A few days ago I talked about the necessity of enhancements at the user interfaces level, to improve engagement and as a consequence, curation. I was proposing in that post (and still am), that those enhancements be included in all major user interfaces that people use on Steem.
In the meantime, I found out about a piece of jewel. It is a new DApp, so a new user interface, also based on the code of Busy, like many others we have in the ecosystem.
Steeve is its name, apparently a combination of Stee[m sie]ve.
Steeve has been built by "a team of AI enthusiasts", as they describe themselves, ,
and
, "who want to leverage the technology for improving the user experience here on Steem blockchain".
It isn't the first attempt to use AI to improve Steem. I reported about the previous one, but Steeve seems to be the first truly usable interface for Steemians, which is both very new and also actively developed.
So, I have been using Steeve since yesterday for all my Steem activities, except wallet-related and posting. That involved checking out my feed quite often to have the feel of the new DApp, curating and commenting.
My new AI enhanced feed looks fantastic!
I discovered stories and authors I had no idea about. And all because the AI algorithm analyzed my past follows, upvotes and comments. I'm not sure how Google Analytics will play a role in this algorithm, but in a way, knowing that you open a post but don't interact with it is a good indicator too.
How is the feed at Steeve different from my classic feed? The AI enhanced feed has one normal feed entry followed by one recommendation by the AI, the next feed entry followed by the next AI recommendation and so on. The new recommendations can be refreshing, because they can be from a relatively different domain than what you chose to add on your feed, but still very good content (usually nothing very new from what I've seen).
Another interesting addition is the "Read Next" recommendations section, at the end of every post. I'm not sure how these posts are picked, "popularity among other users" seems a little broad. Are they popular to users who also read the post where the recommendation is being shown? Or within one of the same categories? Or in general?
One more thing the developers want to test out with Steeve, is showing on Trending pages, when searching within certain tags, the amount of upvotes that don't seem to be associated with bidbots and their voting trails. Read more here.
Something you might be familiar with from Busy, is bookmarking posts you want to remember. You can do that on Steeve too. But what I haven't seen on any other DApp yet, is the possibility to define your own custom tags, so you can easily check them out if they are not trending among the general user base.
Steeve is still very young, and still missing some features older DApps have. But it has its own AI enhancements which I'm sure compensate for now.
I believe other UI developers will think seriously about implementing their own AI enhancements in the future. They're making an impact, in my opinion.
This space is likely to get quite competitive at the DApp level. Interesting times to be witnessing, for so many reasons!
You can read more about Steeve App recent updates from their post.
I reused the image from the above post, it looked better than my own screenshot.