Enhanced Social Features#126

It is hard to build a real conversation by simply commenting on individual photos. If this is to become a ‘community’, I think we need something more. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but some ideas:

1) Allow people to create groups, so they can discuss photography in that smaller, private group
2) Create community-wide discussion forums on different topics, e.g. everyone that wants to learn more about landscape photography or discuss their love of shadows, or a Q/A area
3) Allow photographers to create ‘posts’ that mix in with their photos, where they can write a little bit about their photography in general (almost like a blog), so you can learn a bit more about a photographer other than just their photos.

At the moment, Glass just seems a bit empty/loney and there isn’t really anything at this stage to make the app/community feel alive and sticky.

Stu

The photos themselves are what keeps me coming back. I know it is tempting to add the kinds of features we see in other apps but we know how badly that can turn out. There is a value in keeping the app calm. I came back to glass because it is quieter than other social media. Beware adding noise for the sake of engagement.

The first and easiest thing must be a DM-function thou. So two people can have a chat about what not in private, or am I wrong. It feels dumb to talk about >insert random topic< on a photo of a horse. :)

I would also love community groups. When I heard this app described as the modern Flickr, I thought immediately of the photo groups from the mid 2000s that were so lovely to be a part of. I really think this community needs a group feature so that we can see photos by topic and not just by photographer

Has this improved in the 9 months this post exists?
I’m new here and while the subscribtion is on trial I find it hard to stick around. Photography is good, but practically every good photographer on here has a website or an instagram page. You can see the same photos on there.

If community is what you’re building, there should be features that support it, like the OP mentioned: Groups, maybe a ‘guestbook’ on your page where people could leave comments and questions about your photography in general, not under a specific photo.

Hope to see it grow!

I’m on trial, and here in July 2022 the pickings are pretty slim image wise, there are few images and engagement seems sparse and superficial. One can have a “calm” environment that can also be deep. Writing about photography is as old as photography itself.

My greatest interest is photobooks – indeed, I teach a university course in just that – and it would be nice to instead of just post a pretty photo or such, to have a way to put up a series of photos that hang together and give a larger, different experience than just a feed of shots.

The problem with groups on Flickr is that it’s too easy to create them and they become esoteric and gamified to try to beat the algorithms for “exposure”. If we’re to have an emphasis on discussion, we need to be very slow in splitting into categories so we don’t lose engagement.

I was under the impression that Glass exists to fight back against the ‘engagement at all costs’ approach of other platforms. Because it’s a paid community, engagement shouldn’t be the main consideration in my opinion. It should be about quality of conversation and ability to find like-minded individuals in a civilized and organized manner. Aka what Flickr was in the early 00’s :)

Perhaps some form of DM/wall system on people’s profile? Where they could choose to engage publicly or privately with other users. There’s a reason every single successful social media site/platform/app had/has ways for people to communicate with each other. Scrolling photos is nice, but having no way to chat outside of an unthreaded comment section kinda makes it like you’re separated from fellow artists, just looking at photos behind Glass.

I like this idea. I would like to discuss topics like “tips on landscape photography”, “tips on drone photography”, etc. with people from this community. Having a forum space would be great for that purpose.

I like Glass for its simplicity and the fact that the photos speak for themselves. Groups/forums/etc are noise in my opinion.