Introduction
As we are coming up to Christmas and the end of the year I thought it might be useful to get some community reflection and feedback on Steemit and Steem.
We are only about 7 months or so into the project and still in beta but I think it is still useful to consider what we have achieved so far and the direction which we are taking now and in the future.
I would like this post to serve as a community discussion and informal poll about Steemit and Steem in general.
Since people seem quite fond of prizes and competitions I will award my favourite comment $10 in Steem Power (with a provisional deadline of Friday 23rd December midnight GMT).
How to Structure Your Feedback
This is entirely up to you but here are some things you may wish to think about:
What do you think works best about Steemit?
What doesn't work?
What improvements could be made and how? What is missing?
If you had to prioritise one single issue that you would like to be fixed what is it?
What do you see as the main issue that is holding up wider Steemit adoption?
If you could give Dan, Ned and the Steemit team one piece of advice what would it be?
Would you recommend Steemit to a friend or family member? If yes, how would you do it? If not why not?
What content do you think is absent on Steemit?
What bloggers or content creators would you like to see on Steemit? What have you done to try to get them on board?
What do you see for the year ahead and what would you like to see?
What (if anything) have you done to promote Steemit yourself? Is there anything that would encourage you to promote Steemit more?
As a fun exercise - how would you sum up Steemit in one sentence?
Thank you for reading.
If you like my work please follow me and check out my blog - @thecryptofiend
All uncredited photos are taken from my personal Thinkstock Photography account. More information can be provided on request.
Are you new to Steemit and Looking for Answers? - Try https://www.steemithelp.net.
There is no doubt that Steemit has revolutionized the way people see social media. Nonetheless, the blockchain background, being based heavily on short term investment, scams and gambling, are disabling the potential for wider acceptance.
The UI is on hold because Steemit is still growing and taking shape from free market events that are unknown-unknown. From an investing point of view this is the best way to go as far as founders and early investors are concerned. From a wide-acceptance point of view this is debilitating since people seek security, clarity and simplicity as to its nature.
Good points. Thank you for sharing:)
The sense of community has trumped it all...
Merry Christmas @thecryptofiend :))
Merry Christmas to you too:)
Good comments all around. To add one observation, I think there's a significant recency bias in the rewards system. The most significant payouts only come in the first 24 hours (and to a lesser extent in the 30 days after), so "old" but "good" content gets forgotten. There is very little incentive to promote/upvote content older than 30 days even if it's way better than all of the recent material. I think this is a serious impediment to upping the quality of the content on the platform. When I'm reading regular blogs, I often don't stumble upon the best material until it's been posted for months or even years. But it's still gold.
Not quite sure how to deal with or think about this problem. If you know of any past articles/posts that have addressed this issue, I'd love to read them.
Great point. A lot of people have brought this up but I can't remember any proposed solutions.
RS and UV for you!
Great stuff, keep up the good work. I am going to have to come back to this later for sure.
I will say have a good night since you are about 5 hrs ahead of me
Thanks. Look forward to it!
So cute,the dog with the Xmas hat!!
Glad you like it:)
I'm really liking Steemit so far. There's a good community and I get good feedback on my posts. I'm not sure it's ready for the non-technical masses yet. It needs to be more user friendly for them. There needs to be a simple way for people to include an image in a post. That could be by integrating with external services somehow.
I think a lot of people struggle with the intricacies of the economics of Steemit, e.g. why 3 currencies, where does the money come from. I know I don't get it 100%
I think Steemit could really take off if some top bloggers came on board, but it's a chicken/egg problem. They need an audience and building the audience requires the stars.
I'm hoping to see lots of exciting developments. An important area will be making use of Steem for buying/selling as well as for charity work. If we can get verified charity accounts then people can be confident about donating to causes and may start campaigns to support them.
Great points than you:)
Steemit's integration of a functional and efficient payments system with a social media platform works the best. But the way that this strength is highlighted in the platform's marketing does not seem to be working. One way to solve this would be to develop a set of advertising/marketing language standards to make the STEEM economy feel more accessible to people when they are first exposed to the concept.
I think this issue should be prioritized, and suspect it to be the single biggest barrier to growing the platform's user base in demographics that are currently under-served by traditional businesses/governments in the formal economy. As this category encompasses over 20% of people in the US and more than half the world's population, this may currently be our biggest barrier to growth in terms of the new user adoption.
I suspect the biggest barrier to growth in terms of attracting new users of SBD/STEEM at present is the public perception of uncertainty about the platform's long-term stability.
My main suggestion to Dan, Ned, and the Steemit team would be:
Keep up the good work, but please make sure your actions in the next year do not give potential new users/investors the impression that the site's basic functions or currency mechanics are subject to abrupt change.
I would, have, and will continue to recommend Steemit to friends and family.
As things stand, I will not know what is missing from this platform until I see that it is no longer missing because some clever person has added it.
I'd love to see some big names in journalism on Steemit, but don't think the platform is quite ready for them. Most of the successful people I know in media already have their own thing going on, and will not likely jump on board until Steemit can be easily integrated into whatever their thing is.
Niche-subject bloggers like John Robb and ALWAYS MORE ARTISTS would be great to see in the near future.
I see strong (and probably bumpy) growth in the year ahead. I would like to see the development of a respectful and diverse community here continue throughout this time.
From mentioning the platform to >14k subscribers of a nonprofit newsletter I edit to hosting a local meetup, I've done a bunch of stuff to promote Steemit. Because ...
After trying Steemit, everything else is pretty much bullshit.
Thank you so much for a brilliant response:)
SteemIt is the dawn of decentralization. It can, and will be the backbone of great things. I am happy to be part of this exciting wave.
Thanks for commenting and summing up Steemit:)
Thank you for being a trailblazer.
Thanks that is very kind:)
Though I've only taken up residence here on Steemit for nearly a month, and onboarding has been "tough at times", I enjoy the content driven incentive of reward. (Though of this I have made little to date) More so recently, I have been doing some 'curating' although I don't even fully understand that - the learning curve is vast, as much of the Jargon is New2Me. Example: TIL What does this stand for or mean? I see it used so often. (lol)
Back in 2005 I use to be a quite serious Agrarian Blogger, the improvement of a content posting editor (internal) would be vast for people (like me) who may have become "lazied" by the polish, simplicity & ease of use of social media platforms such as Twitter & FB. It excites me to think of the future improvements that shall come with organic growth and an expanding talent pool. I also believe that "polish" is what Steemit (in general) lacks & inhibits one avenue of successful on-boarding. This is an "observation" and not a "criticism" from my own personal experience. That said with the understanding 'It's in Beta', so acceptance is "Key" in understanding no all is as it should be, or will be.
I've begun an individual personal campaign of promoting Steemit through social media platforms that currently exist and have wide acceptance & participation. 1) I no longer personally post on FB, but I have begun to post other content I find noteworthy here on Steemit to my account there. Genius (in my eyes) because maybe the 1st post from Steemit may not capture someone, but the 100th? Might make someone "check this thing out" - so Thank You awesome content writers - keep doing what you do! As well, I've 'reactivated' my Twitter account, and have started a similar Campaign of tweeting out "others" post of informative content that will reach influential individuals in my "sphere" - content driven from Steemit. This is "method" of content saturation, if adopted by many users and believers of the Steemit platform on a daily basis is "Mind Blowing" if you really, seriously consider it. It only takes "One" post, tweet to be picked up and sent viral. (Kudos to the future person who makes that happen)
One thing I personally would like to see is a notification alert sent when an individual is mentioned specifically in a post's content. I.E. if someone said, for example, @hexdek16 "that saturation concept of social media platforms was 'genius' I'm starting Today!" and I got a "red box" notification of that mention, I could better understand my influence, and audience.
Thanks for the contest.
Thanks for such a fantastic response! The polish is gradually being applied and I think we will continue to see it.
The onboarding issue is one of the reasons why I created Steemithelp.net and I will continue to work on that when I have time.
A lot of people have requested a feature that lets them know if they get mentioned. I don't think it should be too difficult to get added:)
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Thank you:)
Organic growth is one thing, it'll work and it will be a very slow burn. In the end Steemit needs some form of consistent marketing to get the word out if we are to have an aggressive adaptation of the platform.
Yes definitely.
I think (crypto) contests/games works best in Steemit. I would like to launch a finance Steemit next year.
I think this is a great idea
Yes I think competitions etc work well. I would love to know more about your finance plans.
Just like there is finance Twitter and Yahoo Finance, why not Finance Steemit?
So you mean like a news story finance section?
It could be anything that attracts users of Tradingview, Seeking Alpha and Finance Yahoo to Steemit.
OK. I look forward to seeing your post on it.
Howdy @maarnio. Do you use Steemit.Chat? I sent you a message.
What I really love about Steemit is the easy way to onboard new people to the blog chain and of course I love the Steemit community. There is so much creativity and knowledge shared. Wherever I attend conferences or meetings I talk about Steemit. Personally my wish is to become finally a Steemit whale. Next my wish is to reach hero status on Steemit in 2017. What I would like to improve is the usability of Steemit and Steem. I will post about it latest in the first quarter of 2017. I would like to see Steemit to go beyond the Reddit image and become truly a way to help communities to structure their communications and transactions in new and innovative ways.
Cool. Thank you for sharing.
Steemit was the answer to a very difficult question:
If you wanted to write a blog about a subject that has been stricken (both covertly and overtly) from the interwebs, how would you do it?
As a single person, with a single server, where would you get hosting from? Which ISP and domain hosting won't cave from just a letter from the govern-cement? All of these things were to difficult for a single person without a strong following to do.
But now, Steem On.
Cool. Thanks for sharing:)
Influencer outreach is the key to the success of Steemit. We need a few dozen top notch bloggers to begin writing here. It worked for Medium where you earn nothing. It will work here as well. Merry Christmas!!
Merry Christmas to you too. Yes we are working on trying to make that happen:)
All I want for Christmas is a Steemit that's completely gamified and has native apps for iOS and Android!!!! C'mon, Santa!!!
Thanks. Merry Christmas to you too!
Thanks. Merry Christmas to you too. I'll hopefully get my computer back before Christmas so I can get some more photos out. It would be awesome if we could get some snow - I have my infrared converted camera now too so would be interesting to see how that makes it look.