My cat is cute - why this is a serious concern
Well, first of all, you be the judge:
I lied! I have two awesome cute cats, the white one though is an old lady suffering from a feline form of alzheimers (being the neurology geek I am I confirmed this myself - checked her alpha channel amplitude with an EEG and compared to a young healthy cat - confirmed what we all suspected already from her symptoms of forgetfulness and distress - poor thing often walks into a room and sits there meowing at the wall).
With that out of the way (this is the internet you see), let's talk about why on earth this is a serious concern:
Those who hang out on slack know precisely why, but it boils down to what steem wants to be.
Do we want steem to be a place where people make detailed insightful blog posts only?
Do we want to be a new reddit?
A new facebook?
A new twitter?
The problem is, there are massive disincentives here against casual posts of the kind that humanise social networking - people mock twitter for the "here's my cute cat" and "I just had an awesome lunch" type posts, but these little things are I believe a large part of what makes social media sites successful.
On my twitter account I follow quite a few celebrities and they randomly tweet about little things that make them just more human and this connects them to fans much more.
On my old facebook account (I deleted it for personal reasons - please do not ask) I had many posts talking about all sorts of minor trivial things, as did a lot of my friends on there. Then there were the more "practical" type posts too - as a musician i'd often organise jam nights by dropping a message on a friend's facebook wall asking if they were up for a jam.
Were it not for these small minor things, I believe facebook and twitter would be far less successful.
So what can we do to get a large portion of the "normal" social media users here?
My solution.......
drumroll
Reward surrender
I believe the best way to handle this is to enable posts that the poster surrenders rewards on, the normal interface on steemit need not show these posts, but they'd still be on the blockchain.
This way a "steembook" type site could be built, linking together the worlds of casual social media posts about awesome lunches and cute cats with the reward-driven serious blog posts of steemit.
What do you think oh reader?
Is my cat awesome and cute?
Is there a need for posts about how cute my cat is?
Is there life on mars?
[edit]
I've posted a github issue about this:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/469
Anyone more familiar with the steemd codebase, please help out by producing a patch
No. Two of them are awesome and cute!
We already know that but make sure we won't forget.
Who cares? Cats are awesome and cute!
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heh, both cats are indeed awesome and cute - though the older one is an old lady who even feels delicate when you pick her up - we often have to place her directly in front of her food bowl.
More to the point though - the real issue in this post is not actually cute cats - I was looking for comments on the "casual" posts issue.
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I think this is a great idea, from the community perspective. There are a lot of kinds of posts that people could choose to go this route, and they'd likely earn upvotes in situations where they may not otherwise.
I can't speak to the economic impact it would have on the network, or how it would specifically work - but I think it's an idea worth exploring :)
Also yay for cats. We should start a #introduceyourcat tag hah
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When it comes to cats, here's an interesting way to think about it:
Full articles about feline psychology, choosing the ideal breed for a new pet etc are just like any other full article - the actual subject matter may only be of interest to cat lovers, but there's lots of subjects that appeal to only a select group
Then we have just random "look at this cute thing my cat did" type posts - very low content, might be at most mildly amusing, but most would consider spammy - these kinds of posts should still exist in my view, but should not be shown by default and should by default not earn author rewards - the author rewards should go to full content articles.
Basically, large quantities of low content posts help to build the platform by attracting users from more mainstream social media and that is a good thing - it should be enabled somehow, but without harming the main good points of the platform.
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There is already a blockchain feature to decline (or cap) rewards. It isn't exposed in the UI, but it exists.
I don't think this is the right way to handle different types of content. Whether or not content is being posted with rewards capped or declined may or may not depend on the type of content. It is all very context-dependent.
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I agree, it's not the best way to handle or enforce different content types.
I'm all about giving the users a choice (if they want it). If anything, the option to enable this should be hidden by default, and you'd have to expand some "Advanced Options" section that would contain this option.
I also keep forgetting about the cap :)
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Both sides of the spectrum have their place.
Cute, quirky snippets are easy to digest and can make someone laugh or enjoy themselves.
Lengthy intellectual articles and reports also add great content to a community.
Good insight and thought-provoking questions!
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There are a couple ways to do this already:
For a Twitter clone it makes more sense to use custom operations.
FWIW the comment options operation has been in the blockchain forever, but the code for the steemit.com UI is currently in testing.
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