Okay, I'm interupting my "If I was a minnow" series to speculate on what I believe will be the "big surprise" that @steemitblog talked about in their previous blogpost.
I'm ready to bet that this is it. It's coming. This very week.
What is the community feature?
For those of you that haven't been here very long. At the beginning of 2017, Steemit Inc. released a roadmap: https://steem.io/2017roadmap.pdf
One feature that almost made me peed my pants was the "community feature". Just like sub-reddit, it would allow you and me to create communities of interest where people can hangout, be a mod, curate, write, etc.
Now today while "spying" on the steemit github, I discovered this : https://github.com/steemit/condenser/wiki/Community-Spec-%5BDRAFT%5D
What caught my eyes is that it is currently being implemented.
Hivemind - Community consensus layer for the Steem blockchain?
For more see the repo of "hivemind" repo: https://github.com/steemit/hivemind
Any user can create a new community, and each becomes a tuned 'lens' into the blockchain. Currently, there is one large window into the Steem blockchain and that is the global namespace as shown on Steemit.com. This is not ideal because everyone effectively has to share a single sandbox while having different goals as to what they want to see and what they want to build.
Many members want to see long-form, original content while many others just want to share links and snippets. We have a diverse set of sub-communities though they share a global tag namespace with no ownership and little ability to formally organize.
The goal of the community feature is to empower users to create tighter groups and focus on what's important to them.
Member Types
Owner: holder of the community account's private keys. Assigns admins.
Admin: can edit admins and mods. Has mod powers.
Mod: can remove posts, block users, add/remove contributors
Contributor: in closed communities, an approved poster.
Guest: a poster in a public community and a commenter in a restricted community
Community Types
Public: anyone can post a topic
Restricted: only mods and approved members can post topics
Either type of community can be "followed" by any user.
Community parameters (editable by mods)
Admin settings
- type
- public
- open-comment: guests can comment but not post
- restricted: only approved members can post/comment
- payment_split: % of rewards which go to the community account. implement in 1.0, don't enforce until 1.1
- admins
Mod settings
- name: the name of this community (32 chars)
- about: short blurb about this community (512 chars)
- description: a blob of markdown to describe purpose, enumerate rules, etc. (5000 chars)
- language: primary language. en, es, ru, etc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3 ?)
- nsfw: if this community is 18+, UI automatically tags all posts nsfw
- bg_color: hex-encoded RGB value (e.g. EEDDCC)
- bg_color2: hex-encoded RGB value, if provided, creates a gradient
- comment_sort: RESERVED - default sort/display method for comments (e.g. votes, trending, age, forum)
- display: RESERVED - graphical layout in communities (version >1.0)
- flag_text: custom text for reporting content
Monetization of a community
What I believe will be the game changer is that there might be an incentive to monetize a community. For example, if you are able to create a thriving community of webdev, the owner of it could be able to make a % of the rewards on it.
Conclusion
If this is it, we can expect parabolic growth in the userbase of steemit. To me it has been the thing that truly keeps us from growing fast. There was way too many people competing for a single new/hot/trending sandbox.
Who's with me? Who think that it is the big surprise this week?