SteemSTEM aims to generalize the usage of Steem as a science communication medium (our long-term grand goal). Six months after our last project report, we detail below our recent accomplishments and plans for the (short-term) future.
At the present time, most our actions focus on community building and user on-boarding and engagement.
We first discuss below the steemstem.io app and its new design and post promotion options. Moreover, we detail the to-be-developed future features targeting user on-boarding and engagement.
We next briefly come back to our curation work (including the ROI program to our delegators), as well as our up-coming activities on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit.
Finally, we close this post with a few words about our witness @stem.witness and a potential next meetup (should we go back to CERN again?).
steemstem.io: a new layout & post promotion
The 30-40 weekly users employing our app have noticed that the layout of steemstem.io has recently changed.
- The homepage is now clearer and faster to load.
- Six place holders are dedicated for post promotion, 3 of them being free (for whitelisted members) and 3 of them requiring payment and an upvote by @steemstem (for anyone).
- By default, only articles featured by SteemSTEM are displayed. Extra filters can be used: top posts resteemed by the @steemstem account, best posts, all posts carrying the #steemstem tag, etc.
In the future, we plan to improve the app to facilitate user on-boarding and engagement.
In other words, community building will lie at the center of most future developments.
We recall that by community, we mean scientists, engineers and passionate STEM enthusiasts that could use Steem to communicate about what they do, share their knowledge and engage with experts and amateur content creators alike.
On the short term, the app will see new options including:
- Steem account creation directly through steemstem.io.
- Compatibility with Steem Keychain.
- Customizing a blog on steemstem.io.
- Guest accounts to allow for external comments to articles.
For more information, please follow @lemouth-dev and the #app-discussion channel on the SteemSTEM discord server (now linked to the Steem Chat thanks to @gtg).
Curation
Our team browse Steem for original and quality content related to all STEM fields in six languages (Chinese, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish).
Upvotes could be small (5% — encouragement or motivation), medium (20% — informative post on a specific topic), standard (65% — going beyond what could be found elsewhere) or high (100% — state-of-the-art research, generally not available anywhere else).
Upvotes by the @steemstem account additionally trigger, under certain conditions, a voting trail consisting of other initiatives like @curie as well as independent curators.
Moreover, using steemstem.io and setting @steemstem as a beneficiary slightly increases the support.
Similarly, comments posted through the app are eligible to small upvotes as well.
[image credits: @medro-martin]
The best posts, resteemed by the @steemstem account, are all featured in our weekly distilled series (this will be new from distilled #105). Each episode moreover highlights two posts.
In those hard times, we usually weekly support 100 posts and comments written by about 60 unique authors.
The curation rewards are shared together with the delegators to the @steemstem account (65% of the rewards), the SteemSTEM team (15% of the rewards). For investments (through a delegation) in our project with different terms, please contact us!
A more detailed post on our curation activities will be drafted in the next couple of weeks (with a lot of statistics, in particular on the app usage).
SteemSTEM on other social media
In 2018, we created accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit.
Whilst these accounts have been quite calm during the last few weeks, we resurrected them roughly 10 days ago.
They will all soon become quite active again (the reddit one is already moving). Feel free to help us increasing our visibility on those platforms.
We plan to regularly (every 2 or 3 days) advertise and promote the best posts selected by our curation team outside Steem to bring the attention of potential newcomers (contributors and/or investors) on Steem and SteemSTEM.
Witness
SteemSTEM also plays a role in maintaining the Steem blockchain through its witness (@stem.witness), that will be upgraded to version 0.21.0 very soon.
Final words: a new meetup (?)
After a first meetup inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and a second meetup at Virgo Labs in Pisa, we think about organizing a third SteemSTEM meetup.
All ideas are welcome at this stage. As the LHC is shut down for another year, maybe this would be nice to go back there. Feel free to share your opinion in the comments to this post!
PS: This article has been formatted for the steemstem.io front-end. Please see here for a better reading.
I'm one of your 'enthusiastic' amateur content creators. SteemSTEM is probably my favorite place on the blockchain, although I do wander about a bit and regularly try my hand at creative writing.
You've created a place here where not only science can flourish, but also creativity (isn't creativity essential to science?) and community.
I'm a big twitter user and gladly share STEM articles there.
A lot of hard work has gone into SteemSTEM.io modifications--much appreciated. We all benefit.
Enthusiasm, that usually comes with engagement, is what SteemSTEM (and probably Steem) needs more at the moment. We are really happy to have you, both for what you write and for your interactions with the other members of the community! Thanks!
:)
My first SteemSTEM Tweet for today:
Nice ^^
Creativity is very essential to science. In fact, I always tell my artist friends, that the only difference between us is - our creativity is bounded by rules. We have to prove by experiments and statistics that our idea makes sense and is in line with other art under the umbrella of science. But you guys, I envy your freedom! This is how my conversation started with this artist girl 3 years back and we started dating, and recently got married.
Posted using Partiko Android
There is indeed something major here. We love new and original ideas. However, as soon as the idea is not backed up by data, it is just a bad idea and should die. This is how one can generally single out crackpots: they will fight to death to have their ideas recognised, even if they disagree with observations (and they will even explain that the entire community is against them).
Thanks for your contributions to SteemSTEM!
What a beautiful story. I'm so happy for you! Yes, I think creating is so much fun for me because of the freedom. And science is stimulating because of the rules. What is life, after all, without discipline ?
I wish you and your new wife the richest life together.
I would even say: the richest and happiest!
:)
This post has been promoted on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Twitter.
Please help us spreading the words! :)
I just simply love the idea of more activity on conventional social media. I will check steemstem on Reddit right away. We definitely need to put some efforts on onboarding. The guest accounts provide a great interface between steem and non-steem universe. However, maybe we can expand that interface a little bit more. Is it possible to provide an opportunity for non steem universe people to be able to subscribe our blogs to their feed or their email? And maybe we can automate the steemstem supported posts >20% upvote to get auto shared on all social media accounts of steemstem?
About the meetup, idk if you guys would like to try some spicy Indian food? I mean it can be an option.
For now, we will manually share all posts voted by more than 65% (let's encourage people to write posts of that caliber). Also, we function in counting on the good will of people, so that the amount of work has to stay reasonable (at least for anyone else but me :p)...
The faster loading is going to help a ton in the long run. Thanks for improving that!
I hope so. I am still unsure now fast it could be if the number of posts explodes. However, we are still far from there ;)
A third meetup? Awesome.
Maybe. This depends on the demand from the community.
A third meetup? Awesome. Can't wait for the updates.
Ahaha you said it twice... It seems that you are very insisting for this third meetup... :D
Hey @lemouth,
cool idea to spread @steemstem to other platforms. As you probably recognized, I currently using WordPress (@steempress-io) to bring my blog in a more ordered fashion (I'm at the very beginning). Is there a possibility to interconnect @steemstem-io with @steempress. For instance, I write an article with WordPress, use a certain tag (#steemstem-io e.g.) and then both apps will be used at the same time?
Thanks for your work
Best
Chapper
Unfortunately, what you ask is not possible. Either you rely on wordpress and not on the steemstme.io app, or vice versa. These are self-exclusive choices. I have started to draft (on my paper notebook) cool options to allow user to configure their blog on steemstem.io. But this is for the future (as you may imagine, I do not have much time to develop the app...). Maybe at that moment you would like to try it out here :D
Maybe when the cryptos have their next big-bull-run we hire an app developer for support :D
For that we would need a major investment to be able to pay this person correctly.