Agreed, largely. Michael (Crowdify) does know his community building.
Steemit is reaching that tricky stage where early adopters become resistant to change in service of "protecting their existing benefits" while also being aware that continued growth depends on making changes in such ways that the community becomes attractive to newcomers. "Nobody likes to feel small," yet the system has to be merit/contribution based.... because otherwise, why bother?
The Steemit infrastructure is already partitioned in a working way... with SP representing one's "stake" in the platform and Steem/SBD being current rewards. Couple of things are screwed in the equation, however... one being the imbalance between the weight/influence given to automation/scripts/bots vs. actual human interaction and curation. My actually reading, voting on and engaging in interaction on 50 articles a day seems to have little "value" to the overall picture, compared to an army of bots that clearly do not "read" or "evaluate" or "interact with" the content. As a newcomer I look at that and think "Why should I bother?"
The other missing factor is external engagement. As an experiment, I wrote an "article style" post the other day and "distributed" it to the general public through the niche channels I usually use when I write something. It took about 72 hours to pass 1000 page views, and it's still going. These are actual human eyeballs, actually reading the content, making them actual potential new Steemians.
But why should I bother? I don't even know if any of them made accounts. Even if they DID, I have no way to contact them and say "thanks, and welcome, and I hope you decide to create your OWN content here, feel free to message me if you have any questions!" So, there's that.
Part of the "problem" (I think) seems to be that there's an inherent contradiction between the concept of "decentralization" and "building community." One means "apart," the other means "together." So the real challenge seems to be how to build the infrastructure in a decentralized manner, and yet have the actual execution of the infrastructure happen centrally. Stated a little differently... I don't really *care" if there are 17 independent helper apps that can help me create the effect I want; that's too much hassle. I can just go back to Facebook where everything runs on one platform.
I'm not saying ME personally, but that's how the average blogger/user content creators thinks. And if Steemit can't provide an approximation of that, "thay ain't no way forward," as they say...
Sorry, wandered a bit off topic there...
Couldn't have said it better myself.
This is an excellent point and the reason I proposed to remove curation rewards, I believe they are harmful to the platform and that no serious business is going to integrate steem if it's run by robots.
One thing though, bots don't have more influence per se, it's just that many whales chose to subscribe to guilds which are mostly operating with bots.
I think this is very difficult to do on the blockchain. People could be paid per views for example but the blockchain can't tell number of view..
Something like a referal program could work though, but like I said it would be a waste of time to market steemit right now, it just isn't ready for a broader audience.
I know what you mean but I don't necessarily think decentralization is in contradiction with community building, I think the problem is human nature, humans always want more power and more money. This is why to me the solution is to create a fairer system( based on merit like you said) where the incentives are aligned with everyone ( not just the 0.2%).
Really great discussion.
"This is why it is so important to seperate influence and investment. It is OK for early adopters to have a lot more money than other users but when it comes to the influence which is the dynamics of the whole system it is not OK, it's not sustainable nor scalable." Great point. ~ No one likes to feel small. Indeed. It seems there are some counterintuitive disincentives to wider adoption. A cross-purposes at odds, stagnating the platform.
It sounds as though Yours.org is busy fleshing out ways to get around these bottlenecks.