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The (current) problem with SenseChat, and others

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Clark Everetts
@clarkeveretts
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6 min read

SenseChat channels suffer the same problem I've seen in so many projects for years, but I have hope for it.

What is it?

SenseChat app is, per the website, is "A new messenger built to communicate, organize, and reward your communities and friends," offering:

  • Real People, to help "limit scams/spam, and spot fake accounts"
  • Secure communications with "just you and your friends, chatting safely in encrypted groups"
  • Token Rewards, allowing people to earn SENSE token by "inviting friends, participating in conversations, and being active" (Sound familiar, people of Hive?)
  • End-to-end Encryption, so "only conversation members can read your messages"
  • Privacy First, "Your data will NEVER be shared or sold to a 3rd party in any way"
  • Multilanguage, "to make sure everyone can use our application"
  • And, "SENSE lets you promote content, reward contributors, secure the network and prevent bots and spam"

SenseChat CEO Crystal Rose is well-known to the blockchain and cryptocurrency community, as is her husband Brock Pierce.

This all sounds great!

Early days for me

I finally managed to get the preview release of the app installed on my phone. I signed up for waitlist from a referral link last September, if memory serves, and took steps to boost my place in line, to no avail. It was as if I were starting over each time. A bit confusing. Finally, an email from them offering beta test installation did the trick.

The onboarding of a new user to Sense Chat is what one would expect from many blockchain/crypto-based applications: it could stand improvement. However, the team behind SenseChat actively seeks user feedback, and make asking questions and providing feedback easy to do, both within the app itself and by email. So, I really have no complaints there. Any responsible person thinking about installing any app on their phone should avail themselves of the product's web site before doing so.

I've staked a few channels, posted a few messages, replied a few times, looking to be "vouched for," just generally interacting.

Freedom and Choice

My focus today is not onboarding new users, but on a different problem, one common to many projects and platforms. We naturally want freedom, and one measure of our freedom is our ability to choose. That's a good thing, but what happens when we have too much to choose from? Is it possible to be too free to make too many choices available? I'm not advocating censoring community/channel creators, but there is a practical problem.

The various interfaces to Hive make it easy to find communities of interest. See https://peakd.com/communities and https://hive.blog/communities, for example. There are interfaces for direct access to specific communities, like LeoFinance and STEMSocial, but for finding new communities, you've got options. Options for finding options; how's that? :-) But they are good, usable options.

SenseChat has a list of channels in the app, and you can use search terms to narrow down the list of channels containing those terms. I could have missed it, but I see no place to easily browse all existing channels and see descriptions of them. That's very likely already on the feature request list. I'm going to do my part and ask for it.

Here's why: people have gone on a channel creation binge, and it's led to a problem I reiterate is not limited to SenseChat.

The Problem

The programmers in the audience will appreciate what a plethora of choice can impose. Consider the number of available Node.js packages available on the npm registry, or PHP Composer packages on Packagist. If I'm looking at the npm and Packagist info correctly, there are nearly two million Node.js packages, and 300,000 Composer packages. Tongue in cheek, it feels like there are more Javascript frameworks than both of those numbers combined.

Imagine how many libraries exist for Java, Go, C++, Python, etc. That's a lot of functionality out there, a lot of choice, a lot of freedom, a lot of contributions to those ecosystems.

It also results in a lot of redundancy and a wide range in quality and utility. I've found some lesser-known PHP packages with higher quality than lower-quality packages having much greater usage, even some packages that are essentially ignored by the main developers, but which remain high in recent download stats. I recall a similar problem when Zend Framework introduced modules. Too much "not-invented-here*" syndrome, resulting in a ton of replicated effort to build modules written for each of the development frameworks, so everybody could stay inside their silos, and not truly benfit from leveraging the work of others. (In my humble opinion.)

How does a developer find a well-maintained, well-tested, high-quality library, to use in a mission-critical program, that that program can rely upon as the library is maintained over time? Popularity does not equate to quality or true benefit, as we can see with centralized vs. decentralized social media applications.

Channels, channels, everywhere!

Returning to SenseChat, if you're interested in, say EOS, the app currently has 18 channels available to you, ranging from 0 to 196 members, with a range of 0 to 20570 SENSE tokens (staked? used to pump posts or replies? I dunno yet.) The channel with the most members and SENSE tokens primarily contains spammy link-drop messages. Ugh!

Granted, it's still early days for usage, but there are, for another example, 16 channels with "Defi" in the title, some whose names differ by only one letter. Pleasantly surprising, there are only four channels with the word "giveaway" in the name. How to assess which channels to join? It's important, because you have to stake 10 SENSE in order to join a channel. This sounds dumb, and maybe I am, but I don't yet see a way to "unstake" and leave a channel. So, I'd like to know what I'm getting into before I join.

With no descriptions or visibility into the channels themselves prior to joining, I don't know if I should join or not. The result is I haven't joined many channels, and the experience is nothing like reading Hive content.

I think SenseChat channels are listed in the app from greatest to least amount of SENSE associated with the channels. I suppose people tend to join the channels seeded with more SENSE tokens. It doesn't necessarily follow that those channels are good ones. If listed in order of SENSE, it means a bit less scrolling to find channels that people seem to be interested in. But I still don't know what's in the channels to know if their worth my time, and there seem to be hundreds of channels. You have to scroll through the list, with five listed per screen, to get through them all. I haven't managed to do that.

The Solution

There are arguably too many Hive Communities, but the marketplace has taken care of the problem of deciding which to join and particpate in. The marketplace of SenseChat participants will do the same, eventually. Both Hive and SenseChat represent marketplaces of ideas, but I see a major difference between those markets at this point: Hive participants have the necessary visibility into the marketplace of communities that SenseChat participants do not.

Please note this is a critique on the current state of affairs, and in no way is criticism of the people behind SenseChat, the developers, or (most) of the participants. This is my observation, and though I feel strongly enough about it to set my thoughts down here, because I want microblogging on Hive to succeed, too, I know my observations are limited by my ability to observe. That is, I may be missing something obvious. It's happened before! I welcome any corrections anyone might have.

A little bit of information can go a long way toward helping a market participant make a decision. In financial markets or in deciding which of an increasing number of attention-seeking platforms for connecting socially deserve our time, we apply what information we have available to decide where and how to act.

Those markets that provide less friction for people to obtain that information will do better than markets that don't. I look forward to seeing how SenseChat solves the problem I perceive, and I really look forward to seeing how LeoFinance microblogging works out!

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta