I really love the idea of Threespeak, a viable youtube alternative, fully integrated into Hive, its workable permanence of videos hosted, the thriving community. It really is a blessing for the Hive ecosystem.
BUT, there are one or two things about Threespeak I just don't understand and that have continued to be an issue, making me hesitant about using it more regularly.
I feel these issues should be apparent to any- and everyone who uses the dapp but despite that the "issue" remains and so I want to learn why that is the case and what we can do to change it.
The Dreaded Threespeak Tag
It must be a unique situation in the world of social media and video hosting in particular. Whenever I use Threepeak to post a video the thing gets automatically posted into the "threespeak" community, meaning the first tag that appears on my post in my blog will carry the tag "Threespeak".
Why on Earth is this (still) the case?
You may think "well you are using that particular dapp so why wouldn't threespeak be the primary tag?" but if you think about it more deeply you can clearly see why that is an issue to take seriously.
Think for a moment how much tags mean to the hive ecosystem and how much primary tags mean to the average reader on peakd. Hell, primary tags are a new form of content discernment in a way. I could read the most fascinating title on a post but if the first tag goes into a direction I am clearly not interested in I will skip the post in my feed and keep on browsing without hesitation.
Titles like "I finally found the secret to unleash my full human brain potential!" may sound amazingly interesting to me, but when my eyes skim over the primary tag that says "coding" or "programming" I will probably skip the post in a heartbeat. Not because I couldn't maybe learn something new but because the post is more particular than the title initially suggested.
The primary tag helps me discern more about the content in the post to help me choose whether it is worth my time checking it out more closely. Primary tags are a way of sorting, of refining categories and making sense of clusters of information at first glance. They are vital to a thriving community of diverse interests and opinions about the world.
It's why we use tags in general, compartmentalizing fields of creativity and knowledge to make them palatable to a broad range of users with significantly differing fields of interest and competency.
And this is the jumping point (as we say in German) - the heart of the matter: Regardless what content I post on threespeak, what it is about, what my area of competency is and what my target audience is - all of it automatically gets lumped into the category "threespeak" and there is nothing I as a user can do about it. How disheartening.
Any post that carries "threespeak" as primary tag confuses content with the medium which is almost as bad as shooting the messenger.
The content and the medium are different, they are not the same and equating the two leads to loads of unnecessary confusion.
Imagine for a second every video on youtube had the tag "youtube" visible near its title. What would that accomplish? Nothing at all. People on youtube know that all content there is a part of youtube and to anyone else using or watching embedded youtube videos the tag wouldn't add anything meaningful at all because they can intuit that it is youtube content.
To the user the place of hosting is completely beside the point, what they want to know is if the video they are about to watch for its interesting title is in THEIR CATEGORY OF INTEREST. That is all.
Sure Threespeak is a hive dapp, and it may potentially help to let people know that the post they are going into has a video inside of it, but then Threespeak on peakd is already so amazingly integrated that it will let you play its videos inside your feed. This feature alone makes threespeak unbelievably powerful - you really made it easy for people to only click once and have the video start - not inside the post but from inside your feed! It's marvelous and addictive, it's perfect.
It's part of the reason why I really want to use threespeak so badly - precisely because it's so easy to deliver content to people on the go when they are merely browsing their feed.
BUT, as I eluded to, the missing CONTENT CATEGORY - the MISSING PRIMARY TAG is just such a turnoff that I find myself not wanting to use threespeak at all until it is fixed or I found a decent workaround that doesn't involve double posting.
Instead anywhere on hive where people post to threespeak all I can read is the tag "threespeak", regardless whether they are talking about makeup, politics, spirituality, music, pornography, smoking weed, astrophysics or Heidi Klum. Here is something unrelated:
No. Nonononono.
I just don't get it and I don't get why it is still the case. Maybe I'm too German to get it, lol.
You see, like many on Hive I would like my post to be pretty, streamlined, straight. I don't want to doctor posts after publishing more than absolutely necessary. Typos, formatting - alright, we all miss mistakes here and there when authoring a post.
But getting a video on Threespeak and then making an entirely new blogpost just to be able to choose a descriptive primary tag and then including the link to the threespeak post I just made simply does not feel streamlined. It messes up the clarity for my readers and viewers, it makes content double in quantity and it's just so hard to see why this should all be so difficult.
So, what can I offer in terms of suggestions? There are a few but I feel I either completely overlooked something, or noone is talking about this issue for some reason.
Here are some ideas:
Allow me to choose a primary tag for my threespeak content other than "threespeak".
This would satisfy my need for content clarity completely. I could easily alter the threespeak post later because the primary tag is already set right, and make cosmetic adjustments in any hive dapp like peakd. A little bit clumsy but totally awesome for content clarity. You would win me over with this one, and m,any other people too I'm sure.
Allow me to host on threespeak without having to post the video.
This would mean I could upload a video, get the embeddable link to it and then make a simple peakd post where I paste the link to said video. Everything embedded, threespeak video gets watched through my blog post and I have no doubling of content in my "all posts" section".
I am sure there are other ideas and I do not claim to have any idea about the technicals here at all. Maybe this has been discussed hundreds of times, it ought to have been...
I just see that as a user, the threespeak tag hurdle is frustrating beyond belief, and when I see how much good threespeak is doing for Hive, how awesome its prospect is and how promising its community and reliability, I feel this primary tag issue may be one of the biggest hurdles to more people using it, especially on a vast scale.
So in all respect and gratitude to 
There is a reason I choose the primary tag "#cryptocurrency-trading" for some posts and "#conscious-music" on others.
Ironically, this post of all the posts tagged "threespeak" on hive should ACTUALLY appear in the primary category "threespeak" because it is about threespeak and not of it. Get it?
Thanks for your ear!!!!
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