The blockchain records every transaction and is immutable and the Steem chain holds all the text and edits but one thing it doesn't hold, is how we feel about it all. We can see the ebbs and flows from a content level but it is much harder to gauge what is happening at an emotional level, how are people affected emotionally by content or the prices when they are up or down?

Last month, @steemitblog posted a Hivemind update, the coming soon community features that have been on the cards for a 'while'.

When they suggested some features that would be possible, the very first one on the list was Reactions. This is something that I think is going to be a lot like the useless ones on Facebook but, I wonder what it would look like if we could actually get a picture of how people react to various items here, situations, comments and information. What would it look like compared to the other data points?

Accuracy of self-reported actions would be somewhat dubious however I think in time, it might be possible that people actually start reacting somewhat along the lines of how they actually feel. Perhaps through a serious of weighted emojis it would be possible to scrape the chain to reveal the mood of the entire hive and then get more granular.

@abh12345 simulated an alternate trending page the other day where he scrapped together the top performers that had the word "interesting" in the comments section. This is an interesting way to discover posts but not available easily. What would be discovered if there was an emotion-based trending page where it was sorted by reaction types? Would it be interesting also?

Of course, it sounds pretty gameable however, that is not the concern of this particular post. The current tagging system is limited and doesn't have a lot of utility for discovery unless using obscure tags. However, what happens if it is also combined with some kind of reactive score, perhaps even one that has a weighted reaction similar to stake.

For example, what if content that is reacted upon builds up some kind of emotional reputation score that give a weighted rating of trust in reaction. Kind of like having a trusted movie reviewer who you feel makes good decisions on movies. Those that react early on content that then goes on to get similar reactions from others builds an emotion trust score.

This wouldn't even need to be visible to have an affect as content could be pushed and pulled without anyone knowing who has a high score or not, including the people themselves. Of course, it is the blockchain so it would be possible to see however, hypothetically. This is just one idea that an interface might use to sort data and combined with whether stake also backed up the reaction, it would be much more accurate than something like imdb where popular gets votes, often without even seeing the movie.

Another interesting thing that is going to be somewhat visible is how various communities interact and the feelings they create upon the platform. There are going to be some that create a lot of positive reactions and others negative. this doesn't mean negative is actually harmful as it depends on the content itself. After all, a lot of happy reactions to a case of child abuse is likely to indicate something else entirely. This would also be another interesting metric to see the variation in groups voting on and reacting to similar content as it will give a more accurate read out if diverse groups felt similarly about the same article. This could be used to provide a confidence level rating.

Even more granular than groups though is the possibility to see individuals not only shift in their own reactions but, observe how they influence the system. See how their content and comments shift peoples emotional state and potentially, be able to track the emotional reactions to spin-off articles also. Possible through something like that over time, we could actually see who is a community builder and who isn't as the data could potentially show if it leads to positive growth, negative retraction or nothing.

I wonder if we were able to observe the knock-on effects of trending articles and bidbot voted content whether we would see them leading to positive growth. The reactive metric would be able to see what kinds of immediate effects an article has on the next few votes or, the next posted content.

For many, these kinds of reactions will seem useless but if utilized well, they could become a vital part of categorizing content and evaluating things like who gets delegations to build the community or who is overly rewarded for what affects they have on the community itself with a fair amount of confidence if this is combined with other factors like Reputation and voting weight as well as their own reaction trust scores.

I am not a technical person but the coming hardfork is meant to make it much easier to pull data from the blockchain and if used in combination with all of the community tools on offer in Hivemind, it could fundamentally change our view of Steem and the relationships within the system. Positive and Negative relationships. Not only will it change our view, it will give the world insight into what the other social platform have been doing for years already, priming us to pull more of our attention.

The more I think about just the factors possible with reactions, the more bullish I become about a bright Steem future. I am not only hoping that the smart people who pull the data can uncover a lot, but developers can get much more clever and start using these tools to maximize engagement and growth on the platform to facilitate a healthier community.

What other things do you see as possible with Hivemind?