Hive Think Tank

It's Time For Me To Talk About Tips/Donations Again.

Since I recently dipped my toe into the LBRY pool and their system which is 100% tip/donation based I think it's time for me to bring this up again. If you follow me you might remember me mentioning this a few times in the past.

THIS is how we save Steem.

I Can't See How You Don't See It

Donations are the solution to the comment crisis.

Would you use a donations feature on Steem?

I have had a VISION!

So yea, just a few times.

What Steem has now, is a ton of functionality. But it's severely lacking in "features". To define those in the context that I'm using...

A Functionality is something the blockchain has the capability of doing.
A Feature is a functionality implemented into something a user engages with that hopefully gives them a positive user experience and solves some problem for them.

For each functionality, you can have several features. ie different ways of doing the same thing.

Some very powerful functionalities of the Steem blockchain are

Upvotes
Direct Transfers
Beneficiary System
Delegation

Now think to yourself how many features there are for these functionalities. How easy are they to do? How easy are they to learn about? How easy are they to access? How intuitively are they implemented?

I won't go into breaking each one down because most of you can answer these questions for yourselves. The main one I want to focus on is Direct Transfers.

I'm running a little promotion for my new community Steem Think Tank where I'm paying participants 10 Steem each to make a post in the community answering a survey about Steem. (Still 5 slots open as of now btw, paying the first 10)

If I wanted to offer around the same reward with upvotes, I'd have to be a whale. I'd have to have hundreds of thousands of Steem, or I can buy about $13 worth of Steem and pay people via a direct transfer. As a user, I'd like it to be clearly evident, as soon as you land on this communities page, that all these participants have been paid, by me, without the necessity of leaving this page or even understanding much about Steem. I'd like to be able to COMMUNICATE with my transfers in the same way that I communicate with my upvotes.

I not only would like to be able to communicate as in this case for some promotion, but if I had tools like I've mocked up here, I would only reward comments with direct transfers. It would probably "cost" me less in the end vs the voting power that I burn up by upvoting comments with enough VP to make them actually pay something out.

Imagine if tomorrow you woke up and all the Steem frontends hid how many, and how much each post made and you had to go to your wallet and figure out how much each post made by adding them up individually. I know a few people who have called for just that, but in reality I think it would be catastrophic to the already struggling user experience here. Well that's how we handle transfers and we're completely squandering an incredibly powerful functionality by not developing any features around it.

This is especially vexing to me recently because I'm looking at LBRY, a platform that EXCLUSIVELY uses this and they are being covered more favorably than Steem. Now that I've been using LBRY for a while I can tell you Steem has MUCH more functionality, but most of it people don't bother using because...*deep breath

That is all. Enjoy the rest of your day :D

Comments · 22

@jekhy(7)· 2424d
Thanks for the post.
@ash(74)· 2425d
RCash does this super good, they have tipping and sponsorship widgets in place.

example: my post
@roadscape(65)· 2426d
What if account creation credits were made transferrable (and only requiring posting key). They could be used as on-chain tipping token without involving active key. And the claim op could be reduced to posting auth as well. Would allow users to harvest tips based on their SP and create an RC sink. Someone could also launch an invite service which allows users to trade these tokens for invites.
@clevecross(60)· 2427d
Of course I find myself responding before reading in it's entirety the post. I just find myself strongly agreeing with you on a few points, especially about the community just seeming to... fail in areas. It seems a beautiful premise, what it is, what it offers and what we imagine it could be. It just seems to.... stagnate into what it is and continues to be.

I am just returning after a long while but did start steemit a few months after it started. Was active for awhile and just got too caught up in it and had to step back. Came back after a year for awhile, and now after two years. I don't notice much terribly different, with the exception of some advertising banners.

It is what it is, and what it is isn't bad.... but I agree there is something keeping it from being adopted by more and it's hard to watch what you think (know) could help it fall on deaf ears.

Anyway, I have several of your other posts open in new tabs to read after I finish this one.... but I am enjoying, thanks.
@tipu(68)· 2427d
🎁 Hi @midlet! You have received 0.1 STEEM tip from @cardboard!
Check out @cardboard blog here and follow if you like the content :)
Sending tips with @tipU - how to guide.
@cardboard(65)· 2427d
!tip ;)
@arcange(79)· 2427d
Congratulations @midlet! Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following category:
- Pending payout - Ranked 1 with $ 58,44
@belemo(79)· 2427d
The tipping idea is pretty cool and while my first reaction was "but we have ginabot to know how much goes into our wallet for that", I get your point about the ease of use.

Is the Survey thing still going on?
@cryptosearch(49)· 2427d
Still steemit community beta website working?
@marki99(62)· 2427d
Love the way you write, funny and convincing.

The steem keychain extension makes it really easy to tip someone(2 clicks and username needed). But I agree that an onsite feature will have to be added eventually.
@gadrian(76)· 2427d
A tipping system is much easier to understand than our curation with all its rules for a new arrival. Let's count that in. They can coexist, but we need a tipping system and I love your mockup.
@chekohler(76)· 2427d
Indeed I agree in tipping being a secondary option it will help improve the rate at which steem can be distributed and redistributed and allow posts to be rewarded well after the 7 day period

People are already doing this via the wallet and Vimm.TV has a native tipping button on its front end that I’ve used in the past.

it would be nice to have it associated with posts and make it more visually appealing to the user both in and outside steem

What would be cool is also have a tab for heights donations so you can see which posts got the most donations like with trending

When you make it an integral part of the experience people who don’t get the inflation pool will understand this

Donations can also be intergrated with tools like steem engine and blocktrades or even PayPal and people could tip in other currencies to have it converted into steem too!

Bringing money outside steem into steem too! People understand donations which is why superchats are becoming more popular on YouTube and twitch is based on donations and subs
@g7terra(58)· 2427d
Learned a lot here.. Thank u very much!!! UPVOTED
@thecastle(69)· 2427d

This is especially vexing to me recently because I'm looking at LBRY, a platform that EXCLUSIVELY uses this and they are being covered more favorably than Steem.

LBRY also solved a bunch of other problems with UX design that steem has still yet to properly solve even in the beta version of the new UI. Honestly, steems voting system is pretty good, it just encourages weird behavior in its current design.

I would suggest that in order for peoples full voting power to be reached they the overall number of upvotes need to be accounted for. You should not even be close to reaching 100% of your collective voting power unless you are at least in the top 1000 most upvoted posts on the platform for that 24 hour schedule.
@reptileaceh(3)· 2427d
Hallo... follow me...
@imwatsi(71)· 2427d
I think this is a great idea! I'm willing to work on a Hivemind implementation for a tipping system, so that the backend can support this.

With Hivemind, associating specific payments to posts/comments is possible (I already implemented that for Native Ad payments).
@jarvie(75)· 2427d
Well i'm on board and it's a to-do ticket for https://steempeak.com/

However we have a few things ahead of it like communities and guest commenting and features that make the site easier for non-steem users... etc.

Also love to see it decentralized ... aka in the tracking of donations and association with either Post or User.

cc: @asgarth
@justineh(72)· 2427d
Agree it’s needed, and have been told it’s easy to implement. But this isn’t a chain based change, so essentially it just requires a front end to implement it and there are some difficulties with setting multiple wallets (if you want to accept multiple currencies).. I actually have been looking at the spankpay system and wondered if that was something that could be just integrated (as they have the wallet thing already figured out).

But yes, fully agree this is needed.

In your vision though is this over and above inflation rewards? Or does it replace them?
@bil.prag(76)· 2427d
in @steempeak in profile page there is an send steem button so it feels that it would not be that hard to add it into posts and comments but the info part may be a bit harder (have no coding skills so it is just a guess)
@dalz(81)· 2428d
The donation button should be an easy frontend implementation. Just a shortcut for transaction.
@borislavzlatanov(65)· 2428d
Now that we have Communities, how difficult do you think something like a tipping system would be to implement? Would it require a lot of time (days, weeks, months)?

One of the major advantages of Communities was that frontend development would be greatly simplified and so sped up quite significantly. So I'm really keen to see how easy and fast such ideas for user experience improvements can be implemented.
@ammonite(73)· 2428d
Whaleshares has changed to a fully tip based model. There is stake based daily reward for all holders of WLS and you can choose to keep it or use some to tip good posts. There were many not happy when it came in, mostly the ones who just upvoted their own posts and those of their circle. Many had their doubts that people would reach into their own pocket and tip good content creators. Well a few months in and people are happy to tip. It is like busking and for me personally it is working quite well. Your suggestion of adding it as a feature on top could be a great test maybe Steempeak could make it so. ps I must check out Lbry