In's and Outs Of Communities. What’s changed!? What the least you need to know!?
I've been testing the in's and out's of the new Community system, and let me tell you it's very exciting! There are some details that you do need to know and understand so that you are able to post to the communities you want, and still have your posts visible on your blog. There are also some details about cross-posting that you should understand, and a few other things that I am going to share and explain. Before I go into details, let me explain the main differences between communities and blogs, and how to use them!
Communities
Think of communities as a special place to put something. Rather than sharing a post with the entire Steem ecosystem, when you post using a community page, or hive-tag your post does not appear on your blog feed. There is an option to share your community posts to your blog feed if you want, but you have to manually do that on each of your posts. If you do use other tags they WILL still appear in those feeds.
Make New Connections Easily!
One of the best things about communities is that you can see everyone who is subscribed on each community page. Previously we had no idea who was in who's groups, and it was hard to discover people who didn't post frequently. Now we can easily click and discover new people, as well as share slightly more privately in each community. It's also very easy now to view the entire feed of each community, all conveniently linked at the top of the page in the communities drop down menu.
One of the features (limitations) of Communities, at least right now, is that you can only post to one community with a post. If you use a community page to post from then just click the button on the page that says WRITE A POST. This will automatically assign it to the community and you are then free to use any other normal tags in the post. (see image below)
If you are using the standard post buttons outside the community then just use the interface to post to a specific community, You can choose whilst you post at the top. If you don't see the community you want to post to you may need to Subscribe to it. See image.
Adding a Community post to your blog feed
Once you have posted to a community you can easily share it to your blog by clicking 'Profile' and then clicking to view 'All Posts' . Find the post you just made and then choose the option to 'Add To Blog' should appear on your own posts. See image.
The hard part now will be deciding which community to post things on!
Cross-posting
The main thing to know is that cross-posting is more like normal posting rather than re-steeming! If you are on auto-votes, or have limited RC (resource credits) then be careful cross-posting. 90% the rewards on the post you cross-post will go to the author of the post. Also bear in mind that anything you cross-post to another group will have its own comments thread, separate from the original post.
Basically, RE-STEEMING is to share with BLOG TAGS and CROSS POSTING is to share with communities that you are subscribed to. When you cross post the the following things happen:
- The rewards start again for 7 days , (evergreened) 90% go to the original author, 5% to the cross poster, and i THINK that other 5% is to the community.
- The comments go to the Cross poster, not the author.
- Cross posting a post that is still live on votes can cause confusion or issues (e.g with auto-voters). If You are on auto-voters be aware you may trigger them on your cross post. which will mean you are donating those rewards to the author .
THE COMMENTS ON A CROSS-POSTED POST WILL COME TO THE PERSON WHO CROSS-POSTS AND NOT TO THE AUTHOR!
So, if you cross-post then you need to keep an eye on the comments from the post you have shared. If someone cross-posts one of your own posts, you will want to go to that post to see the comments.
Note that you should only cross-post a post once, and only after the 7 day payout (although it is possible to do it before).
Some people say it's bad etiquette to cross-post your own content but I think it's totally fine IF you want to get your post in a different community.. Otherwise how else to share it?
Badges
We now have the ability to receive or award badges to people! You may already see the ecoTrain badge, Natural Medicine Badge, TribeSteemUp Badge etc on some peoples profiles. Badges can be awarded for any reasons you wish, and ecoTrain is awarding people badges for their outstanding contributions to Steem and the community. If you are interested to see what the feed looks like for a community with just the people who have badges then just click on a badge and see! Its another way to find and view high value posts on Steem.
Blogs
This is the part of Steem that we all know and love! Things are much the same here as they were, and you could just keep posting blogs and ignoring communities. If you do this i think you will be missing out though, Communities are still very new, and so i think it's worth the time to Subscribe to a few and see how your Community Feed Looks! I think communities will play a big part of Steem, and we can already see that normal tags have completely gone from Steempeak.com. Now all the links are Communities and Tribes!
Info On the ecoTrain Community
You Can Subscribe and Post To Our ecoTrain Community Page here:
https://steempeak.com/c/hive-123046/about
If you are posting for an ecoTrain related post, especially the Question Of The Week, then you will need to post from our community page. We will be giving curating priority to our community and those of you who post on our community page. Finally we can all see who each other are and make some new connections! We support a wide range of topics, including
sustainability, community, self-sufficiency, off-grid living, eco-green, permaculture, inner transformation, alternative energy, alternative lifestyle, eco bulding (esp. earthships), recycling, esoteric, spiritual, nature - in short, all the practical and conceptual underpinnings of the eco paradigm shift.
If you write or post on any of these topics, or similar please do join us, subscribe to our community and lets reach out and expand the ecoTrain motto "Together we are helping make this world a better place"
If you want to read more check this post out from @jarvie
https://steempeak.com/hive-175001/@jarvie/choose-your-own-adventure
Thanks to....
I would like to say a huge thank-you to all the developers and team at Steempeak and Steemit who have made this happen. I have been waiting a long time to see these changes, and can already feel the difference in how much i want to engage with the ecosystem. What i feel using Steem now is that we have more cohesion and structure, and ability to find like minded people to connect with. We can join as many different communities as we like, so i don't see it as limiting at all! As a group leader of ecoTrain, I never really knew who was following us exactly, especially the people who didn't post much. Now I can already see everyone who has subscribed and am able to check their posts out and see who is with us... Very nice work guys!
The 8 Pillars of @TribeSteemUp
@ecoTrain
Supporting People Who Help
Make The World A Better Place
Discover previous ecoTrain magazines at @ecoTrain
** Click Here To View Our Feed **
Yes, I've noticed that cross posting creates a new post.
This is a little bit annoying when you have a post relevant to 2 or 3 communities and you cross post then the comments aren't shared.
It also means auto-votes end up being made twice or three times for essentially the same post.
yep! there can be some funkyness with autovoters! cant be helped really.. the idea with comments if you look above at Steempeaks comment is that when you cross-post it you share it to a new community who may see or comment in a different way.. so you are now holding that comment space in the way you saw the post.. something like that .. !
You really shouldn't do this to be honest... just use the interface to choose your community they'll put in the proper info and no one will make mistakes like we've been seeing.
Not just for that reason but too many people think communities is just a tag. They think of tribes... It's not like tribes at all we are not summoning a community with a tag. You are making a decision to put your post in that community and only in that community.
What you've said about cross-posting is right on and what I'd add is that cross-posting has a different set of comments by design because the post may appeal to this NEW audience differently and they may have different conversations.
ive removed all mention of manually adding hive tags.. it was confusing and is totally not needed now.. wastes a tag if anything it looks like! SO its simple, just use the interface to assign a community whilst you post..
totally agree,, its almost not worth mentioning using the hive tag manually as ite SO easy using the system.. couldnt help mentioning it thoguh as so many people have been doing it during beta testing.,.
thanks for fact checking, very important! and clarifying on the thinking behind having separate comments.
im very curious what your thoughts are about having the option to post to maybe 2 or even three communities? My thoughts are it would help other small communities grow.. as choosing just one to post to is (already) so hard to do sometimes.. it can get tricky!?
You can give it a shot right now if you want manually (actually posting it several times). We aren't going to develop a UI for that unless there is a lot of people doing it and it's being received well.
But let us know how it goes for you.
well, im trying to figure out how best to use these parameters.. preferably without having to double / triple post..
after some thought, and testing i think community curators can also do some cross-posting to bring in content that they want to see.. so we dont rely on the author so much to do that work or have to double post.. I've already made a new cross-posting account for the SpiritWeb Community and used it to bring in a few posts.. Seems to work and solve the issue..
You've asked elsewhere if an interface could allow you to put the posts in multiple communities.
That would require creating an identical post and putting it into multiple places (communities are place) ... as a comparison cross-posts simply are a reference to the original post then graphically we display the post. (in addition to a bit of commentary to share with the separate audience/community)
I'm not sure how the steem user base at large would feel about creating multiple identical posts. Honestly it's already doable just copy paste your posts ... here's the thing if it's not already being done right now in mass then we'll wait to create a system that makes it easier. People have to do it a lot to begin with.
i see, thanks for explaining that.. so to clarify what you are saying:
There is no way to have the same post be linked to two communities (code wise?) e.g. by having check-boxes on the communities you want to post to?
Are you saying that posts in different communities are separate entities and have to be separate for the code to work?
thanks for this feedback, really helps!
How do rewards work? Does the community account get any or is it still go to the author? I am trying to catch up to alot of stuff here, and created GreenHouseRadio community. Thx for the help in advance.
upvoted for sweet sweet curation and first comment
also i notice steemians get no comment love
people are too strict on comment upvotes, we need to start givin out auto comment upvotes for example: if 10 real organic comments show up the top one would get an auto upvote thatd be cool
i wanna guarantee my commenters get upvoted
i feel very strange tho about steemit now as if its gonna get inherited by some people who just take it and use it for their own private party. so much fomo i sense
maybe im just mistaken and mis sensing something else
i guess if steem goes up i win if i have steem
i think steem is still cheap, may not be 10 cents but when it was ten cents everyone was scared itd go to 7 cent lol but that never will happen
yep comment love is hard for some.. for me its really tricky because my VP is tied to @ecoTrain and we do a lot of voting.. so when i vote comments it gets VP a bit out of whack!
i think good things are coming, and whilst you Neva know.. i think were in good hands now.. and dont forget he didnt buy steem,.. only a load of coin and a very important front end
Thanks Alex , this is just what I needed.
Me too! Just trying to learn this new stuff. Thanks for re-steeming Sallybeth ❤
xxxxxxx
happy to hear! takes some head wrapping to get it all!
We are getting to grips with it bit by bit. I am loving this new steemit... so exciting.
thank you . can i join your community
Posted using Partiko Android
of course, just click the link to visit our community page and press the Subscribe button
https://steempeak.com/c/hive-123046/created
I see what you mean about the community choice being difficult... I wonder how different it is from a tag bringing the same post up in multiple places vs this? I don't know much about that in depth tech but I would have thought it would be the same or similar of just being able to have the post seen in multiple places over just being confined to whatever community it's posted in.
I've got to catch up on all these new changes evidently because I'm with you-- how would one ever choose which community to post to?
Posted using Partiko Android
well, you can STILL use tags and so you can still be visible on all those other tag feeds.. but they are way less accessable right now as there is no list of them anymore!
so for choosing communities.. well , this is gonna be fun! i think many people, including me, will cross-post some posts into our communities ourselves,, which is nice for the author.. and can spread things around a bit.. but otherwise the only way is double posting! !(perish the thought!)
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Nice! When I saw the title of your post I knew I would not be disappointed. With so many new things on Steem, and me getting maybe a tenth of the time online I normally do, I even thought I'd wait exploring communities till I'm back at home. But thanks to your informative review I'm excited to try posting in communities.
One thing I'm not quite sure about though: since I'll be writing posts on the Earthship build, I'd like to share it in ecotrain AND build-it. But that would require cross-posting, which in a way is publishing the same post twice. Is that really worth it? What do you recommend?
In Steempeaks introduction post for the feature they say crossposting is to keep posts evergreen. It should only be crossposted after the 7 day payout(you get another payout for each post crossposted) and only once per 7 day period. Also, its bad etiquette to crosspost your own content, but anyone can. You left this info/advice out @eco-alex.
That's a useful perspective. Thank you.
thanks for that.. i will do an edit shortly to clarify this
this is the THING right now.. i Truly hope that the @steempeak Devs will consider allowing us to post to at least 2 communities in one post.. i think that will really help more diverse communities grow.
I think with a limit of just one community to post to, people will choose the bigger communities, or ones offering tokens/tribes.. even if the community aspect isn't there... and most people like you and I are already stuck with this new difficult choice.. as before we could just tag a few groups and they would all see them in their feeds...
so for now, we do have an authentic reason to post twice.. It seems inefficient in terms of the blockchain data, but necessary if you want to put something in two communities.. else you can crosspost instead of copying which is slightly more transparent that its a copy..
fingers crossed this may be tweaked with in future!
The way the system is designed There is no such thing as posting into 2 communities with one post. However you are free to post the same content into multiple communities.
i think that may end up being a way,. the Only issue is people who have auto-voters on them,,. theres quite a few folk i know who cause some issues there .. but maybe thats a reason to stop auto-voting rather than double posting ;_) .. at least for now, as things stand, were trying to decide how to proceed!.. and so far double posting seems the best option..
Why should we cater to the ineptitudes of auto voter systems that don't adapt to how we now do things? It's as if they're holding us hostage?
Auto-voter systems need to update.
im inclined to agree.. there are going to be some knock on changes that may well need to happen.. mostly positive too if it encourages manual voting!
@dtube and @threespeak etc COULD in theory also provide a way to alter the first tag.. MAYbe.. thats a big ask though probably
You can't alter the first tag... it's very different from the rest from what I know.
Right.. so the main thing that will need to change is our posting behavior .. we will all have to double post videos etc to share with our chosen community.. rather than rely on tags..
Or to put another way..
we can rely on our Blog feeds tags to see media posts in general ..
it's worth mentioning that i think everyone posting on dtube or threespeak etc will HAVE to double post to share with their community.. as you cannot change the initial tags on all of those systems.. unless i missed something..