In this post I will expand on a proposal from a recent post of mine (view article here) in which I proposed a feature that I felt would benefit the Steemit platform.
The idea was to include a traffic indicator on the user's homepage that alerted them to the level of activity both across the user's connections and across the whole Steemit community.
The benefit of having such a feature would be greater transparency enabling more efficient ‘reach’ of your content and general communication across the platform.
For example, suppose you write an excellent article that you feel would really appeal to your follower base. If you knew that the level of activity among your followers was much lower at the time you were going to publish, you would probably hold off, wouldn’t you? Well... I definitely would.
Rough details of the proposal were given in the last post and I was grateful to receive such a strong response.
In this post, I want to flesh out the idea a bit more so readers might be able to see the potential I see in this. As one of the replies pointed out, something like this may very well be in the works so forgive me if this is already being developed (@teamsteem, would you be able to clarify?).
Traffic across your connections
The screenshot below is a rough mock up I did of what the traffic indicator for the user's connections might look like. The important communication here is the Activity Level which (in this example) has three levels:
- Busy
- Moderate
- Quiet
The activity level could be determined using an algorithm that tracked your followers over the last 24-72 hours (or a different window of time). A very simple algorithm might look like this:
The algorithm would define a ‘busy’ and ‘light’ threshold using standard deviations of ‘active’ followers and average number of followers based on hourly data from the last 24-72 hours. In the example above, the current number of active followers lies within the range so the indicator in this case read “Moderate”.
An important consideration is what defines an ‘active’ follower. This could be defined in various ways, for example:
- If last reply, upvote or post by the followers was in the last x (e.g. 15 minutes)
- If the user has been navigating the Steemit platform in the last x minutes (I’m not sure if it is possible to determine whether a user is moving across the platform)
- If the user is currently logged in. I don’t think this is a feasible option as many users will be logged in but not actively using the platform.
I would like to hear your (and the @teemsteam‘s) thoughts on this. I won’t cover how the overall Steemit traffic indicator would operate at this stage.
Other Uses
This idea made me think of other uses of capturing “traffic” statistics on Steemit. As well as knowing the level of activity across your connections and the community overall, an indicator that highlighted the level of activity in your most tagged threads could also be useful.
For example, if you’re a technology buff and frequently post and read articles in the technology thread, an indicator (which could be based on anything, e.g. the number of reward shares across technology posts in the last hour) might be something that enhances the user experience. There are lots of possibilities beyond what I have presented here.
Many thanks for reading.