The first of these, I've plugged elsewhere but will put here as an actual posted idea for discussion - the multi-queue.
The idea is very simple. You have a proto-story queue, which I am tempted to call the Firehose but won't. This is a story marketplace, an incubator for overly raw material. People like me who have decent enough stories to tell but no capacity to tell them present a story that's been redrafted to death, we're sick of it, but it's not "prime time" material. Decent writers shuffle through and buy up the stories that interest them. No obligations, but they now own the rights to it, end of story.
If the decent writers can then make more off the main site than they paid, everyone wins. Although the price for a draft is likely to be very low, due to the fact that although it may be content-rich, it needs to be story-rich. People need to have a reason to care about what comes after.
The second idea is based on the fact that some people write stories. Scrolling stories is ok, some people like it, but I would like to propose an interface to the OpenLibrary code so that stories can also be read just like a book. Data is just data, having multiple ways to view it might be good.
The third idea is an author's scratchpad. Have each author with an area where they can scribble notes, sort ideas, doodle, etc, where it isn't a story. The author has access, nobody else. It's where half-formed ideas develop. The step before incubation, but an important step, it's where ideas don't get lost or get pushed forward when not yet ready.
The last idea is to have a link into other social media. Not WasteB, err, Facebook, I'm thinking more along the lines of Utherverse, countercultural venues such as Freenet and Syndie. Syndie would be the difficult one, but a Freenet connection to Steemit should be easy. No guarantees over who - or what, as they might not be human - would cross the bridge, but I can say it's likely to do odd things to the balance of articles. It should diffuse the stuff that's pretty turgid, effectively bulking up the quality, as well as increasing site activity.