I think you make a good point. Even though I am relatively new here, it's obvious that, for some people, this is just an opportunity to make money and chase numbers, rather than contribute great content that provides helpful information. I guess the idea is that the community will upvote worthy content, but what if most active users in the community are here because of the money? Then, all we see will be self-congratulatory posts and schemes for people to follow each other just for the sake of it.
One idea is to find / organize people who are not just looking to use this platform as a money making machine, but as a way to connect, inspire, and learn from each other. I think that if we are able to organize micro-communities based on that simple premise, we will have a much better time on this platform. Content is indeed king and I am very curious as to how people who dedicate time and energy to create something worth reading can organize and support each other's work. This is also a question of breadth vs depth -- there's a lot of breadth on here, since everything is kind of "all together," and I am sure there's a lot of depth, but right now it takes some time to find the hidden gems.
I am currently working on creating a community of writers and will definitely try to incorporate SteemIt as a way for those writers to promote their work and encourage discussions, which is what I find most satisfying. In the meantime, I wonder what place do topics like music reviews, political commentary, philosophical musings, etc, have on this site. I guess I will find out as I use the platform more.
I think they're working on building "groups" for people with common interests, like subreddits.. Not sure how much progress has happened, but iirc, it was definitely on the roadmap
Agree with everything you say, should be interesting to see how "micro-communities" affect this place. I've seen a musician on here say that their content gets way less exposure than on youtube or soundcloud, to which another user suggested this -
That's very true, steemit has a lot of posts about cryptocurrency currently since most of the regulars are early adopters and heavily involved in crypto. While YouTube is about music and video. It makes sense that the musician would do well over there..
Micro communities could fix that, and connect bloggers and readers better ..
While all of these things would improve one's experience (and most definitely increase the market value of steem) , we must still be trying attract more passionate bloggers and curators and less people from crypto circles buying loads of steem power and abusing the platform, bullying other content creators etc. And even less noobs who stumble on steemit and view it as some kind of a "get rich quick" scheme, they get disappointed inevitably and bad-mouth the platform