With the Alpha Persei release rolling out in fuller force over the past week, we want to take a moment and highlight five major improvements to the Sapien user experience. Whether you’ve been with us for years, or are a newcomer to the platform, there are a handful of significant changes to both platform functionality and user interface that are worth exploring in greater detail.

Sapien gets a facelift

At Sapien, we work hard to bring you an intuitive interface with which to explore our platform. While the tech that Sapien is built on is certainly pushing boundaries, we don’t want the platform to feel alien. We want the user experience to be friendly, inviting, and not too dissimilar to the online experiences that the world has come to know and love. To that end, Alpha Persei’s release brings with it a refined user interface aimed at showcasing the real value of any social platform: the user-generated content and conversations that bring a network to life.

Gone is the blocky purple design of the old site; in its place, a streamlined and minimal interface that shows off posts without drawing too much attention to voting and rewards mechanics. We decided the content is what’s most important here — it should be given priority placement.

Figure 1: Old interface — a bit cluttered, less focused on the content.

Figure 2: Behold, our new interface — more streamlined, minimalist look.

We hope the community likes the new UI. Let us know your thoughts in the Feedback tribe!

Buzzworthy posts get featured

If you look at the Alpha Persei screenshot above, you’ll notice a new column layout that highlights featured posts from the Sapien community. Our stellar users are already sharing great content back and forth — we figured particularly interesting or timely posts deserved some of the limelight.

Users should know that the featured posts column only lives on the homepage feed; the place where most people discover new topics and conversations happening on Sapien. All featured posts are pulled from public Tribes. The Sapien team frequently updates the featured section with user-generated content that’s topical, unique, or otherwise interesting for all to see.

Tokenized polls

It’s human nature: Everyone loves to give their opinion, and we don’t think Sapien users should be any different. To encourage our innate need to speak our minds and hear the opinions of others, the Alpha Persei release introduces a beefed-up version of our tokenized polls. Now, users can create Tribe-specific polls (or share that poll with their followers) and offer SPN as an incentive for community response. The poll-creator specifies an amount of SPN from their own wallet, and everyone who responds to the poll gets a percentage of the reward. For now, SPN will be evenly distributed to all users who answer (though we are interested in exploring different allocation options down the road).

Polls can have up to 5 answer options; can remain active for as many days as the creator would like; and can end early if a consensus is reached, based on the creator’s specifications.

Polls can be a fun tool for building digital communities, and especially for shaping conversations within Tribes. They enable users to freely exchange value between each other and do all the things communities do: set the rules, elect leaders, settle debates, and the like. We see polls going a long way to supporting the growth of Sapien Tribes.

Down the road, tokenized polls also open interesting doors for advertisers to engage with Sapien users and learn about their preferences, transparently and fairly, all while directly rewarding users for their time.

Speaking of rewards: unveiling Rewards Engine 3

Drumroll please: The biggest change coming to Sapien is our new version of the Rewards Engine, which we rebuilt from the ground up. Development of the Sapien Rewards Engine has been an iterative process that we’ve been working to perfect since the platform launched in 2016. RE1 awarded tokens to users based strictly on their activity on the platform — not ideal, in that it fell short of our vision for putting rewards distribution in the hands of the users, but a starting point from which to build. Nearly a year ago, Version 2 of the Rewards Engine was introduced, featuring the Charge mechanism that’s integral to community-driven content curation and consensus.

The major thing to understand about RE3 is Sapien’s integration with Matic — a partnership designed to bring enormous changes to users’ ability to efficiently curate content. While gas costs are always a consideration for Ethereum-based DApps, our Matic integration will allow users to give Charges and spend tokens freely without taking gas costs into consideration — a feature which, we think, goes a long way towards enabling the kinds of effective community-building and content-sharing that Sapien seeks to foster.

As in previous versions of Sapien’s Rewards Engine, when users receive Charges on their community contributions, these Charges still convert to SPN on a daily cycle. For the heavy curators prone to running out of Charges, RE3 provides users the ability to reward content with SPN tokens directly if they run out of Charges — a new feature which increases the utility of the SPN token within the Sapien ecosystem.

Ready, set, Charge!

There are a few other interesting updates to Charges to know about, beginning with a quick definition for the uninitiated: On Sapien, Charges are the primary method for boosting content. Users can upvote a good joke, a snappy comment, or a great music video, for example. Content creators can boost their articles, podcasts, GIFs, or anything else their talents produce.

We’ve revamped the Charge system in the Alpha Persei release in order to facilitate more frequent engagement from users. In previous versions of the platform, Charges were awarded on a daily basis, but they didn’t accrue beyond that daily allowance — we realize that this limited users’ ability to curate valuable content as it was published, and wanted to rectify this issue moving forward as the platform continues to grow.

Now, each day, users will be allotted 10 fresh Charges on their Sapien account, allowing them to boost content they like or have created on the platform — completely free of charge (pardon the wordplay). Here’s the new bit: Users can accrue Charges until their reserve reaches a grand total of 100. We included this cap so users will be encouraged to use their Charges and boost content they deem worthy, and we set it to 100 so users can give one big bump to a post they particularly love.

We see Charges as a valuable tool for the network because they inspire conscious decision-making within our users — a Charge represents a choice to give intentional support within the network, which we think makes them more valuable than the infinite, meaningless likes, hearts, and upvotes users are afforded on other platforms. Charges mean something on Sapien and we’ve designed them so they always will.

NOTE: Currently, using Charges does require the user to spend ETH on gas costs, but our partnership with Matic Network will soon eliminate those costs for Sapien users.

Big news for the chatterboxes

You asked, and we listened. In Alpha Persei, one of the most requested features from our users has finally arrived: Chat! Our new user-to-user chat feature enables direct communication between members of Sapien’s vibrant user base, making it easier than ever to build communities and form personal connections. Initiate interesting conversations on any topic, dive deep into the particulars of niche or sensitive subjects, and discover more about the unique individuals that make Sapien a great place to be.

Now more than ever, we all need the ability to reach out to one another and strengthen our relationships with fellow humans. We recognize that the real function of any truly social network must be to facilitate the formation and cultivation of meaningful interpersonal relationships — this has been true for communities of people since time immemorial, and must remain true in an increasingly digital landscape. Alpha Persei’s new chat feature currently supports one-to-one messaging, but we’ll explore other chat modes in future releases.

We believe Chat will be one of the most powerful forms of social glue on the platform, but only if users adhere to standards of civility and respect. For a good primer, we suggest the Better Conversations Guide from the On Being Project.

Social media for humans

There are lots of things to be excited about with Alpha Persei — not least of which is the feeling that we’re making profound progress towards our goal of a truly democratized, user-driven social network that brings value back to where it belongs: with the users, and their shared experiences. With Rewards Engine 3, we are building the machine that powers the democratized social network wherein users are interacting, sharing content they like, and exchanging value. Our new partnerships will help Sapien scale gracefully, streamline user experience, and bolster the network’s token economy. Our new interface is designed to maximize ease of use and user satisfaction. Our chat feature makes interpersonal communication more natural than ever. These are all exciting upgrades, but they’re not the most important components of an incredible digital community — you are. We hope you enjoy Alpha Persei, and as always, we welcome your feedback and comments. Let us know how we can make it even better.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent official policy or position of Sapien Network, Inc. The information in this article was compiled from sources believed to be reliable and is for informational purposes only. Sapien Network, Inc. does not guarantee the accuracy of this information or any results and further assumes no liability in connection with this article. In addition, Sapien Network, Inc. does not guarantee the timeliness or completeness of the information contained within this article and the information contained in this article is subject to change without notice. This article may contain statements regarding Sapien Network, Inc.’s intent or current business expectations. No reliance is to be placed on these forward looking statements, and Sapien Network, Inc. does not undertake any obligation to publicly release the result of any revisions to these forward looking statements. Any and all information contained herein does not constitute any purchase or other advice, does not constitute an offer to purchase or sell, nor does it constitute a promotion or recommendation of any token or cryptocurrency or any other type of product.