I've pretty much given up on Steemit. The front-end that is. I like the Steemit front-end, Condenser, but it's been a year since multiple users suggested multiple ways that Steemit could improve Steem and Steemit. The replies to that Steemit blog asking for community input is rife with great ideas on how to improve Steem and Steemit. I don't think that all of them should necessarily be implemented, but I personally believe that if a few of them had been implemented, some of them quite easy to do, they would help quite a bit.
The Steemit front-end, Condenser, is a very good, functional interface, but it has a lot of small problems that, frankly, suck. The main way to discover posts via the Steemit interface is "Trending", which sucks. Some of the solutions to this are quite difficult to implement, but we do have quite a few developers here, and if Steemit had engaged the community in open source efforts, we could have gotten even some of the most complex efforts developed. One such way is to use AI, which the new interface, Steeve, uses. So, clearly not impossible to implement. SteemPeak chose to simply display the posts that have been chosen by curation teams. That is likewise a perfectly valid solution.
I personally think that they should have worked on an AI solution, as well as implementing build in curation tools.
But they did nothing.
I understand that they can't do all of the suggestions made by the community. I don't think it's even a good idea to just adopt every suggestion. A good development team takes suggestions and determines the best course forward to further advance their project. Instead, after seeming like they were actually listening, they for some reason decided to drop all the suggestions and enter a maintenance mode for the Steemit front-end. What kinda fucking idiot puts a project in maintenance mode when there are well known issues and it's still in beta?
There were a ton of small ideas that were easy to implement, and they just dropped them and did nothing.
One such suggestion, allowing people to promote posts into Trending, and possibly people's feeds, would have burned a TON of Steem/SBD, lowering the supply, and possibly making the current suggestion a lot better. It would have also caused anyone that legitimately wanted to advertise to burn the money rather than helping to support bidbots that don't give a shit about what content they upvote to trending.
With all of this in mind, I decided to start trying alternative interfaces. Mainly I've been trying out SteemPeak, but I did give Steeve a shot today.
SteemPeak is pretty cool. Ironically I haven't been checking out their curation discovery thingie too much. What I like the most about it is it's grid mode. Though it does need to perhaps add a few extra posts before you scroll to the bottom, as sometimes you end up with a blank spot on one side that you have to scroll back up to see what post gets put there. It's publishing window has also frozen a few times on me while uploading, and I've hit the limit before on image uploads per day during a particularly image heavy post. Then I had to move it over to Steemit to finish it. The image upload button also sucks, and for some reason it doesn't support drag and drop on Firefox for Linux, or at least not mine. It's a pretty cool interface though. I think if everyone used it, we'd be in a lot better situation.
Steeve likewise is pretty cool, but it's way more green. It's supposed to be just a proof of concept, so in that regard, it's really fucking good. But DTube started as just a proof of concept at first as well. The icon on the upper right that looks like it would take you to settings just lets you turn on night mode. It annoys you every time you post a comment to put a footer on it, which I frankly don't want to do. There's no option to change that in the settings, once you find them. Adding bookmarked categories likewise didn't seem to work for me. The "Explore" category, which uses their AI I assume, is pretty cool though. I found some cool posts with it. I also like that it puts links to other posts under a post after you're finished reading it. This allowed me to quickly see some other posts that I liked. I think with a bit of polish, Steeve will be a great interface.
After trying them both, I started to feel like I wanted to grab some features from both, and mesh them together. Would be cool if you could easily cut and paste together your own version of a perfect Steem interface. Right now, they all have their pluses and minuses. I think they're all awesome. We just have to pick which we like the most.
So here we are. Do we just abandon Steemit? Do we pick another interface that we like more? Do we give them a portion of our already meagre earnings? Well...some of us are earning a lot better than others.
Steemit entered maintenance mode when it wasn't even ready to launch out of beta. We weren't ready. The majority are still using Steemit. It's part of why it's so hard for good posts to get rewards. No one can find them. No one's reading many of them. They just have to hope that someone shares the link with friends, or join a circle jerk, and maybe get a few cents, or maybe more. If their community is a bit more than just a circle jerk, maybe they'll get a reward more befitting of the worth of their content. Maybe someone will share their link with a curation group. Then they'll get upvoted by that curation group and the followers of their votes, and maybe possibly someone from SteemPeak, and that will be it.
That's what this place is like now. There's no community tools built into Steemit. They didn't try to do anything in this last year to improve anything. But the other interfaces have created their own beneficial interface. Right now, as it is, I think everyone should be trying the other interfaces and picking their favourite, until Steemit gets their head out of their ass.
Right now, I think I'll stick to SteemPeak for the most part. I will also occasionally peruse via Steeve. At least until SteemPeak totally steals their idea of putting suggested posts below a post. It kinda sucks using two interfaces, but I like both. I also will occasionally post via Steemit, because SteemPeak has a limit of 2 megs per day for images.
Perhaps they can add a way to pay for more, or interface with an account on some image upload service or something.
Image by francousqui
Copyright CCO (source)
