> Keep in mind there will be 3 different types of communities. Also we are presently approaching owned communities which means a community account that you own the keys for and that assumption is that the person with the keys makes the decision... which doesn't mean they can't make that multi-signature or turn it into a DAO type structure.

Yes, you've said that there will be "three different types of communities." But that's just handwaving. You have to start by defining what a community is, what a community is intended to do, and how the community will be interacted with. You need to start with one.

Once you have a strongly established idea and design for how the core mechanic is going to function, then and only then can you move on to saying "and there are these other two kinds of things, as well, which differ in the following ways." Until/unless the basic premises is in place, until there is a design which can act as an engine for something that can be built and worked with, it doesn't matter how many things you imagine because none of them are real.

> I think of this as an issue of semantics... it could have been stated differently no reason to go crazy reactive to it. Let's just find a different way to define it. I agree you don't actually own your audience in that direct sense of the word... it's not slavery. You have your own independent portal to an audience and they to you and no one stands between you in a centralized fashion. But... I mean that doesn't roll off the tongue so I went the lazy approach... Good thing we are early on and we can change the wording or how to present it. It will be alright no need to overexagerate the issue... we'll find the right wording for it.

We are literally talking about social media networks. There isn't a single part of them which is not "an issue of semantics." Semantics reveal the underlying thinking that lead to decisions. If the underlying idea is about ownership of communities, particularly as phrased, "you own your audience," I can tell you that doesn't and in good places – not making any reference to political realities but as a result of decades of dealing with various kinds of creators who have emotional reactions to their audiences. It is a dangerous line of thinking because it is simply untrue, and so by necessity the right wording leads to the right thinking, not just for the people that hear that wording but for you as you are thinking about how to provide mechanics for people to interact with the experience.

Part of the reason that I went on at such length was to point out that "you have your own independent portal to an audience and they do you" is not useful thinking when it comes to considering how to construct and mechanize communities. Very few communities are one to many relationships. We already have those – people can follow your account and get updates on your content all the time, so you don't need a community for that. This is a thing you already possess.

This harkens back to "what is this good for?" What does it actually provide that you don't already have? Why would anyone use it?

Ownership of an audience in the sense that you originally intended doesn't say anything useful for communities. It doesn't provide anything new. If you want to sell the idea, it has to be a real idea that people want.

> I don't appreciate your overreaching assumptions about our motives or inclinations I think it's a cheap statement and petty. BUT... i do appreciate your perspective on how important the design should be and would love your help with that.

I suppose I could use my vast psychic powers to perfectly intuit your motives and inclinations, but because I'm essentially lazy, I think that I will instead go by what you write and what you have written. Going by all of those things, including the piece to which I was responding specifically, I know it's not a priority. If it were a priority there would have already been discussion about that. If it were a priority, it would have come long before the "and how will this integrate SMTs?" If it were a priority, the post would have started with "here is how we imagine that users might interact with communities," and then you would have told a little user experience story which illustrated even a sketch of what you think the look and design might be like.

Since none of those things happened…

Do you disagree?

It's not my job to sell this idea. I'm not getting paid to use my technical expertise and ability to construct user experiences in order to make SteemPeak a better place. I have a certain self-interested motivation in pointing out places where that could happen, but that's not my job.

It's your job.

But from where I'm sitting, all of the discussion – and to be fair, not just from SteemPeak but from Steemit Inc. and 99% of the Steem blockchain developers – is all about pushing numbers around. It always has been. Even before Communities and Hivemind were even being talked about, user experience wasn't and hasn't been anything people talk about. It's all about tokens. Then that same group of people look surprised when others come to the platform, poke at it for a little while, find that the obsession with token accumulation is about all there is, and leave because the story they've been told doesn't match the experience that they have.

SteemPeak is literally the best interface for interacting with the Steem blockchain right now. It has the best user experience of all of the options. But it is still just a more pleasant and cleaner front end to what is essentially Reddit with fewer functions and a complex fake money database slapped on. It doesn't even have the basic straightforward blogging platform facilities that Medium does and they barely pretend to be any kind of social media platform at all.

This is the place where you get to start and it doesn't serve you at all to pretend otherwise.

The design has to come first – because you're already starting behind and in a hole. You have to be able to convince people that you are going to offer them something that makes their lives and how they interact with other people essentially better.

That really starts and has to start before the design, when you sit back and imagine who the user you're actually building this thing is for. Who are they? What do they want? Why are they here? What are they expecting to be able to do?

I don't think that kind of design has ever been applied to most of the interfaces on the Steem blockchain, absent – maybe – the brief few moments where we had streaming-focused video platforms growing off the side. They had a definite target user and consumption vision and did a pretty good job of banging on it in different ways (and a couple of them are still around). The rest? It doesn't seem to be the case.

> It's gonna end up happening eventually by some site. We may not need to worry about it for a while but eventually tons of communities are gonna come beating down our doors demanding a human readable URL for their users. So thinking about a solution (hopefully decentralized) is a decent thing to consider for the time being.

It's absolutely going to happen, eventually. Whether it be someone that just is building it for their own convenience and it turns into a broader public project or whether someone sets out to deliberately capitalize on the opportunity.

The smart money is on making it someone else's problem. If you believe that tons of communities are going to come beating down your door demanding a human readable URL for their users, despite the fact that it looks like I'm contradicting myself here, monetize that known need. Say upfront that you are willing to sell parts of that namespace, just as other providers sell off DNS namespace, and roll with it. You'll also have to simultaneously accept that other providers are going to sell off their own gateways to that namespace, and they will inevitably conflict. That's not actually a real problem.

It's not something you want built into the blockchain (even as a bit of dependent code), because nothing ever goes away once it's been committed to the blockchain. It is static. It is monolithic. It never changes. Communities should be dynamic. They may want to change their names. They may want to change their descriptions. They may want to set any number of dynamic traits about themselves – and it will be really helpful if for something as simple as name spaces, you don't have to walk the entire blockchain back to the beginning of time to access that information whenever people need it.

The decentralization happens naturally as multiple providers want to provide the service. That gives you inherent replication without inherent control. (Again, as DNS can be.)

> You missed something BIG in the discussion... help bring in people who actually know how to create communities and give those people the tools they need. Don't reward Steem users who all they do is be first to create an account with the name of a topic.

Except there is no way to know who those people are beforehand. Again, your thinking like "a cryptocultist", as I like to put it. You're trying to determine the value of a thing before the thing exists rather than letting individuals determine the value of a thing to them.

If someone is the first to create an account with the name of topic or the first to create a Community with the name of a topic, we don't really care. It's not important. They aren't privileged by the simple dint of being first if IDs are effectively 64 bit hashes (or whatever), group names aren't unique, and the process of discovery is by search or by organic sharing (that is, by people deliberately sharing content which may be Communities themselves or posts tagged with Communities so that individuals that stumble over that content can follow to the source). This demands that organic discovery can occur and by observation of other social media platforms we know that organic discovery is one of the most powerful drivers of community growth.

All of this does suggest that Community creation, from the ground up, at the beginning, shouldn't be tied to content rewards. If you don't want people rewarded for being the first to create a Community, design the system so that they don't get rewarded for creating Communities. Decouple those mechanics.

Now, yes, I can already hear the question. "If people don't get rewarded for creating Communities, why would they?"

For the same reason that they create subReddits on Reddit or Groups on MeWe or Pages on Facebook or used to create Groups on Google+ and will forever create mailing lists via email – so that it is convenient for groups of individuals who have similar interests to share content. People use Community mechanics so that they can reify, mechanically, relationships with other people that already implicitly exist. Those relationships can be positively correlated as well as negatively correlated. Both of those correlations are important.

For instance, imagine two Communities devoted to Harry Potter fanfic. It's easy to imagine two different groups of people who are interested in sharing in talking about Harry Potter fanfic. In one group, Harry/Snape is the primary ship. In the other group, Harry/Snape is anathema and considered heretical, and Harry/Ron is what they're all about.

These groups are correlated positively by the fact that they share an interest in Harry Potter fanfic. They are correlated negatively by being interested in different parts of the concept and finding some things more desirable than others. As long as there upfront with their descriptions, there is no reason that either one should be considered preeminent over the other.

That's what I mean when I talk about Communities being a proxy for "locations," with the distance between Communities being both the conceptual distance between their central ideas and a gradient distance as defined by the relationships between their members.

> You have awesome way of thinking about a lot of this... however you are decently agressive at times abbout your approach possibly thinking this is what will push us and posing it like a challenge (which can work). But i challenge you... why don't you just help us create it and be more intimately involved in the process.

I have had little rule decades of thinking about social media platforms, online communities, and how the dynamic of how they come together actually happens. I predate the web. When I first started going online, it required telnet and USENET – and I have to be honest, in a lot of ways we have stepped back from the ability of people to engage with each other via of the means of communications available to us from that deeply distributed, deeply federated architecture that works so well with so little digital overhead.

I also have no illusions about whether anyone will actually listen to me. I know they won't. I don't expect you to. I'm not trying to push you into anything because I don't expect you to move.

I do this because it amuses me. I'm confrontational and aggressive because – well, I'm confrontational and aggressive. Though it might help if you imagine everything you read of me being said by someone who looks vaguely bemused at having the conversation in the first place.

At this point, however, I have seen way too many projects that have preceded online, particularly in the Cryptocommodities space, which suffer from what I call "nobody is over 30." Or at least nobody has any experience with anything that is older than 15 years. And that's a problem – because there is no general sense of understanding what has gone before, what has been tried, what has been experimented with, what has failed, what has been successful and why. Worse, little curiosity about that.

On the positive side, at least you are not the decentralized communications/mesh messaging folks, who tend to combine a lack of awareness of anything older than a few years with a complete and utter delusion about how everything works. Good technical folks, lousy people. Comparatively, the occasional cryptocultist is fairly tolerable.

I am, however, helping you create it. I'm commenting. Just as importantly, I'm using. I'm a user of the platform; I have yet to abandon the place altogether. Even though as a social media platform it really doesn't fulfill a need across the board for me or even significantly, I stick with it because it has a few interesting mechanics from a game perspective and I love games.

In the meantime, I respond as I will.

Though if you are really curious, it might be worth looking back at some of the things I wrote two years ago on this platform about discovery, web of trust organic presentation, and content lensing. It is not about cryptocurrency. It's not about blockchain. It's about social media platforms and user experience.

One day someone will read that and go, "you mean the stuff was sitting here this whole time?" But I'm betting today is not that day.