BIG HIGH FIVE, @corpsvalues!
There is a sense of community here even without any official community feature. (yet). I think it is hard to locate these communities if you do not know where to look or know how to navigate Discord and other tools.
However, I also think the average user does not necessarily understand crypto. Having new users on the platform is great, but it is a crypto-based platform, so crypto education is absolutely essential in terms of user retention. FB manages to retain users even as the largest privacy rights violator on the planet Earth!
That says to me that people stick around for the people - not the platform itself. They certainly aren't staying for the privacy and from what I have seen friends share on there - users certainly are not staying for the 'kind words' shared on there.
I agree that some sort of feature could be implemented to help new users navigate the intricacies of Steemit. A quick tour feature would be more than enough to introduce the new user to essential features, listings to communities and an overall synopsis of the compiled info that exists.
The information is all there, we simply need a better way to present it. An effective means would either be an email upon sign up, but more effective would be a 'tour' feature to physically show the user how to navigate and seek their own information, while sharing essential details and resources available.
I totally agree that it makes sense to extrapolate effective methods from the gaming industry. Steemit is a tokenized platform, so GAMIFY things!! There is a prime opportunity to make this experience far more enjoyable. Think about the things people do for likes and thumbs... WE HAVE FAR MORE TO OFFER THAT SAME USER ALREADY. It is a matter of how we present it which determines how it is ultimately received.
We cannot entice people to come here to drop twitter-length posts in order to strike it rich and be rolling in crypto. That just isn't reality, but you'd never know that as a new user staring at the Trending page..😆
Thanks again, @corpsvalues for taking your time to share your thoughts
Great thorough reply! Users like yourself have a good grasp on what is needed for the community to grow. Communities of users like Curie are already doing what is necessary to push the content that should be the face of our authors to the forefront. All we need is a consensus from the dev team that lets the work already being done do more to be the face of Steemit for the new user than the "trending" page and welcome spambots.
Personally I think that the "promoted" page is dead. I understand that it was envisioned to be a way to take Steem dollars out of circulation, but I don't think it is doing an effective job of that. I would like to see a way for that feature to get replaced by a curation channel. This might require some sort of "centralized" effort that might offend some of the purists, but I think this will end up being necessary for the good of the community at large.