Streak discussions & daily art by leafo | Daily Art Club

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Daily Art Club

Make art every day, how long can you last?

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Streak discussions & daily art

leafoHost8 years ago (Edited 1 time)

Hello everyone,

I decided to work on Streak Club a bit this weekend. One idea that's been floating in the back of my head is having a discussion place for streaks. Streaks are effectively communities, and previously the only way to discuss anything was through comments on a submission. Streak hosts can now optionally turn on a community for their Streak. (When a host creates a new topic, everyone gets notified. That's why you got a red circle).

So why am I announcing Streak Club features in the Daily Art community? Daily Art was the reason why I created Streak Club. It's the biggest Streak on the site, and there are still people using it. I'm very happy for that, but I think that it has a lot more potential. I wanted to start this topic to talk about things that could be added to Streak Club to get the attention of old participants, and attract new people.

Here are some ideas I have:

Daily prompts Streak hosts could have a place where they could write up prompts for each day (or week). They could remain hidden until (or not) until the day arrives. Everyone could attempt to work around the prompt. Prompts could include things like themes, colors, mediums, etc.
Multiple streak hosts Right now only one person can host a Streak, and I'm the host of this Streak. I know there are many people that want to see Daily Art Streak stay interesting regardless of if I have time or not. After coding support for multiple hosts, we could elect people to help run it. If we have prompts then this could include writing prompts.
Personal streaks and streak templates Streaks are for motivation. If you want to learn something with Streak club then you'd be responsible for figuring out what you'd want to do each day or week. The problem with this is that most people are not motivated enough. There's a huge drop off rate. After someone joins they tend to submit once and give up, or they'll create a private Streak and abandon it. Combined with the prompt idea from above, I think it would be interesting to be able to start a new streak from a template, say a "Drawing basics" streak that has a prompt for you to work on a different technique each day. You could click start when you want and do the streak on your own time. I think this is an entirely new use-case, and could get many more people involved in the public streaks like Daily Art. A personl streak would have relaxed rules, and be private by default, but you could make it public and invite others like any other streak.
Nagging notifications I want to add some sort of nag that encourages people to post. I'm cautious to avoid spamming people, but I think some some of email reminder, especially after you initially join a streak, could boost engagement a lot. I only know I want to do this, I don't know any details yet.

If you have any ideas then I've love to hear them. Here are the problems I'm trying to solve:

When someone joins a streak, how do we make sure they keep coming back and they keep posting
How can we make more people aware of Streak Club, and encourage them to join Daily Art

Bonus: How to use this community

Now that we have this community, here are some idea for topics:

Drawing resources megadump - post links to stuff to learn from
Ad-hoc prompts - before we have official prompt support, we could organize things in the community manually
Links to related streaks - there are a lot of related drawing streaks going on, but people miss them. Did you know there was an inktober 2016 streak, and there's an upcoming paintvember streak?

Thanks for reading this very long topic!

BTW Streak Club is opensource: https://github.com/leafo/streak.club Tell me if you want to help work on it

s-ol8 years ago

love it!

about your unsolved questions:

To keep people coming back, I think an off-site notification channel for (opt-in I guess) nagging notifications would be something I like. Ideas for this would be serviceWorker notifications in modern browsers, email notifications (meh) or maybe automating @thestreakclub to tweet at a few people with a fun reminder (a bit like @indiewhipbot).

For the second part, a unified hashtag might be useful, when I do things I try to tag @thestreakclub but using a handle like a hashtag is a bit clumsy sometimes and people use it less I would imagine. Also I guess if you thought of a smart way to promo streak.club from itch.io via something like the itch jam that could work wonders (though streak.club probably fits artists best, and jammers are likely going to be programmers in majority).

Also - would you be up for a weekly loop streak again some time soon? I've been sporadically doing a few over the last weeks but streaking and non-solo is more fun, plus I desperately need some inspiration :D

leafoHost8 years ago

Daily art had the #dailyartstreak tag, but do you think all streak club posts should just have same tag? I think #streakclub is fine for that, some people have already used it in the past. A twitter bot could be interesting. The easiest implementation and most reliable is email so I'll probably do that first.

I'd like to do weekly loops again, it's just hard finding time to work on all these side projects :)

s-ol8 years ago (Edited 2 times)

It's a problem to decide on one general hashtag w/ volume vs seperate hashtags that are specific, I was thinking just write down #streakclub somewhere prominently so people know it's 'established' and add a tweet button / social media share widget?

and for the loops, if you do find the time go ahead and ping me on twitter ;)
Also maybe someone/I should post to r/gonwild and propose an OC month....

leafoHost8 years ago

I think doing something for /r/gonwild would be pretty cool, good way to get others involved. Do you want to host it? :)

s-ol8 years ago (Edited 2 times)

I'm not sure if you can see a streak draft by link, so I set it to hidden for now:

https://streak.club/s/818/weekly-loop-17

I thought about starting at New Years, so nobody would be busy with all the Christmas things coming up and it's a nice round start.
Anything to add to the description?
I don't really have any experience scheduling things like this, so let me know if there's any obvious issues or I should move it to a bit later to have some time to get the word out.

Maybe wait for reminder emails to be implemented? I have no idea what your project focus looks like atm and what an ETA on that would be.

Stephan8 years ago

It's so great to see you working more on it. I mean, even in it's current state I love it already, but I also think there's a lot more potential for it.

Streak templates like "Drawing Basics" would be very useful for many people. Curated this could be a major tool, but I also guess that it needs a certain level of proficiency and time commitment, and people having both of those are probably more interested in having people come to their own portals.

Maybe a random theme generator would be a neat helper for the Art people, where a combination of words like "figure - forest - cyan" should be enough for a starting point if someone is looking for ideas.
Getting a daily theme mailed could be very good for keeping people in the first days.

Regarding other streaks: I normally just visit the Daily Art page, look through the newest entries, look once at the notifications, post my image, leave. So the place to reach me and hint at other Streaks would probably be the notifications. Not spamming them, but every now and then mentioning some other Streak or feature of the site. Or having that info in the sidebar or header of every streak site.

leafoHost8 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I'll think of better ways to advertise new streaks. I'll probably post topics in here for the good stuff to notify everyone, but adding more links to them on the site definitely won't hurt.

For prompts, I'll probably make a topic soon to collect ideas. I want to start with them manually, but doing them randomly could be interesting.

Would you use prompts if they existed - all the time, sometimes, never?

Stephan8 years ago

Sometimes. I have enough art tasks of my own because of project work which I also post here, but one some days it would be nice to have an impulse from outside.

mckeeboards8 years ago

So many great ideas! I think notifications and prompts are great. It would be nice to get a summary of drawings or posts if you didn't post for a day or a week.

leafoHost8 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, I like you art so if you're coming back that's cool :)

When you mean a summary, do you mean like the top liked things the past week or something? I think right now most people use the follow feature, then check their feed. Sending out a digest email as part of a "Hey come back to the streak" plea could be interesting.

I've been thinking that some people get turned away from daily art when they land on the page and see most recent things instead of cool things. I was thinking maybe having something that bubbles top liked content on top, while still being mostly chronological. But I don't want to offend anyone by having their submissions be less visible than others.

mckeeboards8 years ago

I'm coming back!

Thanks for the compliment. I really liked doing it when I was staying on to of things :D

Your varied output of all the different things you are up to is pretty amazing

I think a digest email is a good solution for continuing engagement. Just a a nudge of what other people have been doing while you've been away. A day is probably too much but a week might be nice.

Yeah I would be conflicted about bubbling up stuff too. Maybe an alternate stream or feed for highlighting cool stuff but then again that may be discouraging to keeping up with things.

Lambitymoon7 years ago

Hello! I've been lurking on this site for a while and finally joined! And after being here for a little bit, I do have some suggestions:

I made a draft/hidden streak to see how things looked but I'm unable to delete it. I tried to leave it but it didn't do anything lol. It would be nice to delete streaks that either aren't going anywhere or you just changed your mind on.
I've seen on my friend Penbee's page that she's joined quite a few streaks! But it looks a wee bit long? I suggest a page where you show all completed/other current streaks and only feature current/recently completed streaks at least 2-5 at a time. (number of streaks shown optional?)
I tried to add a little HTML image on my test streak, but it didn't show up. Maybe add some "emojis" or make it so others could add little pictures in descriptions? Frankly it's not important since I'm fine with using just plain old emoticons. ;P
When I'm logged in, I'm unable to see the front page! Is there a way to make it so members could still look at the front page logged in?
Your "nagging notifications" suggestion could come in the form of little speech bubbles that appear somewhere under where the Dashboard button is. And of course old fashioned signal boosting on social media sites don't hurt either. :)

That's just some things that floated around in my mind. I look forward to seeing how this site evolves! ^__^

Stephan6 years ago

Just a small suggestion:
I think the "How do you feel about your entry" section could be removed. I personally don't use this at all and I have a feeling that many people uploading some work don't want to immediately judge upon it. They're probably just happy they finished something.

leafoHost6 years ago

Do you think the wording could be changed? The goal was to let people identify the works that they felt like they worked hard on or want to remember for later. I'm not sure if having an option for negative is helpful though.

I also wanted to maybe try to use this to find cool stuff to automatically feature on the homepage or something but I never really looked into how people were using it.

BLK MKT6 years ago

I end up using this for my own categorization, same as tags. I didnt notice it being surfaced to other people, is it currently like that?
I tend to think of it as "Today's work went well" "I have no strong feelings one way or another" and "Today was a problem for one reason or another".
The section would be more useful to me personally if I could look at a listing of things I rated one way or another, otherwise its a metric I'm not able to do any reflection on at a large scale.

leafoHost6 years ago (Edited 1 time)

I think this is what I intended. Right now we don't show the ratings you've given your own submissions to anyone else. I think I'd like to have:

A page where you can filter your own submissions by your rating
All submissions you were proud of get an icon for everyone to see, other ratings aren't shown

Stephan6 years ago

I think the wording is Ok. I just thought it was unused, but if people use it to categorize their own entries than that's of course a valid use case.

notApollogising6 years ago

I'm always happy when I finish something, and I think it's more about quantity instead of quality in this case, so I agree that it's a bit unnecessary. I like the idea, because it causes me to reflect on what I have done, yet it never ends up helping me. It could work, the execution is just a bit wrong, so I agree that if enough people want it gone it should either be removed or be optional/have a checkbox on your profile or something.

rhmoller6 years ago

I am manually cross posting my daily drawings here and on instagram. Do you think it would be possible to make some kind of integration between the two?

leafoHost6 years ago

Maybe, I've never looked into instagram's API before. Do you know of any other sites that do something similar?

Ashly4 years ago

Heya leafo, non-urgent heads up, there are no hearts to click next to posts on firefox, so it's only possible to like posts elsewhere.