Hive Babel Tower - a suggestion how to benefit from diversity and keep content comfy to enjoy

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We all see these bilingual or even trilingual posts aimed at broadening reception base and targeting more tags and communities.

The problem:


I think these kind of posts are harder to read, harder to enjoy thus are less likely to attract genuine outside traffic to Hive. People from the outside world aren't used to it. The last thing we all want is to make Hive more complicated.

The general idea to target two bases a local one and an international one is beneficial for hive as it enlarges possible audience. These posts are valuable and original, which characteristics are essential for drawing in the outside attention.

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Solution:


To make posts more pleasant and easier to experience while allowing users to keep on creating posts in two or more languages.

Technicals:
Users who posts bilingual posts use blockquotes > or tables to separate block of text of different languages. I think we can make it easier for both sides, but it would require a consensus of Hive interfaces devs in order to implement integral technical solution.

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I'm not really a tech guy, but as far as I understand interfaces can be coded to attach additional functions to tags/commands.
Let's say the devs will all agree to :

  1. implement an option in account settings to choose default language. This would also require creating the possibility to choose default language for unlogged users (cookies).
  2. Attaching additional meaning to a command [EN], [PL], [RU] etc. Which will hide the text under said command if the default language is different and the langtag itself.
  3. Creators will tag block of text with the langtag.

IMHO this can be done as an additional html <div> property.
For my posts I use <div class="text-justify"> command, so I guess it would be possible to tag language in it. Yes it would require setting different characteristics for every paragraph under <div>, but it's not an excessive sacrifice for the benefit we might achieve.

I don't know if this idea has been already discussed here or the technicals suggested are sound, but at least I think it's worth considering.

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4 comments
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There are various ideas on how to handle multilingual posts on Hive.
Some create separate accounts for content in separate language (I think that's a bad idea)

Separate posts while only main (native) language is set to recive rewards while others have declined payout + link to original one?

Tagging sections of post with different language tags might one of better options.
This could take into account user settings and display by default only preferred language.
Problem is that it would be a lot of hassle to implement it, while very limited use cases.

In many cases multi-language posts are of poor quality, because it doesn't happen frequently that poster gets help from professional translator. In the end, such translation is usually so bad, that's not better from auto-translation, and if so... why bother? ;-)

(I know, My English sucks)

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I agree the multilingual posts tend to be poor quality but I think the original text quality is responsible for the greater part of the difference than the inefficiency of translation. People that think their content is undervalued are more likely to go that route and guess what - their content is mostly valued low correctly. Quality posters without English skills can find audience in their language. Quality posters with English skills tend to post in in English and often feel translating to their first language is not worth it.

I do not want to say multilingual posts should be discouraged but I do not think we are leaking value not treating them efficiently (for lawyers: we are not leaking as much value as the post indicates).

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I was thinking about enhancements to writing as well since some time. It's not a problem to design a better system for that, the problem is the adoption -- all of the interfaces would have to adopt the new system in order for it to truly work.

Said that, I thought about one solution to this... Since every post is basically a large text field, but it can also have any metadata added to it... Theoretically it could be used to provide this multilang functionality that would be backwards compatible (it wouldn't break old posts) and interfaces could implement it on their own at any time.

It would require to have an interface that would allow one to write content in two or more languages. Then the content would have to be duplicated: both langauges would be in the ordinary content field (primary language on the top, at the bottom version in secondary language etc.).

At the same time, contents for both languages would also be available in the metadata of the post. Then interfaces could provide something like language switcher, which would grab the right version and display only that.

The downside of this is that the content would have to be duplicated, which is not good for the blockchain...

Theoretically there are also other ways to implement this. For example:

<hr lang="en">

Could be used within the post itself to mark the beginning of the content in english. Currently it will simply get rendered as a horizontal line (which is a good thing, because it separates contents in different languages). But I can imagine it's not that hard for the interface to be able to select a content from between such <hr>s and not display the rest, and allow for selecting the language.

But, again, the big question is whether this is a solution that will be lasting and optimal. And whether interfaces will adopt it.

Anyway, that's enough of this tech bullshit. What I wanted to convey is that you're not the only one trying to figure it out. So thanks for your input! I'll make use of that for sure! :)

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interfaces would have to adopt the new system in order for it to truly work

Yes, I'm aware of that.

Thank you for your ideas!

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