Some thoughts on why we need to fix the cross-posting function

This isn't meant to pressure @asgarth as he knows I've brought this up for him a few times, I'm just going to highlight some things on why I think this would drastically help a lot of engagement, retention and discoverability on Hive and primarily the front-ends that use this feature (@peakd and hive.blog as far as I know).

Not only was the cross-posting feature a big success on Reddit when it was first implemented but it showed why it was needed considering the way Reddit works with subreddits which is similar to what we have here on Hive; communities. The main difference between subreddits and communities is that subreddit usernames are "squattable", i.e. someone can quickly create r/hiveblockchain (which happened) and just hold onto the subreddit while pretending to do minor things but never letting someone actually interested in growing it take part. On Hive this can't really happen because the hive "accounts" that are created to represent a community only have ID numbers and the names can be changed, you notice this when you go to a certain community it'll show the hive-####### in the link rather than the "Cats are assholes" community name. Another big difference is of course that Hive communities are immutable, while Reddit could just deem the owner of r/hive to be too inactive, or not belong there cause Hive's CEO contacted Reddit admins and wants the subreddit which Reddit would gladly kick the original creator of the subreddit for. (I've done this myself back when r/steemit was dead cause @ned the dumbass had forgotten his login details and I had to contact Reddit admins letting them know to invite other mods) On Hive on the other hand it's "your keys, your community", but the non-squattable nature is what gives the community (the people) the power to switch from "Cats are assholes" to "Cats are real assholes" if they don't like the way the previous community is run or if the owner does something malicious in the eyes of the subscribers.

The small issue with this is that it makes community discoverability not as easy in my opinion, for one, you can't easily link to said community when talking to someone or quickly wanting to share it on #web2. Not many are going to remember the 6 numbers associated with your community, I honestly don't even remember OCD's #'s. While reddit is famous for people being all "just visit r/aww if you're feeling down" and since most people are aware of reddit they'd know that all they need to do is add r/aww after reddit.com/. On Reddit you can also easily generate links to subreddits in the comments by just writing out /r/aww to make it clickable which isn't possible on hive, not even with the ID. While that part could be fixed at some point and this post isn't really about that, just thought I'd mentioned that would also be important to fix which I'm sure would be easy for most front-ends, especially pioneers like @peakd and then have the others copy the code to make it universal on most. Let's instead talk about cross-posting.

Source

Cross-posting is quite unique on Hive, what it does in a nutshell is generate a new post on the blockchain layer where it pretty much just states "This is a cross-post of (post link)", but the front-ends edit the post's content out to preview the full post, which community it was originally posted in and if you were to upvote it it would upvote the original post or "refresh" you onto the original one so you can cast your vote. To avoid spam/abuse, which many early on loved to do when this feature was introduced, this "post" that's a cross-post of the original, thus a copy on the blockchain level, has it's rewards "declined".

Now here's where the major issue is with the cross-posted post having rewards "declined" rather than declining rewards in different ways that have gotten a lot more popular over the years for obvious reasons. If I were to upvote a cross-post itself that has rewards declined, it means that not only will the author not earn any post rewards for the cross-post (which works as intended), but the curator will also have their returns removed which causes a lot of issues and stigma towards cross-posts. Doing it every now and then is fine, of course, not a big deal to lose a little bit of APR here and there, but if you want to use the cross-posting feature more often you're going to quickly shoo away any autovoters or supporters you've gained over the years cause they'd be noticing how say one or two thirds of their votes on your posts are returning no curation rewards.

The small change that'd need to be placed would be to send rewards of the cross-posts through beneficiaries to @hive.fund/@null rather than "declining", this gives curators still returns, I highly doubt there's instances where this could be abused, at least I can't come up with any. What this opens up is that not only can authors now, both new and already established ones cross-post freely, but it also allows other accounts to cross-post posts of other authors which is something I know we at @ocd would appreciate to be able to at the very least. We've been trying to ask authors posting into the OCD community for a very long time now where they could post instead in more appropriate communities and with this it would allow the @ocd accounts themselves to cross-post their posts into new communities without ocd curators losing out on autovoters/supporters for simply declining rewards on the cross-post when trying to bring more traffic to the post they cross-posted.

I've also been in some talks with @anomadsoul lately about some things that have been bothering me, for instance communities like @leofinance not enabling posting into different communities from their front-end if the post in question may be more about say gaming rather than finance. While we've gone into this quite a lot and there's reasons as to why or why not from both sides, we both agreed that cross-posting would help this.

As a simple example, if I were to post about World of Warcraft and in part mention the auction house and gold economy in the post I'd feel like this would be something of interest to finance subscribers, but posting it solely to c/leofinance would mean that the main part of the post and possibly interested new readers wouldn't be able to find it because they've subscribed to many gaming communities but aren't interested in finance. While I'd still get some engagement from my followers looking into their feeds, or those subscribed to both gaming and finance communities seeing my post in their communities feeds, or if the post were to trend those looking at the trending list. The users, often times newer ones or returning users who are only subscribed to gaming communities, not following me, not checking trending, would never be able to read a post they would've wanted to.

There's many examples I believe where a healthy cross-posting usage would benefit the community as a whole. I remember a few months ago I was searching for "hive blockchain" on youtube, after shifting through that dumb mining company and finding YouTubers talking about our actual blockchain. I find through their channel what their Hive username is and when I get here I noticed that they've been posting quite often, for a while, quite decent posts too, but the problem is that they had been posting solely onto a "anything goes" community that is so massive it seemed his posts were just hidden in the masses, a.k.a. firehose effect overshadowed his content from readers. Unfortunately this Youtuber who had a decent amount of subscribers had received close to no engagement, no followers and no curation on his posts and shortly after had just given up which really sucks to see.

With a healthy cross-posting activity we could create a ton of new initiatives to go out and look for authors and posts like these, not just within our own community where we try and ask them to post in more appropriate communities so they'd find their "home", the subscribers and consumers interested in what they post about. It could become the norm for any stakeholder that has active followers/following to gladly cross-post other people's posts onto other communities they think it would fit in.

Of course some communities may be against cross-posts, and that's fine. Of course some users would also attempt to spam cross-posts onto any and all community they think it would fit into, maybe some communities there's no way it would even. Luckily we have the tools to deal with this, communities can mute specific posts, cross-posts and eventually even authors from showing up on the community feeds if abused.

Lastly the biggest reason why cross-posting is important to be used often is discoverability, not just for the authors as mentioned above but also for communities. This is something that has been one of the best use-cases I've found for cross-posts on Reddit as it has introduced me to so many different subreddits I would've never been able to stumble upon on my own or at times even be able to search for if I knew I was looking for them due to their names being somewhat random at times compared to what they're about. This is again not the case on Hive with the community names but it wouldn't hurt to make new, active, well-ran communities easier to be discovered through cross-posts (and in the future hopefully also easier to be linked in comments/posts)

Anyway, if you read this far I'd appreciate your time and thoughts on the matter, I know it kind of seems like an obvious change with no downside that I can think of but I think it's important to highlight the pros of this change.