A first thing I want to say, congratulations with your achievements, SteemStem evolved into a really big thing on Steemit and it changed the entire landscape here! Although there might be a many people who want to milk the concept, you also helped a lot of enthusiast writers and scientists by fairly rewarding their hard work.
Then the second thing, Engagement is indeed very important in a community, and I think the great size of SteemStem is backfiring here. The Discord channel is always busy, and for new members it might be intimidating to join conversations with so many members they don't know.
Maybe dividing SteemStem into multiple categories can help to decrease the size of individual communities and induce interaction while keeping SteemStem's grandeur?
But eventually money will always attract "leeches" (I can't find a better word in English ☺️) And I hope it will be possible to filter these out and to keep the project running.
At last another BIG THANK YOU! I truly realize all of you are also just people with jobs, personal lives, motivated to keep this community alive and I admire your works.
Smaller communities are harder to keep track of, but we're already trying to at least have some language-specific communities. The biggest problem is that people don't seem to think it's necessary to engage with other author's posts, they just wait for their big vote and then post again. That's something that needs to change, or there's no future for this project. At least not one I want to be part of.
Yeah It surely is a lot of extra work managing multiple sub-groups and I think the language groups already help a lot. Maybe it is possible to make the size of the upvote dependent of interaction with other SteemStem posts? It should not be impossible to write a bot that keeps track of users activity on SteemStem posts and storing that as an "Involvement score" that influences the size of upvotes.
It would give a natural incentive for users to get more involved in other posts I believe. This score could be behind the scenes so people do not try to manipulate and milk it.
This is along the lines of something we're currently discussing :)
aha! that's great! I'd love to help in any way, but I assume there is already a big team to work with? 😊
Keep your eyes open, there will be a post :P
The splitting is not practical because it will induce more work for the team. This is something not sustainable at the moment. If the community decides to act as a community, things may change :)