Default View for Communities

I think the default view for a community should be New not Trending.

With communities, we have introduced the concept of subscription, which inherently implies:

• All content posted in this community matters to the subscriber
• Keeping up with it should be made easy

Because signal to noise ratio is low in communities, the Trending page loses relevance. A trending page makes more sense for a high level page (e.g. Homepage) where trending posts from trending communities can be highlighted, from among many posts.

This can be used to help people find interesting communities to join, but once they join, the concept of trending won't apply. They will want to "keep up with the community."

Currently, when a new post is made in a community, with the current default view of Trending, the post's visibility is limited. It's kind of a chicken and egg situation. New posts won't get to "trend" unless they get engagement, but they won't get engagement because they are not visible. And people have to switch over to New to see this new content.

I think a default view akin to New will:

• create more natural content consumption and community curation
• increase visibility for new posts
• increase engagement as a consequence

A way to track community content

I also think that we should introduce a "floating count" beside each community that one has subscribed to; like the one we have for notifications. So we can see how many new posts have been added to a community since we last viewed it.

Implementation

I have a few ideas for implementing this in Hivemind so that the backend will support this. It's preliminary studies at this point, but it seems like a relatively easy implementation. I wanted to get feedback from you all before opening an issue over at GitHub to discuss/suggest this.

So what do you think?