derwaldgeist
commented
3 years ago Interesting point, and I kinda agree.
The counter-argument would be: Does this really help, or will it add more complexity? I mean: if you start marbling, in most cases you would (should) not really care about the layer you're placing your content on. For a noob, that's an app to drop videos in the world. I think you will be a quite advanced user already, if you start asking yourself how you can filter the public layers. My gut-feeling is that people will create their own personal groups first, before they even think about using the public layers, but I might be wrong. (It might even make sense to place the groups first in the maintenance dialog.)
Please also keep in mind that the app will show you other layers if you are nearby a Marble that has been placed on it. This happens automatically. So you gradually get a sense that this is possible.
There's another downside in pre-propulating the favorites: Since they will also appear in the wheel, the wheel will be pretty cluttery from day one. But you won't see anything on these layers. We could resolve this by only showing those layers that have Marbles nearby, but in this case, we have the problem that you would have to select the layer in the Marble editor afterwards if you want to place it on a layer that has no Marble nearby. Which is the main reason why all groups appear and thus all favorites (to be consistent).
The last question would be: what would be a valid set of pre-defined layers? We might ask the users what they are interested in, but that's an additional onboarding step.
One pro argument for pre-populating the layers would be that you will get a notification for them, even if you have set your wheel to "#general". However, if you keep it in the "All" state, you will get these notifications anyway.
Thus, I am not against pre-populating the layers, but we have to consider the points mentioned above.
From the perspective of a new user, getting started with layers felt really hard. When opening the layer search I really would appreciate a list of currated or most popular layers to get me started/to give me an Idea what type of content I could post (and on which layer(s)). It kind of looked like there are no layers at all.