I'm a better model than I am a camera man.
Updated feed view with new post cards and post payout values.
New Post Modal with gallery slider. (You can use arrow keys to navigate the gallery)
Monetization options updated and posting to other communities enabled. Posting to liketu community requires you to select the Liketu community.
Mobile Feed
Reacting to posts.
..Years to cultivate liketu?
Yes, I'm back with another quasi-idiom to talk about some of the changes that we're making here at liketu. I think as someone deeply invested into the Hive ecosystem, it has always been important for me to look at things with a multi-year time horizon. I mean heck, we announced liketu in 2018 and didn't get round to putting out something useable until the end of 2021! Three years in the works, and now we are just over 3 months since going "live."
There have been numerous issues since going live, many we didn't foresee, and others we thought we would have to deal with as we gained a little bit of traction. A lot of the issues were technical, others were cultural pain-points revolving around the culture that we're trying to establish and complying to the existing established community norms. Finding solutions to these require navigating potential solutions in different ways.
Over the past three months, we recognised the importance of building our presence further into the existing blog culture, but doing so without completely axing our own cultural identity. On the one hand, we firmly believe that short-form picture based content can be just as "valuable" in the Hive ecosystem, but equally, we wanted to make sure that the experience was improved to a point where making these kinds of short form posts can be a two way value exchange.
These are some of the things we changed / added
Note: We are constantly listening to feedback from all stakeholders and so none of these things are cemented in stone
Post rewards from voting are now visible.
It's always been our philosophy to attract users from other platforms who are already posting pictures. We didn't want the rewarding aspect of it to be the highest priority and therefore excluded it from view. In-fact, we went to some lengths to make the vanilla experience largely agnostic to post rewards with synthetic on chain likes, and ranking algorithms not based on the pending rewards of posts. However, we can't ignore that the voting rewards system remains a core sell and it has worked quite well to incubate and grow our initial user base.
Reworked feed views to reduce clutter and increase visibility of pictures.
After working with @derangedvisions and taking onboard a lot of his feedback on the feed views, we've updated the look and feel to de-clutter not only the post cards, but the entire feed. We're all about pictures, so having minimal obstructions to the pictures on post cards was desirable. We also reduced the number of cards in a row to 4 and increased the size of the cards themselves. We believe this allows people to judge what posts they want to view at a glance, and not suffer from too much information presented to them all at once.
New Post modal content view for enhanced picture consumption.
The bulk of the changes come in a new pop up post modal to replace the perm-link view of posts. You can now scroll down to anywhere on a page, click on a post card, and have the pop up post modal appear with all the post content as well as comment. Images here are rendered in higher resolution and the gallery pops up when you mouse over to allow you to skip between pictures within the post.
A small addition we made was the ability to caption every picture. This has some positive effects on posts viewed outside of Liketu as now each picture can have their own description under it, instead of all of the descriptive text in the post description.
Comments now work!
Along with the new post modal, the comments have been fixed. Previously, only comment depth of 1 was visible, and the threading of comment depth >1 was broken.
Making a reply through liketu also by default tags the user that you are replying to.
Posting to a community of your choice (not default liketu) *more on this later
Liketu was always meant to be a picture based front-end that allowed for participation across all of the various niche communities which already existed on Hive. While all the posts made with liketu.com are still visible through the site and indexed in whichever way they are tagged, users can now make use of posting to any communities through the post constructor. This should hopefully let users participate with their content posted on liketu in other communities and expand our reach at the same time. Shout outs to @acidyo for bringing this up early on.
Standardised Monetization options
Monetization was confusing before and has been reworked to be in line with the options used on other front-ends. A key point to note here is that Declining Author Rewards sends the author rewards to hive.fund. This is likely to be something people might want to use for posting unoriginal picture(s) / text but the discussion/debate value is still worth being ranked on Hive for visibility. Curators would still be rewarded and so this option can be changed if community consensus is that curators should also not be rewarded for voting posts with Declined Author Rewards.
All other options are familiar if you're a Hive user posting on other front-ends.
Watermarks removed entirely
Feedback from many in the photography community have opined that watermarks deter them from using the platform. We have no reason to force this on any users and will make this an opt-in option in the future. Watermarked pictures can still be of "value" for bringing users who might see the picture somewhere outside of HIVE.
What next?
Onboarding / Referrals
Whilst hiveonboard is a wonderful tool, we feel that a native account creation feature is needed on liketu to bring us more in line with user expectations joining us for the first time from outside of Hive. We have been claiming account tokens and building up a bank of them for when we enable native accounts created by us. We also intend to offer a similar referral system where we give referrers 1% beneficiary rewards from accounts they refer, in addition to the 1% they also earn from premium subscription fees their referee accounts earn.
Account creation will be free, but will likely require SMS verification.
Premium features / PPVs / DMs / Freemium features
Building upon our premium subscription features, the next phase of this will be to allow more ways for creators to tap into people willing to pay for content. Currently users are able to create tiers and lock access to people who purchase subscriptions. Another popular method is set a PPV per locked post for those who may not want to subscribe, but want to purchase premium content.
Along with PPVs, Direct Messaging will be added to allow for more interaction between creators and their audience. Creators who are popular, commonly face the problem of being unable to effective apportion their time to engage with their audience. DMs are a good way to let followers bid on more personal interactions with their creators whilst letting creators prioritise and potentially earn further in private messages.
Mobile Web/App
Three months ago, we began work on making a dedicated mobile web app to serve likers on the go. We decided to design and build it from scratch because it serves as a Segway to building a full on native app for mobiles. I'll share some screens in the gallery for what it currently looks like.
Final thoughts
I began this post with an idiom. In it's original form : 十年树木，百年树人 it literally translates to, "Ten years to nurture a tree, one hundred years to cultivate a person," it is about comparing the time it takes between growing a tree and growing a talent. Many of us subscribe to the idea that talent is something we are innately born with, but I tend to subscribe to the idea that it is nurtured. In my previous post, I talked about my aspirations to become a musician, and despite not taking that path, I still put well over 15 years of practice in to play at a reasonably high level. Many would say that I am talented, but I only see blood sweat and tears. Everybody observes the end results, but they rarely see what it takes to get there.
I consider Liketu to be the same. We might not appear to be doing very much, but much is getting done, and our roadmap is more akin to 100 years than 10. Everybody loves to say how "early" we are in crypto, but the reality is, it really is early here at liketu. I am inspired everyday by the people I meet on hive, the support, the criticisms, the wonderful ever growing community as a whole. I am enamoured to be part of something much greater than myself and be working on contributing towards a brighter future for all of us.
Thank you gang, and see you all on Liketu!