Discovering good content on Hive with Veews

Veews, the new app by the CTP team, can transform the way authors and readers interact on Hive

I have recently started exploring Veews, and I could not be more excited about it. In this article, I will provide an overview of the app as well as my first impressions after using it for a few days.

What is Veews?

If you are an active member of Hive, chances are you already know what Veews is all about, but if you don't, here is a quick overview.

Veews is a content discovery tool for the Hive blockchain, which means that its main purpose is helping you find new content that may interest you.

But how is that different from going over the post feeds on the various frontends of Hive?

Well, the main difference is that Veews does not show random content. Instead, it is powered by artificial intelligence that will "learn" what kind of content you like and show more posts related to that; therefore, the more you use Veews, the more accurate its suggestions will be.

The Veews experience

The app is pretty straightforward, and there is only a little that you can or need to do right now, although I'm sure the team is working hard to bring more features.

If you need a guide, you should check this post to learn the basics but, in a nutshell, all you need to do is log in with you Hive account, pick some categories of your interest to get started and then "Start Veewing" and Veews will start showing you Hive posts that are related to your interests.

Veews works like any other frontend, meaning you can perform most of the actions you would normally do on Hive, such as commenting or upvoting a post. Still, a few actions are exclusive to Veews and are the core of its functionality.

On the top of the screen are 3 buttons: thumbs down, next and thumbs up.

The "thumbs" are your way of signalling to the AI that you like this post and want to see more content of this kind or that you don't like it and don't want to see other posts similar to this one. It's important to note that this is not at all related to Hive upvotes or downvotes; therefore, giving "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" has no impact on post rewards. That means it's completely fine to "thumbs down" a post, as the only thing you are doing is telling Veews to stop showing you that kind of content.

Is Veews replacing post feeds?

This is very personal, and I imagine some people altogether ditching their feeds and using Veews 100% of the time. To me, that is not the case.

I'm on LeoFinance most of the time, and I consider my LeoFinance feed very well curated and filtered, so I will still be checking it daily to find good content from my favourite authors. However, Veews will be a great way to discover good content by people I do not follow, and perhaps I would not have found otherwise, so I can see myself spending a lot of time on Veews as well. Not to mention that the more I use it, the more information the AI will have to suggest content that is more aligned with my interests.

Veews value proposition

I think it's pretty evident that the main value that Veews brings to Hive is helping readers find more quality content that they like and helping authors get their content to the right people, but I think there may be another effect that could be positive to Hive which is incentivizing the proper use of tags on posts.

Post-tagging on Hive is an odd thing. Post tags' main purpose is to classify a post's content, which enables similar posts to be grouped and better "distributed" to readers.

On Hive, however, tags also have another purpose: "token farming". There are many tribes on Hive that actively curate posts that have their tag on them, so it's very common for authors to use those tags on their posts to make their posts visible to some of those tribes and get their tokens as a reward on top of the HIVE they get from their posts.

That is not a problem, and it is an excellent way to improve the chances that content gets to readers that are interested in particular topics. The problem starts when authors use all tags available to farm extra tokens and none to indicate the main topics covered in their posts. I don't have any data to back this claim, but my gut feeling tells me that it doesn't help drive organic traffic to Hive and makes it harder for readers to find posts on the topics they are interested in.

While I don't know exactly how the AI behind Veews works, I imagine that tags are part of it. Therefore, as the app grows in popularity, authors will be encouraged to use tags how they are intended to. Now, I'm not against using tribe tags, and I do it myself on my posts. Still, most frontends allow at least 10 tags per post, so if authors use at least 3 or 5 to describe the content of their posts, there is still room for plenty of tribe tags.

That will benefit the Hive community as it will be much easier to find interesting content; it will help authors because their content will be more likely to reach readers interested in it. It will also benefit Hive because content with proper tags is more likely to show up on search engines and drive organic traffic to the blockchain.

Final thoughts

I have been using Veews for a short time, but I already see a lot of potentials. Let's be honest; there is a lot of great content on Hive, but there is also a lot of trash. It can be challenging to find the good stuff manually, so having an app that does the heavy lifting is a huge help.

I know that the team is working hard on making it even better, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Veews will look like some months down the road and also how the Hive community will be transformed once more users start adopting it.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta