A lot of the issues I hear about on SteemIt seem to have to do with the trending page. People buying their way onto the trending page, too many posts from the same user on the trending page, or xyz content is at the top of the trending page which looks bad for new users, etc.
So I was thinking - what if we just got rid of the trending page altogether? What purpose does it really serve? I hardly ever look at the trending page myself, except sometimes to see what all the fuss is about. When I come to steemit.com I just go to my feed which lists new posts from the accounts I choose to follow.
For new or logged out users who don’t have a feed to show, does it really make any sense for them to see the top recent posts by pending payout from any category on the entire blockchain?
I would like to suggest replacing the global trending page with a list of popular tags and some search options. Then users can choose what type content they are actually interested in when they first arrive rather than seeing a list of seemingly random posts about topics which they are unlikely to care about.
I don’t have any designs or anything for this, just throwing an idea out there. If anyone wants to take this to the next level by designing it and even potentially submitting a condenser pull request they would have my full support (for what it’s worth!). Here’s an example of a similar idea from Pinterest:
I still think there should be a “trending” page for each specific tag showing the highest pending payout posts for that tag. My guess is that tag-specific trending pages would create much less of a problem than the global trending page does right now.
I’ve also seen a great idea (in my opinion) proposed a few times that we should allow searching by multiple tags. For example, maybe I want to see posts tagged with both “photography” and “animals”, or with “cryptocurrency” and “funny”.
The point is that perhaps it would be better if the first page that people land on when they come to steemit.com focused on content discovery rather than just the top earning content on the entire blockchain.
Again - just an idea. Let me know what you think in the comments! I try to always upvote quality comments to try to encourage a good discussion which I feel Steem posts are often lacking.
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