The all-in-one social platform you haven’t seen before

Update 20th of September

As promised, we’re back with another update! This week we’re including some tangible changes related to the UI/UX, character limits and membership pricing,

Video view

You can now choose between two main layout styles in Settings: “Social view” and “Video view”. The social view is largely what you’re used to now. The video view serves every post in a thumbnail style, including text posts. This mode looks more like YouTube and might be more familiar with some users. The video view allows, the Home, Recommended and Explore feeds to all serve posts in a scalable thumbnail grid. Similarly, the landing page on profiles (All posts) serves the content in a thumbnail grid.

Posting overlay

The “What’s on your mind?” section to create posts has been turned into a full screen overlay. This will allow us to add more features (for example related to writing blog articles) without space constraints.

No more character limit for paid memberships

The character limits have been updated from 240 to 480 characters for unverified and verified users. Plus members and above do not have a character limit anymore. Enjoy, but write responsibly! ;)

Membership pricing

In an ongoing effort, we’ve added some minor changes to the pricing calculations.

If you were unaware, the XP points that you earn on the platform apply a discount to the paid memberships. You earn XP through activity and engagement, and this discount is a reflection and acknowledgment of the personal value you put into the platform. If you’re a first-time buyers or want to upgrade your membership to a higher tier, you keep your XP for the next billing cycle. When you renew your existing membership, your XP resets. It is an incentive to get you started on the front end and keep you motivated to stay active once you’ve established a presence.

The pricing structure is something that we continue to work on. After all, it is a pillar of our revenue streams. In this update, we’ve included an additional credit discount for upgrades. The current billing cycle is 90 days. If you’d like to upgrade before that time, the remaining days will act as credit based on the original paid amount (e.g. 45 days credit over $10 will apply a $5 discount to upgrade).

In upcoming updates, we are looking into a sliding scale pricing structure starting at 30 days instead 90, with additional discounts if you buy 6 or 12 months at once.

Note: character limit change not included in this picture

Search optimizations

We are always quietly tweaking the search recommendations and suggestions to improve discoverability of posts and profiles. In a previous update, we mentioned improvements to the sidebar results, and we’ve since improved it a little more.

In the next update, we are adding improvements to the ranking algorithms (notably Trending, Rising and Controversial). The existing algorithms currently does not provide accurate results. We’ve mapped out a much improved method of determining trending and rising posts based on moving averages and statistical analysis. The goal is to avoid that only large channels can reach the trending tab because they get a lot of views by default. Each profile should have a fair chance to go trending if their post performs over several weighted means. We’re excited to tell you more about it once the algorithms are in place.

Changelog

Last but not least, the team solved around 90 tickets reported by the community. If you find any bugs, as always describe it in a post with #bugreport and we will take care of it.

You can find the changelog here: https://bittubers.com/changelog

Growth

We appreciate the involvement of our community helping us shape the platform. There is much more great stuff coming. We’re only three months in since the public release and we are happy to see its adoption. We are now at 12600 users (!) and steadily rising. Check out more adoption stats here:

https://bittubestats.com/dashboard/user/bittubers/adoption

Content migration from bit.tube to BitTubers

Lastly, we are on the final stage of making the content import available from the legacy platform to BitTubers. The core differences between the two platforms (IPFS vs WebTorrent+Cloud) create challenges for such a process. We expect to integrate the option in two weeks.

Thanks again for reading. Have a great weekend!

Your BitTube team