Loving this. For years, decades even, I have manually curated and shared on multiple sites awesome content I discovered (no matter if written by pros or newer entrants).
The Internet, and thus also Steem, is, and has always been, about curation. While personally I think that we may make the issue of retention too big one, because there is the sign up hurdle, and somehow Steem is recreating a new - its own - Internet, much work can and still should be done.
I may dream f a better designed onboarding experience (no, not some tour to quickly jump through, something designed over the course of the first days, weeks, and months even) but curation will always matter. Not only to newcomers. It’s how the Internet functions, by means of links.
I would also love a reply function, an advanced trackback as such, and quote rather than esteem but that’s future. Although for the latter, I found space on an alt I started. An alt mostly to be slightly noisier, to share more than on my main account.
Keep rocking.
I think the thing I have to constantly remind myself of is that this is still a "Beta" project. We're all front runners, regardless of when we joined. If this takes off, (when this takes off?) everyone who is here now will be smiling.
I agree that the sign up process needs to be fixed, and hopefully HF20 does exactly that. But in the meantime, I think we do need to do a better job of keeping the people who actually managed to make an account and then proceeded to make a good introduction post. They've proven they are willing to go through the initial hoops.
Man... as far as really getting things started... My dream is to be a "Brand Ambassador" going to local colleges and having classrooms full of people. Spending an hour talking about STEEM, getting their accounts set up, first posts and first comments written, so they leave the classroom having a clue how to make hay in this environment.
We'll see if we can get there!
To be honest, I think the beta claim is something which is said rather to make oneself feel good than because this is beta. Also remember that the beta logo label was brought back during the DDOS/yussi issues not that long ago.
As somebody with a rather long tech background, I think more of Steem is beta in the sense that Gmail was beta for almost a whole decade (until they ditched it in order to sell more to corporations and government agencies). That would mean that the Beta label is a constant reminder to keep working.
Why does it make one feel better about ‘the state of steemit’? Just take a look at all condenser suggestions on Utopian and find the answer. They’re almost all like the unsolicited redesign which were popular and last and early this decade.
Because everybody thinks every site should have all features found elsewhere. Because we are creatures of habit.
Does it even matter that nobody knows what is the roadmap, vision for Condenser? Nope. Does it matter that sneak said at SteemFest that Steem Inc. learns from giants and takes the bits they think will serve best from all social networks out there? Nope.
We lack those features, and whether they have been tested and dusted in the past already, only to be ditched, doesn’t matter. This is open source and Steemit is beta. Now make it happen and gimme that Utopian bot upvote already. That’s the spirit.
Is steem beta? Darn reliable and fast for a beta me thinks. Proof of Brain is probably what is beta, other than that Steem is as Beta as Twitter was in failwhale era.
Never forget that our wishes, desires doth not necessarily be the vision of the company behind something. That, the lack of
kitchen sinkfeatures, doth not make a platform beta either. ;)all of this is understood. You are right on. The Beta tag did go away for a little bit when the new logo was unveiled, but then it snuck back in there. Not sure if the timing was exactly in line with the DDoS issue or not. Memory does not serve me well there.
One of the really interesting stats someone threw out the other day was that there are only about 6500 people with at least 1000SP in the platform. That blew my mind. I did go and look at my personal ranking on steem whales, and I am about to cross into the top 3000 with my 1600 SP, so I guess that 6500 figure could be right, or even too high.
Point is, there are still relatively few people who have embraced what Steem can be. There is room for growth. We all need to help promote the growth so that our STEEM value grows.
That is about ok, actually. If we go with the 30k daily active users it leads to the 80/20 principle.
Even if we look at total number of accounts that would almost/somehow/with some interpretation goodwill still fit in the 80/20 (18+2) online community activity matrix. 80% read/inactive, 18% active/upvote, 2% do all the work and make all noise/create.