The change is here! We finally have post flairs and user flairs that will enable you to express yourself and curate your own content feeds.

Post Flairs

Post Flairs are required. Using correct post flairs will be flexibly reinforced until the end of January during which the community can get used to post flairs and suggest new ones. Post flairs will help each community member curate their feed to their preference.

We are starting with the following set of post flairs:

• OC Showcase: The post is a software or a hardware that you made yourself. We understand these to be the most valuable content on our community, and will continue to design methods to get you more views and comments.
• Tutorial: The post teaches community members how to make software or hardware.
• Question: You are asking a question to community members.
• News & Apps: The post is about the AR industry as whole, or any specific companies or products within the AR industry. These include posts about the AR market size, AR applications, and AR glasses.
• Concept Design: The post illustrates what might be done in AR.
• Self Promotion: You are offering a freelance service to the community or inviting them to visit your website. If your post can also be described by another flair (e.g. You are inviting people to visit App Store to buy an AR app that you made; You are sharing a concept design you made, and inviting people to message you for freelance design service), you may use the other post flair instead of this flair. We will monitor the volume of self-promotion posts and change this policy if necessary to ensure that community members are not spammed by low quality marketing ads.
• Discussion: This post flair is a general fallback post. If you have something to discuss with the community, use this post flair.
• Review: The post describes your experience using an AR application or a device.
• AMA: This post flair is only used by MOD team for AMA events.
• MOD: This post flair is only used by MOD team for community announcements.

User Flairs

User Flairs are not required, but they are highly recommended. Not only will user flairs help you express yourself, the distribution of user flairs will help us see which group of people we should cater to the most. For example, if we have a lot of software developers, we will systematically invite more tutorials and original work promotions. If we have a lot of early adopter consumers, we will systematically invite more app reviews and recommendations.

We are starting with the following set of user flairs:

• Developer: You make AR software.
• Designer: You design AR experiences.
• Maker: You make AR hardware.
• Researcher: You invent technologies that will go into AR products.
• Entrepreneur: You are running an AR startup.
• Enthusiast: You are an early adopter using or looking for AR applications and devices.
• Freelancer: You are open for hire.
• MOD: That’s me. 😛

I don’t expect the flairs to be perfect off the bet, but I think this is a good initial set that will 1) help you navigate this community more effectively, and 2) kick start the conversations between the community and the mod team to continue improving the flairs system.

Let me know what you guys think about the flairs as you use them, and look forward to the other changes (New Year Plan) to come!