I find your article spot on, on so many levels.
I so agree that we are being compartmentalized. When we had regular antenna TV the whole country watched any of 3 channels. We were on the same page. Now, any of us can get so blind-sided by living in our own little universes. You are right, that this has got to change.
As far as filtering, lately I've been lamenting over lack of the same. For me, what I want to filter out is foreign language posts, maybe they have great content, but I can't comment on them, can't improve myself from them, are of no help to me. Also, I'd like to filter out content with grammar or spelling errors, but should be smart enough not to filter out science fiction stories with fictitious names and places and not filter out examples of computer code, etc. These kinds of filters should be the easiest ones to write. Add to that, filtering out posts with only one photo and no story, etc. You get it.
I'd love to write that one myself. I am a software developer. But I don't have the bandwidth for that learning curve.
Just my two cents, literally, I upvoted you and that's what my vote is worth.
Thanks. Glad you agree there's a need for filtering to change broadly, and that we can be pioneers here 😊
I think it's very reasonable to want to filter out languages you don't understand, I hadn't thought of using at as an example but it's probably the most basic and least controversial example there is, good thinking. Stepping up to grammar and spelling errors, that's a bit more difficult, but totally doable. I was experimenting with some modules before with gave a reading comprehension score and spelling checker, it's could be applied to that.
One thing I didn't mention, which is something that the devs would surely think about, is all the processing power that would be required to do add these filters. Steemit.com looks like it is struggling with basic services these last days I've been on it a little more, which is disappointing. But it would be huge extra processing power to process these filters.
Perhaps there could be a way to filter client side, on the user's browser? That way it's up to us if we want to "invest" our computing power in the processing overhead for this feature, and leaves the server more or less only at their current processing load.
That's quite interesting, that these filters would gobble up processing power. I'd have thought it to be a no brainer, especially on simple filters like i've described. I guess I didn't think that through.
There are alternate path's to the steem blockchain. I'm not familiar with most of them, but I know they are out there. Along that line, there is another thought I'd like to throw out, that is to have decentralized servers accessing the steem blockchain, developed by the community for either love of the community or for financial profit. Doing so should leave the guys at Steemit.com to do the development of their roadmap. Anyone else can develop their own web interface and see which the market likes best.
I've been thinking about these things independently over the last few months, it's that pesky learning curve and my personal bandwidth thing stopping me.
Anyone can write a server for the Steem blockchain, and there are two main alternates that I know of: busy.org and chainBB. Both are really good but they are not decentralized. However the fact that there are three main ways to access the blockchain using a web app of some kind is a kind of decentralization.
And there's nothing stopping anyone else from making a new one, except time and resources. 🙂