For a while now I have found the way s&box presents content to users to be difficult to use.

From the in-editor cloud browser, the s&box platform, and the Sandbox game - I feel they all suffer from similar problems with the way that they present the user with content and their intended use. It makes them hard to navigate, hard to use, and quite often involves presenting the user with low effort or low quality assets, or 'slop' as many would call it, which leads to people getting the feeling that the engine/platform/game is of a low standard.

With the discussion about moving over to the Steam workshop for content and all that I figured I may as well throw my thoughts out. 

The cloud browser is the pain point of the editor for me. Every time I want to find an asset, I am tasked with sifting through nearly 20k assets, having to re-sort and re-filter every time I need to find something else, made necessary just from the huge quantity of cloud assets available.

I would prefer to use a search function, but I have mentioned previously that the search results still often require digging through a list to find what I am after.

The best method of filtering cloud assets comes down to favoriting collections to add them to 'My Collections' (which, by the way, is pretty unclear that is what you need to do to use that feature). While this works as a nice, generalized filter, it still needs to be coupled with further filtering to often find what I need.

Example: If I am creating a map, and placing electrical cables across some buildings, it makes sense to filter by that in order to filter the entire set. Unfortunately, while the website seems to be able to get all of these in order, the cloud browser manages to also add some seemingly unrelated items.

The lack of proper filtering means I often find myself having to spend time searching as opposed to time working, which ruins the flow and creates friction. This time filtering also feels especially wasted, because often times it's not a list of quality assets I want to use I need to dig through, it's all the meme content that I would never care to use showing in the results. I don't want to have to scroll through hatsune_miku_fat_03 just because I wanted to find a hat stand.

The cloud browser, and the asset workshop in general, would greatly benefit from better filtering and search results, as well as subcollections and personal collections, or potentially a cloud whitelist.

I'm not sure about the direction the platform is going to go in with workshop integration, but I feel like it was improving for the better since the April release.

The way I see the platform is much like how I see Steam, or GOG - I am opening s&box to either:

Players are opening the s&box platform with an intention to do either one of these things, much like how you open Steam to either play a game you own, or browse the store for one you don't. s&box however is heavily weighted towards the latter, which feels like a flashbang of thumbnails, and a hindrance to those that want to play a specific game. 

Take Sandbox for example. I want to play it, so I open the platform to get a whole page of games that I am not interested in playing at that moment. I need to scroll half way down the page to find Sandbox.

I don't think there is a perfect solution for this where you can maximize exposure of new games to people while also ensuring they can find what they want at the same time. In this case I would probably pull a page out of Steam's (and just about every other game storefront) book and offer players the option to pick a landing page - Library or Browse(?)

Steam lets user pick which window they start up with, and I think that might be a good approach here. This is ultimately just gives players the opportunity to curate what they see without it being thrown at them.

I have already made a post in the Sandbox Mode Suggestions thread which brushed on how community content is presented to players, which is what prompted this thread. Much like the above two points, players open up their spawn menu, see a few good things, and then more or less see a flood of meme content.

I believe this content has it's place, but I don't think a majority of players want it in their face every time they open their spawn menu.

Looking back at Gmod, players would go out of their way to browse for mods they wanted to use on garrymod.org, and later the Steam Workshop. This is also similar to how modding works these days, with users browsing Nexus and installing mods from there.

This separation of 'browsing for things to play with' and 'playing with said things' is important for players to be able to curate their games how they like, while adding a soft barrier between the UGC and the game.

A possible solution to this would be separating the cloud/community/browser tab off into it's own tab, or even it's own menu. Players could open the tab/menu and use it like they could before, to spawn things in, but also to 'subscribe'' things, which would add those things to their default spawn menu (like they all are now)

This would be a good middle ground, as players would still have access to all cloud assets, while also curating their own in-game spawn menu with what they want. If they want to browse for new things, they can open the cloud menu and do so, knowing they are going to be exposed to a number of weird uploads. When they want to play the game, then they have their own customized spawn menu with content they have chosen to see. They don't need to dig through sexy_shrek_bikini_yellow_02 every time they want to look through some assets.

There was a discussion the other day about how users joining servers can also spawn anything from the cloud, including assets that can just kill a server. Much like an asset whitelist I mentioned above for the in-editor cloud browser - a 'subscription'-like implementation for spawnlists could also serve a double purpose in that it could also act as a filter to limit what other players can spawn based on the host's 'subscriptions', which could be customized via server settings if the host wanted to enable or disable it.

I think the running theme here is that, the platform has it's fair share of low quality assets, every platform does, but the way s&box/Sandbox presents that kind of content makes it feel too close to home at the moment. All someone needs to do is upload a shitty model, or a shitty game package, and it's right there in your cloud browser as you're trying to work. Or front and center of the s&box landing page. Or right there in your spawn menu, cluttering it up. By putting a small barrier between all of these things and making them opt-in I feel like it would allow for players to mentally distance themselves between what the game is and what the UGC is.

Funnily enough, it sounds like this kind of separation might be coming regardless if everything is going to be transitioned to the Steam Workshop. I hope doing so doesn't hurt the current way things are integrated at least, as being able to browse through everything while being in-game is a huge step up over Gmod. I wouldn't want to make finding the things I want to find harder than what it is now.

I agree with everything you've said. The UGC is way too integrated in the whole experience, it becomes really hard for a user to differentiate between the high quality curated things and the random lower quality UGC things. There needs to be a clear distinction between what facepunch presents as content and what random users present as content, otherwise you will inevitably be dragged down by the lower quality content. Not to mention it's really overwhelming to see hundreds of models to spawn in when you first start the map. 

I worried that the transition back to the Steam workshop is going to make it harder to intentionally browse content. Being able to spawn stuff in-game without having to leave the game, is absolutely the kind of upgrade you would want over Gmod. It just needs to be separated enough so that it doesn't encroach on the user experience while playing the game.

I don't want to have to open up another tab, or use the Steam overlay to subscribe to stuff just to spawn it in - that's not an improvement. So I hope that won't be the case.

Yes it feels like a band-aid solution, I can understand the sentiment of going back because people want what is familiar. It just feels like there is a really nice middle ground to be had and I hope there is still some will to find that instead of just giving up.

I really like Sandbox mode and I don't want to lose being able to load entities while playing. I think the best way would be if the Workshop just let you download stuff before you join, like maps, entities or games, so you don't have to wait. And you could still spawn stuff from the cloud in-game like now

Garry wrote in his Eridium youtube comment:
"There being too much content is a problem. It's no good having 20 good games on the platform when they're swimming in the sea of 500 tech demos and clickers. We're going to address that, we already have plans. We're changing Playfund so it's not incentivising it. We're going to switch to a Workshop subscribe/install model for maps and games. We've been trying to have a system where we show you 200 games and let you choose - and it's not what people want. Even if there are 50,000 awesome HL3 quality games, no-one actually wants to choose that way. That's apparent now, that's become really clear."

I dont want to discover games from the workshop. I want to have everything I need in S&box.  
I think discovery improved a lot and its very possible to find games. Does the Steam Workshop solve the discovery problem? Youtube for example has an infamous recommendation algorithm, this doesn't come overnight and needs lots of experience and tweaking. 
Maybe have the planned "greenlight" games front and center and also have the "wild west". 
Personally i enjoy scrolling games and maybe hopping on a small game by a beginner, even if just for 5 minutes.
Also as a beginner dev it was cool putting the game on S&box and it being played. I hope this isn't lost in the depths of the Steam Workshop.