A Fresh Mobile Experience & Our Upcoming Community Expansion
TL;DR: Mobile browsing is better than ever. Tribes are getting more functionality and will be easier to discover. And finally, tribe leadership is getting more power to better organize, moderate, and spread/share the content posted in their communities.
Snapzu has a fresh new look on smartphones!
About a month ago we completed our mobile overhaul. It was a multi-month project and our main focus was to streamline nearly all of the available desktop functionality and optimize it for mobile. Since then we have been regularly applying incremental bug fixes as we continue developing the best possible mobile experience for our members.
Based on your feedback, we've made many considerable improvements over the past month, so a big thanks goes out to those who helped out... you know who you are!
If you're reading this on your phone, and haven't seen the re-vamped mobile layout as of yet, we urge you to check out the rest of the platform (but only after you finish reading the rest of this post!)
What is Snapzu? A quick recap.
As is completely natural in today's busy web, some of you may have forgotten what we are all about. Here's a quick recap if you're still interested to give our community voting platform another go. A lot has changed and many improvements were rolled out, and there are many additional updates on the way.
(Note: You can probably skip this part if you're an active member who is already familiar with our platform.)
On Snapzu, your profile is always evolving. With our unique XP system, you slowly build out your profile as you post, discuss, and engage with other members. You are encouraged to join user-run tribes, and follow other members, to take full advantage of your home feed that will keep you updated with all the newest content from the communities and people you care about most.
You can also create and manage your very own communities on the subjects you care about. You can grow your community by inviting friends, or even your audience (if you have a blog/website.) For a full list of tribes, be sure to check out the Tribe Index.
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What makes Snapzu different from other voting/community websites, ie. Reddit?
Your profile has a live Twitter-like "home feed" that shows you the most recent content from the communities you're a member of, the people you follow, and the content you save, and yes, it's fully customizable!
You can post content into more than one tribe (community) at a time, keeping re-posts at a minimum, and viewership at a maximum. Your posts will organically spread into dozens of relevant tribes as tribe leaders and moderators pick up on your content.
Instead of link/comment karma (yes, of the "karmawhoring" variety), you earn Experience Points (XP) for participation and Reputation (REP) as a percentage score based on how other users vote on your posts. The higher your REP, the more XP you earn making it worth while to post quality stuff.
Your content can be expanded with additional links from other members. Anyone can contribute by adding "related links" to your posts. These add value to the post and are voted on by other members, just like comments.
Each member has a limit on how many tribes they can operate based on their profile XP level. You won't find "power mods" on Snapzu.
Snapzu is invite only. All new members are provided with 3 invite codes to share with their friends if they choose to. More are unlocked when reaching higher XP levels.
Our 50/50 Partnership Program is a fantastic opportunity filled with tools and incentives to help you grow your tribes (if you're into that!) If you own/operate a blog or website, this program should not be missed as it can be an effective way to expand your revenues beyond those pesky ads. Check it out and decide for yourself.
Coming this summer!
The most exciting update planned this summer is a major overhaul to the way our communities are discovered, viewed, managed, and customized. Instead of feeling like glorified tags that members place content into, we have a number of really cool and innovative improvements planned that will drastically expand on the functionality of tribes. The new "mirroring" concept will give power back to community leaders by providing the right tools to better organize and grow their tribes inside and outside of Snapzu. You will soon be able to add your tribe to any relevant snap and it will appear just as if added to by that member themselves. Snaps will soon have the ability to spread way beyond the initial five tribes submitted to, completely removing the last remaining issue clashing with our popular"no-reposts" policy. The following upcoming changes, explained below, will make tribes feel significantly more like dedicated and individual communities, focusing on new features that will help with growth, moderation, and content management.
1. Mirrored post customization:
Tribe leadership will get the ability to customize the cover image, title, and introduction of a mirrored snap. This will give more control to tribe chiefs and moderators on how a mirrored snap appears within their tribe. Because every tribe has a different set of posting rules and etiquette, it's important for each community to be able to adjust the presentation of posted content and links.
2. Post presentation & URLs:
Any post that was mirrored by a tribe leader will be displayed with that particular tribe's theme (tribe flag, background, etc). This will help incoming visitors discover the rest of the tribe and it's content when viewing that post through the unique tribe based URL.
Here is an example of two URLs that lead to the same post. The first link is the original post with no reference to a tribe, while the second link is a link to the content that would be listed in the tribe, along with any exterior sharing functions.
Vanilla (Original) Link:
snapzu.com/USERNAME/SNAP-TITLE/Tribe Mirrored Link:
snapzu.com/USERNAME/SNAP-TITLE/TRIBE-TAG/A tribe-themed mirrored link will only be used when a user views a post via a tribe. If accessed from non-tribe related sources (such as the front page, feeds, saves, etc), the original snap will be shown in the regular format, as was always the case. This new approach is important to the health and relevance of our communities as tribes need a better way to be recognized for the content they post and share through social media buttons, embeddables, and RSS feeds. The main objective is to fuel tribe discovery and community growth, which is currently in need of some serious improvement.
3. Content discussion expansion:
There will soon be two discussion options for each and every snap. Members will be able to select/toggle which discussion they wish to participate in.
Dedicated Discussion: Every snap will soon have the option for a dedicated discussion based on the context of the tribe that mirrored it. This will allow members that discovered the post through a particular tribe to have an exclusive discussion without having to share the space with other (different) tribes that also mirror the post.
Global Discussion: Very much like it is now, essentially merging the comments from all tribe's "dedicated discussions" into one global space. This will be the default format shown from all sources linked from, except tribes.
An admin setting will also be provided for each member with a toggle to select which format to always show, meaning that you can leave things working the exact same way as they do now.
Who are we?
We are a small international team of passionate individuals that work on Snapzu during our spare time in an effort to improve on and expand the voting community concept. We are based in Vancouver, British Columbia, however a handful of us reside in Europe as well, so yes we telecommute and it's awesome!
We don't have a fancy office, or investors, and because of that we answer to no one. We follow our passion and use the feedback we receive from you, our valued members, to develop the best community experience possible. We have no intention of placing ads (even though we get “spammed” constantly about it), and we pay for (almost) everything out of pocket. We do accept donations (for hosting, and beer, and stuff) so if you're wanting to contribute, we definitely welcome that! For those of you who already have, thank you, we are very grateful for the support. hic!
Every time we post a blog update we will send you a transactional email notifying you about the new post. If you're not interested in getting these emails, please go into your profile settings and disable “email notifications”. We do however hope you're active enough that you will see our posts well before the email goes out!
Thanks for your time!
/ Team Snapzu
Join the Discussion
Great idea to allow all chiefs to add any post to their tribes. It will make curating content a lot easier I imagine. Time will tell I guess.
The mobile has been desperately needed. Thanks for the reminder, I'll check it out on my phone later if I have some free time.
Yeah last time I checked it wasn't that good, too much zooming and what not. It actually looks quite nice now. Thanks team snapzu.
Great! It means a snap posted in a tripe which members are not primarily English natives can have a discussion about it in their language without cluttering the general discussion with what others would consider gibberish!
For those of you interested in other languages than English here on Snapzu, check these tribes out :
- /t/NonEnglish - discussing the other languges problem on Snapzu
- /t/language - Everything language, linguistics and foreign language study related
- /t/LanguageCafe - A set back tribe about discussing other languages
- /t/LanguageLearning - A tribe for learning foreign languages
- /t/Linguistics - about the science of linguistic, which studies how language is formed and produced (how we talk, how we produce different sounds, and how the brain processes it)
Just a quick question on mirrored posts. If I find a post that is relevant to one of my trbes and I mirror it will the original poster get the XP points of the tribe likes it? I think ir os only fair if they do even though I snatched it and changed it a bit.
Technically, you're not actually snatching it, as their post remains the same on users feeds, the front page, their feed, or even when being viewed on other members "saves", etc. What you're doing is spreading it further by mirroring it into yet another tribe, and essentially helping the poster by giving their snap even more exposure which results in the post being listed higher on the front page, etc. By mirroring it, you change the look of the snap only for the tribe you're mirroring it into, and generally the changes will be contextually minor (maybe a different cover image, or a slightly edited title, or a longer intro).
So as you can see, the reward is getting much more exposure on the content they post because tribe chiefs and mods can now mirror any snap into their tribe, all while giving the user credit by having a link back to their profile, etc.
Awesome. Thanks for the explanation.
What a fantastic thing to come back to! I stepped away from Snapzu for a bit. A lot was going on in my life. But now I'd like to get back to reading the interesting things everyone posts here. This great mobile layout will help! It's also refreshing to see some of the same names still posting ~10 months later!
Welcome back!
Thanks! I'm happy to be back!!
I noticed the mobile layout a while ago I was wondering why no post about it. It looks and works really well BTW.
I am really liking the direction of this community. Good job/luck on the updates!
Great work as always!
Mobile has been great so far! I'm excited for the community updates however -- I have a feeling a lot of time was spent conceptualizing this.
Offices are usually just a waste of money. I find it hilarious when companies use like 20% of their (already limited) budgets on nice offices with fancy furniture in prime locations.
Any updates regarding the API? Do we have a time-frame?
I would like to know this as well.
At this point we are pouring all of our efforts into improving communities, but as soon as we launch the new update we will once again refocus our efforts to complete the API.
Long read but good news