Something that could really make steemit a lot better IMHO is the way the feeds work. Personally, I hardly look at the main feed anymore, the posts that show up there just aren't that interesting. I think there are lots of interesting posts on steemit.com that I never get to see because I don't actively search for them and they never get to the top pages. By searching I've often found older posts that I completely missed at the time that they were active.
Now this could probably all be solved if some genius figures out how to make the main feed better so that it always shows relevant posts...
But what I would like to propose seems relatively simple and would make it a lot easier to notice the posts you want to see, without having to actively search for them.
Users should be able to set up their own feeds of usernames and tags. These feeds should be available at the top (next to trending, new, hot and promoted) and preferably also show when there are new posts, like in the following example:
(If there is not enough space, then only the feeds with new posts will show up).
For example, you could have a feed with the usernames of people on steemit that you know personally to make sure you see their posts.
A feed consists of a title and a list of usernames and/or tags. For implementation, a date/time should be saved for each feed to know what range to search for new posts.
The tags you put in such feeds are the kind that are hardly ever used. You would often need to make a list of variations, since you don't know exactly how people will tag their posts.
If you set up feeds for certain users, you may not want them to also show up on the main feed. You could unfollow them, but technically you do still follow them. To solve this, you could let users in feeds automatically be counted as being followed (then the follow button is only for the main feed), or following someone is required for adding them to a feed and they are automatically not shown on the main feed.
Users can set up their own feeds in the Settings area, where there is a new section: My Feeds. For simplicity, this is just a textarea where you can enter a list of your feeds, one per line, for example:
This would probably put some more strain on the servers, constantly doing all those extra searches, so it would require some though on how to make it work fast and efficiently. Perhaps there would need to be some limits on the number of feeds and tags per feed a user may have.
Perhaps the first step would be to make the system work without the notification numbers (so you'd have to manually check all your feeds for anything new). Even then I think it would already be a huge improvement.
Everything so far would be enough for the most basic implementation. I believe that keeping it simple can increase the chances of it being realized. However there are many improvements possible:
For consistency, the main feed should also have the number of new posts shown here instead of in the account menu:
Then the other feeds (trending, new, hot and promoted) should probably have numbers too, for promoted it would work well, I'm not sure about the others.
Also, there should be automatic check once in a while (like every 5 minutes) to see if there are any new posts in any of the feeds. You could be in the middle of reading a post and then see a notification number come up for one of your feeds.
For more control and less false positives, it would be nice to also be able to set ignored users and tags (for example proceeded by a minus sign), like this:
local: nijmegen, netherlands, -sports
work: @colleague1, @guru1, wordpress, php, css, -@spammer1
For new users who have not yet set up any feeds, next to trending, new, hot and promoted, it should show new feed..., which brings them to the settings where they can set up their feeds. And the search results could display a message like:
Would you like to be alerted to new results for this search in the future? Set up a feed.
It could be useful to have a way to have some feeds always be hidden by default and only show them when there are new posts (good for tags that will probably almost never show up). This could for example be done by adding (hidden) at the end of a line, for example:
nearby places: wijchen, beuningen, malden, ubbergen (hidden)
Perhaps for in the future: You could think about having the ability to easily add a keyword or username to one of your feeds when you are at the bottom of a post. Like if you hover over a keyword you could get a little box with Add to feed [new...] (with a dropdown that shows all your existing feeds), and have the same added to the box you see when you click on a username.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors