When considering things you think they should be doing that other sites are doing it is important to remember that the idea of steem is to be decentralized with steemit.com simply being one view into that chain. If someone took down steemit.com the data on the blockchain would still be there and someone else could bring it back up on another IP, another domain name, etc. It could not be killed.
This is cool but it also creates some interesting development considerations. When you speak of chat. You speak of it being easy. It IS easy if you are centralizing all of your data. You simply put your chat on the centralized server. Steem is decentralized. So where are you going to put that chat data? Do you think it should be spammed onto the blockchain?
It might be possible using what they refer to as side chains, yet one thing to keep in mind is that some things that are simple when we are speaking about centralized website design can be very complex when we are speaking about decentralized. So it is likely doable, but comparing the work required to do something on a centralized social media site to work required to do the same thing in a decentralized fashion is likely not accurate. So you, AND I often look and say X Y Z could do this easy, what's the hold up?
X Y Z were centralized. It is indeed easy to do centralized. That could be completely not the case when doing decentralized.
This is what I was considering as I was thinking about your chat system idea.
Steemit.chat, slack, etc all of those are centralized. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are all centralized.
Steemit is centralized at its domain only as the window into the block chain.
So for chat to work it would need to either be centralized on steemit.com and have nothing to do with the blockchain which means it COULD be taken down forcefully, it could be censored, and it would not be accessible to others making alternative views. OR it would require creating a decentralized chat and deciding how to store that data on the blockchain which NONE of the social media sites you compare steemit to had to deal with.
Advantage of decentralized... can't be killed... and other people can create sites that access the same data an present it in new ways.
Disadvantage of decentralized is that things that seem simple on centralized platforms are likely significantly more complex to implement.
I don't really think a messaging system needs to be "decentralized." The blockchain is what's important here for the currency and for censorship of information. Chatting - in my opinion - would be more like a luxury in this regard, but a necessary one for the social aspects of the platform. I don't care if it's on a blockchain or not. It just needs to be incorporated somehow into the Steemit.com website.
I would like to see a decentralized chat. The problem is that it hasn't really been done before.
Maybe someone will come up with a wonderful solution to the problems of routing user to user. Or maybe someone will come up with an entire new internet that is peer to peer from the ground up.
Otherwise putting steemit.chat in a widget inside steemit.com will be really easy, or really hard. There is either already a widget for that, or there isn't, and they have it locked down to their interface.
One thing I like about steemit.com is that it doesn't have all those sidebars. Reading the blogs is distraction free. All of the suggestions above start cluttering things up. I do not have a good balance to recommend.
As it is right now is really only enjoyable to read if your resolution is not too high. It doesn't scale very well to other resolutions.
Thanks for the explanation. Is it possible to have chat as a sort of widget that remains centralized, but attached to Steemit? Well, everything within reason is possible. Is the challenge worthwhile?
I'm sure they could do a centralized chat on steemit.com or any other site. Then if steemit.com were taken down so would the chat. It only becomes more interesting and challenging if they are creating a decentralized chat that would theoretically span any site viewing the blockchain.
@dwinblood, Thank you for taking the time to thoroughly explain the differences between centralized and decentralized websites and the challenges that go into developing some of the suggestions in this post. Your comments have been very helpful for me.
I was kind of stream of consciousness working through it as I wrote it myself. I tend to focus on other kinds of development than web development and I found myself realizing that if I were making a decentralized feature that might be more challenging than a centralized one. The fact of the matter is most of the features that @ats-david is talking about don't need to be decentralized so it is a bit of a mystery as to what the hold up is with them.