True stuff.
Most of the comments in any popular post are of people asking for upvotes or followers. Either that, or poor quality comments like 'nice post', 'great information' or such other generic "compliments" with the underlying goal of increasing their post count.
I feel like this is partly due to the misunderstanding of 'beginners tips' like:
- Engage with the community more
- Comment more on others' post
- Make yourself visible in the community
I guess it must also be said that value can be added not only through quality posts but also through quality comments on the same.
In other words, impart the belief that it matters not how many followers you have, but how you gained whatever number of followers you have.
Right now, the vision/culture seems to be making maximum use of bots as possible!
There is no onboarding strategy, that's the problem.
I wrote an article about that 9 months ago and called it the "Theme Park Idea":
https://steemit.com/growth-ideas/@surfermarly/growth-needs-retention-the-theme-park-idea
From my point of view, the welcoming is absolutely essential for the platform's development. Just take Steemit's welcome page, it looks like a website from 1980 but not like the arrival hall of a platform that is based on leading technology in the 21st century: https://steemit.com/welcome
Where are the video tutorials, the first-step-trainings? It'd be so easy to turn this site into a great first contact point, teach people the basis rules and etiquette on steemit in different languages there. But I'm tired of repeating the very same ideas over and over again.
Sometimes I really don't understand Steemit Inc's priorities.
I agree on the Welcome page being bland. There's way too many links for a layman to have the patience to go through. The presentation of information could use a revamp.
The 'Theme Park' idea you had proposed looks promising. Among the 5 weak points, 1st and 5th seem to be main ones. The search function is poor and there's no easy way to find and read old posts that "disappear" after a couple of months.
One solution I thought about for that is - what if there's an option to segregate posts in our 'Blog' into categories, similar to pins in Pinterest, to add a visual touch to it while making posts more accessible. Posts about steemit could be in the 'steemit' pin, poem and drawing in 'art' and such.
That said, Steemit still is in beta so we could implement new features and suggestions listed by you in the future, more final version of the website. Let's be optimistic!
That's covered by tags (#art #poetry #steemit etc.).
What we need is a general design makeover. On Steemit content needs to be pro-actively searched, instead of being actively offered. There is no user retention, no incentive for staying on the site. On YouTube content that is related to the one you clicked on is actively offered for instance.
Yep, but since the tags can't do much about old content getting buried in our Profile, pins in a user's Blog could make it somewhat easier to find posts according to category.
Youtube-styled curated suggestions will definitely keep the users hooked. However, there's also the disadvantage of lack of diversity in opinions consumed by them. Meaning, they would be shown only one 'side' of the story. If the content suggestions are constantly shuffled, then it could be a great add-on.