Hive Community Forums Idea
I started working on a proof of concept of an idea I think a lot of Hive folks will like, but after talking it over with @themarkymark I am not sure exactly how many!
(Apparently, there have been attempts in the past at doing this, but I am stubborn enough to give it another try even if I just learn something out of it).
I've been thinking a lot about how many communities move off Hive over to Discord to chat and organize. Why are we not using Hive?
Also, the number of people who feel excluded because they don't have the time or energy to write and create videos, but they have news and interesting links that they share on Twitter, Discord, Telegram, etc.
My idea is to create community forums using the Hive infrastructure.
This will mean
- You don't need to be a blogger to participate and get rewards from Hive.
- We have somewhere to post news, videos you like, gifs and memes, whatever you like, without annoying people by cluttering up the blog feeds.
- Nothing needs to change about Hive, just the additional front-end I am building, though I can see LOTS of community opportunities growing around this.
Think of it as our Reddit clone, but on the blockchain ... Hive-It, or something :)
Unlike Reddit, we won't have centralization, heck anyone with access to my Github repo will be able to fork their own version entirely.
Proof of Concept
Currently, I just have a quick demo of this where you can create new threads or click on an existing reply and reply to it.
The way it works is "top-level threads" are behind-the-scenes just replies to a hidden post, and all the subsequent replies to that thread are regular Hive replies.
A similar approach could be used to create a Twitter clone but due to the way our blockchain works, it wouldn't be exactly a fast response time. For a forum it is absolutely fine.
Work to be done
There is lots of work that would be needed, not least right now the comments are not threaded or sorted, they are as returned from the API.
Ideally, you would be able to vote, tip, etc, and also embed images/gifs/links etc with a preview before posting.
All of that is doable, I just didn't want to get too far into it only to be told it was a stupid idea!
What do you think?
Please share your thoughts in the comments even if your thought is it won't work!
Discord is faster pace and more logical for typical chit chat. I always joke 80% of Hive is on Discord, but it is understandable why it is so popular.
BeeChat was added and even added to Peakd interface to counter it, but it isn't used much.
@nonameslefttouse said it best.
Also, TokenBB is on Github. It's a fork of ChainBB the original by @jesta. This does exactly what you are trying to do now.
As someone trying to learn everything I can about the Hive technologies, I find it frustrating how much stuff is buried in fast-moving chats in Discord, but at the same time it is as you say where people socialize.
I think if we had a Reddit-like feature then those nuggets of info wouldn't get quite as lost AND we could do things that are not long-form content but still valuable, like Reddit style AMAs (I know you do those but these wouldn't require 500 words first), post Instagram-like without expectation of lots of text around the photos, memes, shit posts ... :)
Also Reddit style secret santa LOL
There is still a lot of it on chain, but for the most part it's to be expected to have casual chatter on platforms that cater to that. Even Reddit introduced chat and channels.
Sure, and at work we have Slack even though we use Jira and have long written docs - options are good :)
Believe it or not, Slack was used quite a bit on Steem. It has since been moved over a self hosted/free option called Mattesmost.
At work we had to sponsor a tiny community user group because Slack search on free accounts is really curbed. This is another reason I think some things being in a more async, but also relaxed environment with full text search (and google!) being able to bring things out of the depths is worthwhile.
But also the memes and shitposts too :)
So you have chat on one end and 2,000 word blog posts on the other end of the spectrum, with meme-wars and photoshop battles somewhere inbetween.
If I remember, it is limited to saving 10,000 messages. Steemit Inc sponsored paid licenses of Slack, so we had unlimited history, but it was a limited invite system.
It's a shame all commercial chat option are so freaking expensive.
And the fact we can quickly go through those without noticing shows how much of a fire hose chat systems are - one I am in for retro programming is unfollowable because by the time it is morning in my timezone about a thousand messages have been sent
That's why everyone on Hive uses Discord and the dev channels are on Mattermost.
I haven't seen those, guess they are invite-only or for core devs?
There is a dev Discord, and invite-only Mattermost.
Not quite, it is built in Node and hasn't been updated in a few years, plus it is aimed at a bbs which isn't the scope of what I want.
That said, someone could run with that for sure
Actually...
No, it is a forum not a BBS, exactly what you are trying to do but with caching. BBS have no point point in the last 20 years, that would just be a website. It's called TokenBB but it is exactly like your demo, it was used by Drug Wars, but that was about it, it died off pretty quickly. Even ChainBB never really seen much use as I believe it was mostly under dev but never promoted as an alternative until BuildTeam forked it to commericialize it.
It is a lot like what I want to do but I have ideas beyond what they did is what I mean. They have textual posts, vueJS and a MySQL database, I would like to take the best of Reddit but also go after DeSo, and picture forums ... but I need to start somewhere :)
That's not a BBS.
Turn it into Petscii it really is ;)
Let's not get hung up on terminology though, I take your point
I think, essentially, people will go to where the people are. Discord is pretty well established at this point with so much information available, so it might be hard to tear people away. Would people be able to get upvotes or Hive rewards using this forum?
Yes that is precisely why I architected this way instead of custom JSON so that people who are active in the forum would naturally get rewards without being "Writers", plus if you find a really cool/interesting/funny/breaking news link and share it you would get rewarded instead of downvotes due to plagiarism :)
That's awesome... are you saying that the rewards would be upvotes? Or something else?
Yes, upvotes and tips just like comments because that is what they are :)
That could be very amazing!
I hate to shit on your idea, and I apologize for doing so, but to me this sounds like an absolute nightmare.
It won't be a place where actual discussion happens it will be a place where people post 1000 memes, pictures and phrases a day and vote themselves up with their 100s of alt-accounts or friends.
As soon as something becomes monetized it becomes a tool for an individual to receive rewards not to engage with naturally and enjoy. The reason that reddit and discord work so well and are so successful has a lot to do with the fact that they are not monetized. People use them because they love them not because they are rewarded for doing so. It comes down to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and the psychology of how human behavior changes according to those concepts. People won't use it for its intended purpose of communication and facilitating discussion, they will use it for the rewards. This is why so many of the other reward based social media platforms have failed in the past.
This entirely goes against one of the foundations of Hive and an underlying philosophy of the platform - i.e. "Proof of Brain." It suggests that people should be rewarded for copy and pasting, not for creativity, or effort... but for nothing really.
Why should people be rewarded for that?
Overall I think that a tipping feature would be cool, but I don't see any benefit to Hive by adding a voting reward feature. In that case, to me, it just sounds like a perfect tool for abuse. It sounds like Steemit on steroids to me.
My question is why does this site need a voting/reward feature? and if you don't think that people would use the site if they weren't rewarded for doing so, then I think that says everything - no?
Again, sorry to be a dick and shit upon your idea but I am very skeptical about the rewards feature.
I asked for feedback and I got it - this is great!
If people post spam and self-vote, won't others downvote it? We see this in regular comments, no?
In some ways it would be easier to code using custom JSON but that would mean that the only rewards would be tipping, and I don't see people doing that very much outside of LUV and PIZZA etc
Well I'm glad you're open to criticism because I feel like I came in pretty hot haha.
I never use my downvotes so I dont really know if they are enough to stop such behavior or not, but also, I don't think anyone would be able to discern what spam is though either. If it's a site meant to be used to post links and memes, than is it spam if I do just that and post 100+ links/memes a day? Self votes might be easy enough to identify but alt accounts and organized voting circles may not be.
At this point I'm still not clear on the need to even reward such behavior as posting a link or meme, but is it possible to create a token that is used within your front-end platform, like what we see with a lot of other projects?
Separating out the content from the rewards process for the moment, one of the things I appreciate about things like Reddit, Hacker News, and Digg before them, is introducing me to interesting things that I hadn't seen yet AND the comments/analysis in the discussion. Recently I saw a headline in numerous periodicals that "science has proven there is no base reality" only to find in the comments on HN that the science was flawed plus the headlines were misleading, and why.
Now on the rewards, seeing as this would need to be a new front-end, there is the possibility of moderation controls, filtering etc. Also, just like Reddit, low-quality material would hopefully be downvoted or ignored, with the best rising to the top or surfaced to a specific feed.
Even Reddit has rewards now over and above kudos, you just can't spend it outside of Reddit.
Yeah okay that makes sense to me.
As I'm mulling this over I think I'm just not fully understanding your vision. Very likely I'm not. It dawned on me how voting in Hive discussion currently works and how there are many factors in place that sort of self regulate voting behavior so it probably would sort itself out on your front-end as well..
I probably have my own interpretation in my head that is nothing at all like you are planning haha. So yeah, it sounds like it could be really cool actually haha.
Take my cristisms with a grain of salt and good luck! 👍
This is a great idea. The only think that comes to my mind is the physical action of having to login to another front end to do this just when everyone else uses hive. I think its important to have specialized front ends/dapps, specially something that would maybe evolve into one day fully replacing discord. At the moment i use mostly peakd. It's even an effort for me to login to 3speak or nftshowroom etc. i wish i had an option to upload my 3speak video on peakd and click over to see NFT auctions. This isn't argument, but maybe an idea to aggregate this along with a chat on an existing front end? Thanks a lot for sharing this. I guess we make all these front ends also to avoid too much of politics ?
My hope would be that Peakd and the others would see the value and integrate the feature into their front-ends, so while I am working on a front end (and maybe mobile app) it would be just to get people using it, not to monopolize how people access it :)