How I Expect Communities To Change The Typical Steem Experience
Even since the inception of #newsteem and the best efforts of tireless curators, Steem is a pretty hard place to find content. There exist tools designed for content discovery that are frequently used by curators such as steemlookup.com and anyone can navitage to https://steempeak.com/explore/trending and click on the tabs on the upper edge of the page. The curation histories of various curators can easily be found that way.
But this approach requires one to actively use this type of features. As a result of the difficulty of finding content and the general abuses and misery of #oldsteem, Steem developed into something like a giant hall full of strangers thrown together without much organization where being connected with the right people was everything. First there was a small number of pioneers, for a subset of whom stumbling upon Steem was like winning in the lottery. STEEM was premined in massive quantities mostly by people who became witnesses. Before delegations were introduced, Ned gave some people their posting key and allowed them to reap mind-blowing rewards for simple posts, the most famous example being the $31,000 make up tutorial. That took place in the summer of 2016 when the Steem price pumped and went up to about $4 before crashing when people started to cashing out their rewards after that was made possible. Many a con artist and scammer came on board when they caught a whiff of easy money. That paradise was short lived, however. On March 11 2017, the price had plummeted to its all-time low, slightly below $0.07.
As a result of the massive rewards brought about by the 100% annual inflation until HF 16 in December 2016, the small number of users and certain key people's very liberal distribution of upvotes, entrenched power voting circles became the norm. Like on any platform, building an audience and networking takes time and one's reward levels will crucially depend on those factors. On Steem, that effect is amplified by the fact that Steem has stake-based voting and that stake is concentrated. In this sense, Steem is very much a social media platform as opposed to content delivery platform.
The Steem Economic Improvement Proposal was created to enhance Steem as a content delivery platform. With Communities, content discovery on Steem will be further improved. Authors will be sorted into categories as they join communities. I think that will be a very welcome development. There exist powerful curation projects, above all @ocdb, @curangel, @ocd, @curie etc. whose purpose is content discovery and rewarding. They offer a pretty decent reward for delegators who wish to use their Steem Power to reward attractive content to bring value to the platform while earn passive income. Of course, the social side will be enhanced as well since Communities will people with similar interests together. But those connections will be more about shared interest than opportunism.
I would say that a strong emphasis on content quality in choosing what to reward is very desirable even from a scaling point of view. The more attractive the content, the more it will attract consumers who need not have Steem accounts at all. Those people will not need to transact with the chain at all. They will only burden the platform by using Steem front ends without logging in and thus only need to increase the load on RPC nodes without increasing transactions going into new blocks.