Introducing the "Community Cross Posting" Feature

"Cat's out of the bag"

Recently we told everyone to use https://beta.steempeak.com/ to test out communities and a whole slew of new features. One of those features that people randomly found and are super excited about is our Community Cross Posting feature set.

Versions of Cross Posting are very common features on sites like Reddit/Facebook/Twitter.
Now Steem will have the ability... and it's time to see how this goes.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

We have lots of information to help communities and for people doing the cross-posting below... but...
If you're in a hurry the short of the matter is Cross Posting posts from one community to another is now available on SteemPeak.com ... hopefully it will be visible on other interfaces shortly. It's extremely easy and communities need to figure out what they find acceptable on their own community.

If you want your post in a community put it in there FIRST
If you want it on another community CROSS-POST
If you want it on your home page RESTEEM

WHAT IS COMMUNITY CROSS POSTING

First, what are communities?
Hivemind communities are an ORGANIZATIONAL tool that includes moderating abilities. They're truly transformative to the experience of the Steem Blockchain (based on the opinions of most of us that have used communities, they've changed the way I use Steem for the better during my couple months of test)
We should all be thankful to Hive account@roadscape for pioneering the development of hivemind and the API that makes it run. And thankful to his employer Steemit INC for paying him to do it.

When you add to a community you are deciding WHERE YOU WANT YOUR POST TO LIVE. When you decide that you're deciding what group of people will interact with your post. Cat community wants to see cat posts for example put that post there for them to see.

MULTIPLE GROUPS MAY ENJOY THIS POST
There are times when you may want your post to live in multiple places. You believe both communities would truly benefit from the post.

There are times when you as a community wish that post was in your community so your people could see it and converse about it in the way that you like... with your own conversation.

So Community Cross Posting is a very simple & decentralized method to let a user share a post to a community.

• A community can have rules and they should decide and state what they allow.
• We are not putting the content of the post onto the chain a second time... we share a permlink.
• The magic is on the interface side where each interface can DISPLAY the content from the Original post.

OUR INTERFACE: HOW TO

1. Click "cross post in..."
2. Choose your community
3. Write a message to accompany your cross post ... just enough to give it context.
   (presently 100 characters)
   

INVITATION TO OTHER INTERFACES

• CREATING: Cross-posting is pretty simple and any interface can actually be used to create. However, presently it's 2 simple clicks on beta.steempeak.com (and soon to be on steempeak.com)
• SHOWING: Displaying the elements of the cross post is likely only to be supported only on SteemPeak.com/beta.steempeak.com for the type being but we invite every other interface to join the fun.
• Soon we hope all interfaces will show your cross posts in a beautiful way... but the good news is that at least there is a link to the content so people can see what you're talking about.

THINGS TO KNOW

1. A TEST: I think you should consider community cross-posting an experiment. We know why it exists... because multiple communities may have different takes or reasons to love and interact with a post.
2. NOT TOPIC CROSS POSTING: This is community cross-posting not topic cross-posting. We are not adding tags to the post because that just makes it so your topic feeds get cluttered with multiples.
3. SIMPLE: Cross-posting is simple just two quick clicks and it's up.
4. POSSIBLE TO RE-EDIT: People could re-edit the post and do things like ADD TAGS/TOPICS however the plan is for them to not show up in the UI as a cross post on topic feeds. So keep them to communities.
   Also of note is that you can't remove it from a community or change communities of the cross-post.
5. COMMUNITY DECISION: It's the right of the community to moderate and decide if they like cross-posts or what type of cross-posts are allowed.
6. ABUSE IS POSSIBLE: Some people may choose to abuse the system, Hopefully it's not prevalent but we believe it won't be terribly common as they are fixed to communities and we believe that communities will use their moderation powers to keep an eye on these circumstances.
7. ONE STEP TOWARDS EVERGREEN: This is only a step in the direction of helping users organize their content so that it gets seen. One of many steps we still need to do. But it's a big step to put content in front of other users that are specifically there for that reason.
8. AutoVote systems will need to adapt or you'll adapt by using separate accounts. Truth is autovote systems probably already need to adapt to the onslaught of community content that is coming.
9. STILL BEING DEVELOPED: It's in beta for a reason... we're testing it. Please give us feedback. But with that said it's totally LVIE on and usable on beta.steempeak.com

EXAMPLE COMMUNITY RULES:

Other ideas for community rules are:

• Do not cross-post if it's been shared before
• Must burn your reward portion
• One cross-post per week
• Only cross-post your own post
• Never cross-post your own post
• You must write a description with your cross post
• Only cross-post posts 7 days or older
• Never cross-post posts 20 days or older
• Never cross-post something you put on your home page first because that feels greedy.

Respect your community... it's THEIR space it's their decisions.

UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE

Be responsible and understand your audience... do they like cross-posts? Does the content your sharing really appeal to them? Write a note and give it a bit of context as to why you think it belongs in that community or what the conversation could be.

Also... why didn't you just post it in the community to begin with?

Examples: You could share a post from an opposing sports team and write a short description to give it context:

"Hey guys this opposing team thinks they are going to beat us on Saturday, what do you think?"

The beauty of cross posts is that it starts a new conversation directed just to your community.
While you can go back to the original post and comment on it in general.

OUR STEEMPEAK COMMUNITY
https://beta.steempeak.com/c/hive-175001
Have at it: We are looking forward to cross-posting your best How To videos, introduction posts are really thorough reviews about STEEMPEAK to our community.
This was one of the driving factors for making cross-posts... Some of you make such great content that we want to share it with our audience in a place that directly impacts them and where we can organize things to make it more evergreen.
(We understand there is still lots of work to be done to help keep amazing content evergreen... stay on the look out for future features)

HOW THE REWARD SYSTEM WORKS

This is NOT a system built with making money as the primary goal... we did this to make communities happier and help people find and interact with content. However reward pool is a part of Steem Blockchain so let's discuss that.

We have the ability to add options to cross posting, but for now on release and for testing, we went with a very conservative system:

• 90% of the reward will go to the original author
• 5% to the new community
• 5% remaining to the user doing the cross-posting.
  In fact it's better than that we will duplicate the same rewards beneficiaries as the original author for their portion.

Sure we could get more complicated on this... but for now let's role with this and see what people think.
What's likely to happen is allowing the cross-poster to BURN their portion if they want, that's an example of an easy change to this system.

SELF VOTES?
People could use self-cross-votes to upvote their own stuff more often... but truth is cross-posts are very visible and very bad places to abuse the reward pools. They will be watched closely by users and if you think self-voting large amounts is frowned on now, self voting your own posts twice will likely be even more frowned upon by some users. People will devise many crazy ways to take advantage of the rewards pool however we expect that cross-posts won't be very effective way to do it.

GETTING THE RELEASE READY

Hive account@justinsunsteemit mentioned they are likely to release the beta version of steemit.com this week or next and we would love to do the same... so we've been getting all sorts of COMMUNITY related features ready. Cross-Posting is perhaps one of the ones I pushed for the most. I knew it would be useful but so far the reaction has been pure joy and excitement which makes us happy.

We still would love people testing beta.steempeak.com and helping explore the many ways we can polish it up for release to the main site. Also you may stumble across a few more gems of new things we've put on the site that we've not even talked about yet.

And of course if you have an amazing post ABOUT SteemPeak we welcome you to post or cross-post to our community. https://beta.steempeak.com/c/hive-175001

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