ask him if there maybe is already a solution like this and we just haven't found it yet or if somebody is working on that.

Wow that would be great!! Thank You!!! My User Experience stresses me out. And when I imagine we will soon have 1 million, 5 million, 10 million users... it will be more and more important that you can find the content you are really interested in. And we all want at least a little chance to be visible too. When posts people worked on for hours vanish in a couple of minutes and even your followers can't find you... people will lose their ambition to create valuable posts.

I know what you mean. I have so many followers who follow 500+ people. I guess most of them are some "follow for follow guys" who are not a real part of my community. But even if somebody from them followed me because he saw and liked one of my videos it's just like you say. There is no chance of being found on that massive feed again.

A friend of mine told me, she wanted to find one of her own posts yesterday and couldn't find it. Because she would have to scroll back to months ago and with that Google search you would have to know the exact header. ^^ Follow for follow... yes that's not real community. But I can understand it. People just hope to be more visible. One could discuss about it: isn't it just natural human behaviour to follow someone back who follows you? I really would like to sort my followers. You see, I call the people I follow followers, because most of them are. Even when you follow just 50 people who create content every day, that's lots of stuff to look up.