Guest post from sponsor Trove Collective.
It’s Spring and everything is blooming – especially great ideas! Today we want to share our exciting new platform, Trove Collective, designed for you to collect and build content on all the topics that matter most to you. A place where you can curate your passions with less distractions. Trove is a social sharing platform focused on community-oriented engagement and discovery. We are committed to chartering a future of more authentic peer-to-peer “social blogging”. Trove is a growing community of creators, storytellers, chefs, adventurers, and explorers who showcase their knowledge and pursuits in the spirit of mutual empowerment and inspiration.
Check out the platform, and if you want to give it a try, we are welcoming 200 new users to our iOS app experience using the code TRVE31, completely FREE.
As you explore and navigate (and hopefully love) the Trove app, you may notice the following elements which were at the forefront of our platform design, and how we wanted to set it apart from existing platforms:
- Multimedia Content Creation (and Curation): Trove helps you organize your various areas of expertise/interest into separate collections. Within each collection, you can still focus on the written word, but also add user-friendly links to music, books, google maps, youtube (and more) to perfectly customize your story
- Evergreen, Ever-evolving: Trove is built to encourage you to come back to your posts (we call them Kernels) and update them as you learn new things or have more to contribute on that topic. It’s a work-in-progress (ya know, like life)
- Community at its Core: Trove makes it easy for your communities to subscribe to your specific Collections, save content they love, and discover other content that inspires them. It’s a more structured and focused way for people to discover your content.
- [Future state] Monetization on Quality: We are in the process of building out a seamless ‘content marketplace’ to put specific Kernels/posts behind paywalls. Once you build your audience, you won’t have to wait for thousands of site visits, you can use Trove to organize, share, and monetize your most valuable content
If you want to know more about the ‘why’ behind our endeavor, we love sharing how we got here:
Currently, there are over 600 million blogs that exist across the web, accounting for a third of all websites.
People have a deep desire to share valuable information on the web in blog form. Lately, it’s getting harder to justify the time, effort, and cost of running a personal blog. It takes, on average, a toilsome 3.5 hours to write a blog post (~1,100 words average), and research tells us that the average reader only consumes it for 37 seconds. Blogging platforms haven’t changed much in the last two decades. They haven’t evolved to account for shifting attention spans, optimal monetization methods, modern storytelling tools, and intelligent discovery engines of the current times.
Conversely, social media has exploded with over 4.5 billion users tapping into rabid content creation with user-friendly tools. The tragedy is in its design principles. Built to bait our attention and exploit our data, these platforms incentivize content creation without context and engagement meant to inflame rather than inform. This strategic commitment to entertain at all costs undermines the basic elements of knowledge sharing – the ability to search, recall, and share for long-term benefits. The worst result of all this has been a mental health epidemic that leaves people in the vicious cycle of want, rather than empowerment. We felt there had to be a better way, so we started to build Trove through the lens of a positive flywheel – without the need for validation of likes and comments that have become the dopamine burst that leaves you needing more.
