We all know that Hive got this very steep learning curve. Some of that comes with the territory when you put a blockchain under a social network of course. But the frontends? They can defintely do a better job of welcoming new users, and that part is on us.
Here is the one things that always bugged me: On Hive there is not a single prominent feed that is driven by an algorithm. Everything is sorted by Rewards or Recency - no intellignce involved here. Yes there have been some experiments over the years but nothing that stuck as a prominent list of posts.. Some might argue that such an algorithm should be be a built-in feature of Hive itself but at the same time, different frontends have different requirements. The logic a video platform needs is not what a blogging frontend aims at. So we built ours. And it is live right now.
Nobody coming from tiktok/instagram/youtube wants to read a manual first.. What new users want is pretty simple:
- an UI that does not fight them
- content that "finds" them instead of the other way around
- a free account without the need for a documentation about key management (we are working on that)
That is the bar and we can do nothing about that. On web2 we all live with algos shoveling content in front of us based on watch time, interests and social interactions. You can dislike that but pretending our users do not expect it, just means losing them quietly and fast.
The funny part is that almost everything we needed was already built in some way, just sitting in different corners of 3Speak and needed some refurbishing.
Viewer retention: With audio tracking we have been able to record "bot-proof" retention and reuse that data in follow up processes. Now for video we used the exact same technique and it surprisingly just works.
Auto-tags: Our transcription bot has been running for months and already picked tags for videos based on captions, body and title. We improved that by also taking the community into account, but there is still a good amount of work to do (more on that below).
Viewer tags. Playlists, reshares and similar interactions are recorded on-chain via custom_json already, so we used the same functionality to let viewers tag videos themselves. Yes, you have direct influence on the algorithm.
So this was less about actually building new things and more about wiring the existing bits together in new ways.
Measuring retention started on the audio side of 3speak. There is a feature planned to activate pay per listen, and that will only be fair for everyone if we know a track was actually listened to up to a certain percentage. The exact same technique now runs on videos/shorts:
The same technique now runs on video:
- play - you open a video or press play on any frontend, including peakd, ecency etc
- keep playing - the player sends continuous heartbeats so we know the video is properly played back
- stop / skip - If you stop or skip, the measurement session closes and a new one starts.
So we now track real watch time and our feeds can finally be sorted by retention instead of rewards or date.
Topics - no guesswork
Most platforms guess what you like by tracking what you click, like or comment. We do some of that, but we ask you. Tell us your interests, and we show you content that is living in these topics. Wild concept, I know - but it works ;)
For the autom. tagging itself, the transcription bot gives us the voice track, and we mix that with the post description, your tags and the community you posted in. That combination gets us surprisingly close but it is still not perfect.
We started with a pretty limited set of tags aka topics and we defintely need to widen them into a full catalog soon. Of course we take care that the 3Speak UI remains simple along the way, we just need some time and data ;)
But now the catch: because an AI will never see a video the way you do, we added a feature where you can help tag videos with the correct topics. This takes you just a few seconds and makes the feeds better for everyone, including you.
3Speak Analytics!
Now that retention data exists, we published the very first draft of 3Speak Analytics into your profile and onto your videos. You get the pure watch time, and more importantly you get to see where people stop watching. That drop-off moment is the most useful thing a video creator can stare at. It can tell you multiple things: your intro is too long, the middle drags, or that people leave the second you start reading your own post out loud. Use it - This stuff is what turns "posting videos" into actually getting good at video.
We keep working on the algorithm and the UI to make this as easy as it can get but we will need your feedback of course (and time lol).
A real tag tree. As mentioned before - the tags are too broad right now. The plan is to create a full tree covering video formats, topics, music genres and all of that so we can become much better in determining what you wanna see. This is a huge task and it takes a lot of time, because every adjustment touches a lot of spots in the codebase.
Balanced feeds. The feeds are not perfectly balanced yet and the main reason is that we are still short on retention data and on that tag tree. Even if it is not perfect, it already beats what we had before with the classic trending "algorithm".
Untagged videos. Some of the videos and shorts slip through out automatic tagging because they are missing metadata like a description, tags and such. We will find a way to tag those as well - thinking of image recognition or somrthing else experimental.
Social signals. Of course a proper content discovery rating should also look at social interactions, for example the people connected to the ones you follow, meaningful comments and all that. But basics first!
Three things, all of them easy:
Feedback. If a feed serves you garbage, tell me. If it serves you something great, tell me that too. Both are useful.
Tagging. Help tag videos. Even a handful matters right now while the catalog is still small.
Watch time. Just watch. Every properly watched video makes the data better and pushes decent content up. Maybe also watch some old videos you liked and remember there is pure gold stored on 3Speak!
That is it. Go break it and tell me what broke.
