Whilst there is some desire to go back to the old 'tag' system on HIVE, communities seem here to stay, and they do have their benefits. They're designed to gather people around a common interest, but also function to gather people together to support and help each other grow. They can give a sense of identity and solidarity, just like community groups do in real life. That's not to say that you should exclusively post in your community bubble - I love to join in on a few communities such as Have You Been Here, Stock Images or Ladies of Hive - and like it or not, people will try to flock to the community with the biggest upvotes (something @acidyo has tried to address with his community incubation project, to great success) - but for the most part, communities are kinda fun.

I like things to be kinda neat and organised, so they appeal to me on an aesthetic level too. I still search for things via 'old' tags when I'm curating eg #yoga #health #meditation and I still use those tags myself, mainly as new users still have to wrap their heads around the systems here and I don't want to miss them, and I don't expect everyone to post in a community, and nor should they feel obligated to. So a few of the 'problems' we may have with communities aren't actually huge problems at all - just things to navigate like you do with any system.

But anyway, I digress - here's the 3 ideas I thought I'd talk about in response to @guiltyparties call to brainstorm about communities.

Discussion Forums

I liked @steevc's idea that communities should be like Reddit, where people come together to talk over a particular topic. This can be what happens in Discord, but what's the point of that as it pulls away from the HIVE platform?

Say you want to ask about herbs to support immune function - but you don't want to write a whole post about it. don't like the idea of my blog feed being cluttered with single line questions or short posts that could be seen as 'shit posts' - I'd feel bad for those who autovote my usual work, which I try to make as quality as I can for sake of 'outside HIVE' impressions.

But in a community forum, you could separate 'blog posts' from 'discussion points', for example. You can still upvote discussion points if you like, but you needn't even see them unless you were looking for them in the community.

They wouldn't even be eligible for autovotes at all, so I could post a question anytime and not feel I have to make my post 'worthy' of upvotes. There was a dapp for this under the old Steem but it was separate from the main front ends - damn if I can't remember what it was called!

These 'discussion' posts should be viewable from the community page. For example:

I could drop my question here (and in an ideal world, there would be a clever archiving system to search for previous threads) and perhaps there would be a notification to alert members a new question had been posed.

CO-SIGNATORIES FOR COMMUNITY FUNDS

I find HIVE folk for the most part trustworthy, and there has to be a degree of trust when you're dealing with community funds. I trust the community organisers have got the members best interests at heart, but I understand that one of the biggest fears is that community funds either are locked up and not used when the keys are lost or someone disappears, or that someone with the master keys powers down and hightails it with their fortune (oh please, HIVE, go to $10 so I can think about this option haha).

But I understand that not everyone feels that level of trust and it keeps them up at night. This could be solved with co-signatories like you might do for a dual bank account. I might power down, change the keys, delegate or other 'big' moves, but the action would only happen if say, three other community members who also had the keys approved that action.

Like with my internet banking, I'd receive an alert that the power down had begun, and I could then either block or approve the action with my own keys.

SOME 'EASE OF RUNNING' COMMUNITY FEATURES WHICH COULD BE COOL

Yeah, this is a way of getting more than my '3' ideas in but I can't choose, so here's a few. I'm saying 'could' - happy to be argued down on any of them but it's just a brainstorm on my part (because I just drank too much coffee before I wrote this post!)

• More customisable - eg images, ads
• If you are given the 'curator' role, you are automatically given a nominated beneficiary on any post you write from community account, minimum set by HIVE and max by admin.
• Those who subscribe are automatically given a 'member' role rather than the admin having to do it manually on Peakd
• Application for communities should be made, to avoid crossovers with interest groups, and approved by HIVE team. If applications are successful communities should automatically recieve a certain amount of delegation to help them grow their account to support their members. Communities could be reviewed yearly to make sure they are meeting particular commitments eg paying their curators, advertising HIVE via outside media such as Twitter, working on user engagement.
• Search feature for communities should be easy - how would you know to search for 'natural medicine' if you were interested in 'meditation', which we support? If I search for 'meditation', it should throw up the communities that support this key theme. I know this one often gets raised.
• No Discord - chatting within community only. This DOES NOT NEED TO BE REWARDED - not everything should be! - but damn our own DisHivecord would be amazing.
• If you mute a user in the community they shouldn't be able to post in the community at all until unmuted

I've read quite a few of these and lots of people have great ideas, so I encourage you to join in.

All you need to do to participate is:

• Write a post listing your top 3 improvement ideas for communities
• Tag 3 friends in your post who you want to challenge + copy these rules into your post
• Go to the original challenge post by @guiltyparties and link your post in the comments

Tagging @pavanjr, @justinparke and @drrune for your input!

With Love,

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