Steemit will succeed if we tackle this problem...
I've only been a member of Steemit for a grand total of two days. Now, some of you will already be questioning how I can be talking with such certainty about what's good for Steemit...
In my day job I'm an Audience Development Manager, it's an interesting role that brings together various different disciplines from editorial, community management, analytics, and product development. Essentially, it's my job to try and get as many people to digital platforms as possible and then keep them there, happy, for as long as possible.
What's the problem?
I've posted a few things on Steemit so far, used the service, and my gut feeling is that we've got an issue with spam and low-rent posts. This is all tied to the central premise of Steemit, which rewards people for posting and curating content. There's a large percentage of people who are posting not because they want to create and share great content, but because they want to make money. And this creates by its nature a very difficult community and type of content. Reddit has a similar problem to this but it's people trying to generate karma to make their accounts look better. It's managed there by the downvote system and admins.
What do we need to do?
For Steemit to have longevity and legitimacy, we all need to pull together. We need to create a place that's brimming with so much quality content that the mass-market public come here to check it out. The ability to get paid for creation or curation should be a second point to content, it's a bonus. So here's what we can all do to help with this problem:
- Flag posts which are blatant spam
- Only Resteem posts that you think are actually good, rather than cynically thinking will this make me $$$?
- Steemit should introduce a system to help designate low-value content
- Steemit should continue to develop the content/blogging platform to build out the functionality - to make it even easier for people to share great pieces of content
I'm totally invested in the core idea of Steemit, I love the fact that it's a social media network that's given the power back to the people. That's a wonderful thing. Now we just need to make it work.