Well apart from leo that rewards native posts I wasn't suprised that the front ends aren't being used. I think that it would be better if they were recruiting outside steemit and if they showcased their internal promotional services that can only be accessed via their front ends.
Appics I'm pretty surprised about but I think its because its an app based front end though, if they can get their IOS app on the actual app store it could really drive up those numbers
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I think that it’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians but the idea is still a promising one! Most of us in here are the hard core steemians so we know about cross front ends, esteem should support tribes and communities in their next deploy too
I think that once The RC pool and openseed come out as well as SMTs it will give tribe owners so much more freedom to do what they want and go out and recruit without any limitations! Then it could really get interesting
In theory, the Tribes have individualized interfaces in order to allow a reader to slice the content available on the blockchain to just that topically related to the purpose of the Tribe. That would go along with content-appropriate presentation as well as an implicit form of content curation (in the classic sense).
In practice, Tribes generally are rooted in an interface which is exactly like Steemit.com because they use stock Condenser, and have absolutely nothing individualizing them in any real sense. They do manage to try and provide content which is at least somewhat related, for the most part, but that can be hit and miss. Which doesn't at all help sell the underlying idea of Tribes as communities.
Here is one of the underlying problems with the overall idea in the first place. Why, indeed, would you go to a specific website in order to slice out a community rather than be able to do that slice on one central location where you consume that content?
This is a very interesting question in light of what we had on the Utopian website. As much as I may have had philosophical and personal differences with the organization, the website itself was absolutely amazing in terms of being what should have been the prototype for the Tribe experience. It provided very specific content-related interface affordances. It actually helped drive a specific kind of engagement around open source projects. When that site disappeared with all of the tools and means of presentation that it had for that content, it was a severe loss.
As it stands, as far as I've seen, none of the Tribes provide as much support for the content they intend to specialize in as Utopian did without even mechanical support for an alternate pseudo-token.
APPICS has an essential advantage in being an interface provided by a single mobile application and specifically seeking an audience which isn't really overlapping with the court or traditional Steem blockchain community. The Steem blockchain is not anywhere near the core of their promotion, and as a result a good chunk of their recruitment not only occurs outside of Steemit but outside of the philosophical and cultural bounds of what has traditionally been a Steem blockchain user.
For good or ill.
Ultimately, my suspicion is that, for the most part, Tribe-specific websites will go the way of the dodo when SteemPeak integrates Hivemind Communities into the mainstream interface such that they become very easy to flip through and engage with. Very few standalone websites will be worthwhile because they just don't provide a sufficiently differentiated experience. APPICS probably will because of the inherent law can provided by mobile applications.
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That's always been an issue with online communities. Keeping the interactions on topic requires either a very focused and dedicated group of people who are involved in the community or an extremely energetic and attentive moderation team. And even allowing for both, topics wonder, communities engage in personal asides, and all the rest of the fun happens. It is, not put too fine a point on it, "quite hard."
My suspicion is that a number of Communities will be very interested in building a front end which allows them to keep new posts in a corral, not committed to the blockchain, until they can actually be okayed by a moderator. That wouldn't be a new mechanism; pretty much everything in this field has been done at one time or another. And we will see some reimplementations of things which have gone before, like trusted users who can post without going to the corral first, groups which by default have new users not go to the corral until they make a misstep, all the rest of the ways that mailing groups, newsgroups, and forums have found to deal with potential abuse or just misuse.
It might just be a side effect of the places I've been exposed, but I haven't seen a lot of Communities or Tribes talking about these kinds of mechanics or problems out in the open. Maybe those discussions are happening behind closed doors and I would certainly encourage them to happen, but I haven't seen them happening and that makes me a little worried.