Communities vs. Blogs
I mentioned recently that I've been trying to weigh the relative merits of posting in a community or posting to a blog. So... I thought I'd start with a pros/cons list in stream-of-consciousness order. Here's my first draft:
| Attribute | Blog | Community |
|---|---|---|
| Improve SEO | X | - |
| Moderated | - | X |
| Subscribers feed | - | X |
| Meaningful first tag | X | - |
| Post pinning | - | X |
| Curator support | x | X |
| Post promotion | X | X |
Off the top of my head, I came up with 7 relevant attributes that an author might consider when posting and listed out whether a community or blog/tag would be preferred for each attribute. This is shown in the table above and the figure to the right.
Here are some brief thoughts on each attribute.
1.) Improve SEO
As described by @the-gorilla, here, community tags of the format "hive-######" don't help SEO rankings much, whereas a relevant tag does. Therefore, if an author is looking for readers outside of the Steem ecosystem, the blog/tag approach would be preferred.
2.) Moderated
In communities, moderators can mute off topic posts which means that posts in a community should be less likely to be surrounded by spam when viewed by tag.
3.) Subscribers feed
Posts in a community will appear in the feeds of the community's subscribers, regardless of whether or not those subscribers follow the author. At present, it's not possible to follow a non-community tag. Therefore, if an author is looking for readers inside the Steem ecosystem, a community approach would be preferred.
4.) Meaningful first tag
When the first tag is "hive-######", this doesn't tell the reader anything about the post. So lists of posts by tag are not very informative when community tags are in the mix.
5.) Post pinning
It's possible to pin a post near the top of a community, which gives an author more possibilities for visibility. Again, authors looking for readers inside the Steem ecosystem would prefer communities. (edited to add*: On the other hand, post pinning can almost become a form of SPAM when moderators overdo it.)
6.) Curator support
Curator support is available for both blog/tags and for communities, but some communities also have dedicated high-power curators, so the community gets an edge here. Of course, it's also possible for tags to have dedicated curation, but - as far as I know - that's not currently happening.
7.) Post promotion
I don't see an advantage to either tag type. It's possible to promote blog articles and community articles. Unless someone is using something like mod-bot to link post promotion and pinned posts, this is a draw.
Summary
So, it seems that the community approach would be preferable in most cases. The only time that the blog approach has an advantage is if an author is looking to show up in search engines and pull in readers from other platforms.
This is not necessarily a good thing for the blockchain, since the author's incentive, in most cases, is to downrank their own content for search engines. I see three possible ways to address this suboptimal incentivization:
- Curators can favor tags over communities in order to realign the authors' incentives; and/or
- Some sort of metadata can be added so that the first tag in a community isn't the owning account. Instead, each community owner could register a relevant (unique) tag that would be used as the first tag when people post in their communities; and/or
- Enable following of tags.
Thoughts? What am I missing?
I think the overall answer could be that 'green' content that will forever gain search engine traffic should be posted on personal blogs; everything else should be optional. The bad part about that is the site is the only one that benefits from articles after seven days, so it might be a hard sell versus being a piece of community content that might attract new subscribers over time on the chain itself.
This needs to happen along with some sort of clickable tag cloud and some dropdown menus with popular sections to just jump directly into. The navigation needs improvement.
Agreed, mostly. I guess investors would also benefit if SEO drives in more traffic, but there's currently little motivation for the rewards-driven author to care much about SEO.
It hadn't occurred to me, but these capabilities could also be built into tools like the Steem Conversation Accelerator and/or the Steem Curation Extension. Too bad I can't hire a programming team to step-up the pace😉. If Steem is going to gain on legacy social media platforms, I think we really need to expand our thinking to fully exploit the decentralized development paradigm that's only possible here.
Hey remlaps, thanks for the heads-up about this post of yours! Definitely a great discussion and some great replies, also. The two main points I agree on are:
There indeed needs to be a change to the Communities #hive tags. As an author who stopped writing before the whole Hive happening, it was a little confusing what was happening when I got back here. The suggestion by @steemchiller of adding in a "community" field on the json is something I really do like, and ahree with you that it needs to be unique. I'm sure Steemit is losing a significant amount of traffic due to SEO;
Also, I really loved your idea of adding a #tag following tool to your already existing extensions! This weekend has been a bit chaotic, but it's in my plans to test them out soon.
To add my opinion to the mix, I've been using Steemit as a decentralized journey as well as a long-term project in content creation. Specially recently, when Xwitter got in trouble with the Brazilian law and its access was blocked, I felt the value of decentralization in the platform where I create. Having said that, I think that communities in a way reinforce centralization. As pointed out really well in the post, authors receive a lot more incentives for posting within a community rather than in their own blog. Even though that increases the social interactions, it also decreases the overall quality of posts in the Steem Ecosystem, in my opinion. In my opinion, the decentralization of the platform should be taken advantage a lot more, rewarding authors for creating and adding value to relevant tags in order to improve the macro perspective of the Blockchain itself, instead of only prioritizing the micro perspective through communities only. I wish I had more energy and time to be more comprehensive and to be able to reflect on the topic further, but I hope my contribution for now helps :) cheers!
Yes, why not to have something like a
communityfield in thejson_metadatato define the target community? I really want to get rid of this SEO problem!Plus, it would be good to get rid of that "hive" in the URL. I'm sure that's a little bit confusing to new arrivals. I'd even argue for replacing hive-###### accounts with community-###### (or something like that), but that's a topic for a different day. The only requirement I see is that the
communityfield would need to be unique for each community.No idea how hard it would be to implement, but I think this would definitely be a good improvement.
I think that under the current conditions it will be difficult for us to change anything in terms of SEO optimization. However, the current state of affairs can also be used to advantage. If someone wants to write an optimized text in order to attract third-party readers, he should publish his text under a specific tag. This can be some advertising information to attract the audience to the transition, say, through a referral link. If a person just wants to communicate, talk about his day, get maximum social interaction, then he should publish his post in the community.
Upvoted. Thank You for sending some of your rewards to @null. It will make Steem stronger.
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