The gaming tag has a problem. How can we fix it?
When I joined Steemit, the gaming tag was primarily articles about video gaming and game reviews. With the introduction of DLive, DTube, Steem Monsters and other games built on this platform, the gaming tag has become completely overtaken by lets plays, frequent 'new game starting' updates and posts about Steem Monsters.
This issue has bugged me for some time now, and I don't want to disparage any of those types of posts or posters, but what it has done has made it really hard to find gaming content that doesn't fall into the above categories. The obvious solution would be to post strictly video game content under a different tag, but those simply don't get the traffic that the gaming tag does. The 'videogames' tag has just 11 posts in the past day.
The way Steemit is currently structured, pretty much anything that can be considered a game gets lumped together under one tent, which is turning it into a big mess. This problem extends into any tag that isn't focused or well defined.
Will communities fix the problem?
I often hear people say that Steemit is in some ways a competitor to Reddit. We have tags that group similar content together, while Reddit uses sub-Reddits to create small focused communities with moderators to keep them on track. You have to post on-topic on Reddit, while I could post a picture of my refridgerator and tag it with cryptocurrency, gaming, steem, introduce yourself and sexy (I'm not saying my fridge is sexy; its just an example. I swear). The downvote system is supposed to prevent this, but the fear of pissing off the wrong person prevents people from using it.
That being said, the types of posts I mentioned are still gaming related, but the point stands. The tag system simply is no longer a good way to categorize content on Steemit. Imagine walking into a grocery store where the milk was in coolers in the cereal aisle, hot dog buns were on a rack by the meat coolers and the floss was next to the steaks.
That's what it feels like sometimes browsing the gaming tag.
Some groups have done a great job of creating communities and curation groups -- @archdruid, @opgaming and @steemgc are doing a great job of curating good gaming posts and creating communities that use Discord to organize themselves.
However, I think a formal solution from Steemit is what we really need. Sub-communities, like what has been the standard at Reddit, would keep content relevant and focused so its both easier to find the content you really want and to build a focal point for members with similar interests to create communities.
How would I suggest communities work?
If it were up to me, I'd create a moderator system that works similarly to how Steemit currently elects witnesses. Build a system for moderators, which is voted on by members of the individual communities. This would keep moderators honest and encourage them to keep each community clean, organized, fair and focused. The members would have the ability to vote out moderators they didn't like and put better ones in place.
For their time and effort, moderators would earn Steem rewards much like how Witnesses do now. They could downvote or remove posts that didn't follow the guidelines of the community without fear of retaliation from ticking off the wrong person.
This system has proven to work very well at Reddit and I don't see why it wouldn't work here as well, if implemented carefully.
What do you think? Is the gaming (or other) subs filled with too much noise to be useful? I'd like to hear your thoughts on the issue and possible solutions to the problem.
A similar topic has come up in other groups as well. Most notably the writing groups were many people have decided that the fiction tag can be used for just about anything.
I have read that there are fixes (hivemind) being considered and worked on which might address your issues to some extent.
I agree that having more granular control over where the posts go would be a HUGE step forward in usability. I would take it a step further and have a place where users can hide things based on certain tags. Or at least place them in "circles" like G+ did. That way my feed isn't filled with the twenty steemhunt, or one line posts from busy, but the content isn't censored per-say, just not out in front.
I'm curious to see what they come up with. Plenty of people have pointed out the shortcomings of the tag system and it seems to be getting worse.
The issue is the tag system just sucks. People go where the money is aka the big gaming tag. Even if there game they are playing is let’s say is a ARPG or the game names itself they don’t tend to use those tags since most people don’t go looking in those tags. People are searching purely by tag and not context of what they are looking for since that just not an option.
We are also on a 7 day cycle and anything after a couple of days things are just lost in the void. Unless you have accesses to external tools and/or access to sql database/other nodes to run your own quarries.
I have an example I used over the weekend. In a 72 hour window among the 20+ tags I check for gaming content there was over 1,150 posts.
For many is if you are writing anything “gaming related” and are not using the gaming tag most people are going miss out on that. Now I’m not most people and there an “ok” chance even when you are not using gaming I’ll still find posts I want to find. However there are an endless amount of tags anyone could use that I more than could miss out.
Even in very niche tags like #tabletop-rpg people still don’t always agree on what should or should not be in there. Also most of Steemit has no idea about that tag in the first place. Even in our own community tag we get spammer in there from time to time just because some blogs in there get nice up votes. This is always going be the issue everyone has their own “opinion” on what should or should not be posted in a particular tag.
So your options are to keep doing what you are doing using “gaming,” and include the smaller tags to get noticed more when people know to look for them. Run, manage, and reward a community which is very time consuming and requires some ability to reward posts to the point they want to share content with that community which for now is mostly done via discord.
Archdruid for instance does not require people to share content to our discord I have other methods of finding content. Just some stuff like Video content suffer the most as I have to manually go thought each video and watch them. Even when I set aside hours a day to watch video I rarely find anything since they have videos on other sites with no connection to Steemit that I can find (having there steemit profile on that site listed). I'll have to go look for twitter, facebook, Instagram, twitch, youtube, and other accounts trying find proof they are on Steemit. So I can only assume its stolen content unless i'm going start spamming all day long asking them to include their steemit link on the video I found off the site that is the same.
When people can make whatever tags they want, that content will never get discovered organically unless its piggybacking off a popular tag, therefore smaller tags will essentially always be irrelevant until something changes.
I agree with your assessment that the tag system sucks. It may have worked fine when Steemit was in its infancy, but there's too much content now for it to work. Like you said, nobody agrees on what should or shouldn't be under gaming, so you'll find anything even tangentically related to gaming gets lumped in there.
I can't imagine how frustrating it is to sift through video content trying to decipher if its not only relevant, but not something reposted or simply ripped off from another platform.
But its wonderful that you guys do such a great job working with what you have to work with to curate good gaming content and build a community. Thanks for everything you do!
I think "gaming" is too generic. Perhaps "videogames" or "videogaming" and/or "pcgaming" would be better choices for posts in that category. Personally, I use retrogaming all the time in addition to gaming but there aren't a lot of posts with that tag.
I counted 8 posts tagged 'retrogaming' since yesterday. Its easy to see how those are getting buried under the general gaming tag and hard to find if you don't know about the retrogaming tag.
I agree, the gaming tag has become cluttered with anything and everything related to gaming. Probably because it's too generic but also because there is no sub-categorization or moderation.
Whether it's video, audio, written or just gaming adjacent topics it all gets buried by everything you may not want to see. New and interesting content ends up becoming difficult to find.
Heck, even being able to filter on multiple tags at once would help a lot! E.g. "Gaming + Review" or "Gaming + Video"
Although curation communities based around specific topics are a great way to discover great content related to it. And they're a great way to interface with the people producing the content. I do think it's a problem that we have to rely on systems like Discord, that are wholly outside of Steemit, to organize this type of stuff!
If you have the right tools and access you can run quarries like that from my understanding. I simply do not myself and I'm not willing to pay either. Even with my external tools that I use for them to keep costs low they have to limit certain features like that. Where I am only able to say look for anything with the follow tags and not this tag + this tag. While I can search body text of posts that normally times out as it takes to long as that tool has limited resources and is used by a bunch of curators.
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I'll use the "videogames" tag on my next video and see how it does.