Why Steemit needs a "Friends" list
Rumor is that sooner or later the people of the Steemit community will get to know each other. When that happens it might be important for people to categorize their social contacts in a way which is human friendly. In addition to this the "friend" tag could have a specific meaning to the blockchain and act as a social filtering mechanism for people who don't want to be contacted by anyone except for their friends. People on the friend list could be designated as the people who can make private contact without paying a tribute and this could act as spam control in an attention economy.
People tend to form cliques in a place like this. Steemit ultimately will become circles of friends, and friends of friends, but this information could also be useful at a blockchain level if certain information is only shared privately between friends, or friends or friends, and this could also be used in future broadcast features, future live chat or live stream features, and so on. Today we just have followers, and while this has some value in the business frame, it doesn't have much meaning in the personal frame.
Friends is distinct from followers
Followers probably don't really personally know the people they follow but like their content, while the people followed probably don't personally know who follows them other than they are fans of their content. This has value in terms of the kind of content to create in the future.
Friendship is a bit different. Friends might not really care much about the content from the position of fan, but might care about the person producing the content. Friends might want to support their friends content by voting up their friends and in my opinion this behavior should be allowed and encouraged. It builds community to allow friends to support friends, and the blockchain would reveal who our friends are based on statistics such as upvotes, private messages sent/received, total bandwidth spent communicating with, and so on.
Friendship is one of the most valuable things in life. Unfortunately it sometimes takes sad and painful times to be able to say the difference between a friend and someone who's just taking profit out of a relationship. Nice writing. Thanks :)
Thanks @dana-edwards, this is another realistic suggestion to accompany your selective channels idea from a few days ago. We're loving the developing community here on Steemit, and it does make sense to have a degree of organization regarding who we interact with. We certainly want to be able to support and encourage our friends while limiting contact with haters and drama queens, just like in real life!
This post has reactivated some questions that have been plaguing me of late. How does one create online friends without also sharing personally identifiable information? Wouldn't that sharing create a greater risk of being a victim of cybercrime?
I often think of being online as running through a minefield blindfolded - any stride in that run can be catastrophic. Perhaps that is a bit melodramatic, but, as I've talked to some of my peers about Steemit and the crypto environment in general, that fear is at the core of a negative attitude toward adoption.
Look forward to your thoughts.
Cheers.
Great suggestion.
For the time being there is another way to look up your supporters now.
I use steemvp.com and I did a visual guide for it.
💃 How to find out who are your best supporters on Steemit? 🐳
🌞 upvoting your lifetime dreams!
Supporters aren't friends though. You might not know some of your supporters.
Good point as you do not know them yet. Supporters could turn into friends as friendship often goes together with support.
Yes we are definitely all friends with benefits around here :)
Absolutely agree
@dana-edwards I look forward to this feature too, was only wishing I had it today actually. Nice.
Followed. Upvoted. <3
Let's do it!!
I agree with this completely.
Yes!