I think for the viewing one quick and easy change would be making the personal blog in a grid, much like when you see someone's profile on Instagram. But it could be little cards, like picture plus the title text underneath, and fit like 3 across running down the page. Or make them even bigger, I really don't understand why websites these days insist on this design where there is a narrow stream of content in the middle with big fat white blank areas on the sides. That's fair enough if it's text so you don't get buried under it from a whole page hitting you in the face, but the desired experience for looking at pictures is always as big as possible right? Busy is a bit nicer for viewing now but it's also hindered by the narrow middle column design thinking (as is BTW the new Reddit redesign).

Something that's needed is also a nicely made post scheduling feature. Right now SteemAuto does that, and in Busy you can save drafts, but neither is as clear and intuitive as say doing it on a Facebook page. Where you can go back anytime and edit it or reschedule and do what you want with it. Steemit flat out doesn't do it. I mean you can always do the thing of writing out your article and then copy pasting it into a text file and then copying back when you need it but there should really be a neat tool that does this natively.

Absolutely I want to use Dtube and Dlive and I like the fact that with Steemconnect and the Steem blockchain you can build new tools that sit on there and users can automatically add themselves to. It's kind of like the Google ecosystem where when you make a user you get gmail and google+ and youtube and drive and so forth with it, isn't it? Except here it's you got yourself a Steemit user, now you can also use whatever other program comes along through SteemConnect if you like (sometimes they take a portion of your earnings so watch out). Actually one of the big draws to the platform for me was that you can upload your pictures in big fat nice resolution and it won't start messing it up with horrible compression. Facebook I think is the worst when it comes to that, and it outright mangles videos. The FB video player is seriously in the running for worst video player on the internet, it is so shockingly bad. That said, I do hope DTube ups their game when it comes to the buffering and the resolution itself, because I can upload things as high res as I like but I can see it only in 480p. I tried "original", assuming that's the original res but it never actually worked. So hell yeah I want to see proper 4K in the future, and maybe even a neat downloading function. I've used various youtube video downloading tools in the past year or so more than I could count, because I just dislike doubling up on slow downloads of the same hour long Blender tutorial but just download the same thing.

When it comes to the money aspect, I haven't made an official statement on it yet but you bet I am working the platform in every way to try and make some kind of living for myself. I don't have a job right now, I'm not even professionally an artist, I actually studied Nanotechnology but there are seriously fuck all jobs here where I am (Melbourne), or in general. When you look at the amount of jobs that are actually advertised vs the number of people graduating every year, it's fuck all, seriously. So I make stuff for my TESSEL project because honestly I like doing it and I want to get good at it, expand into proper animation, VFX for movies, my own little series and movies. To date I love it because it's the opposite of my experience in academia. Instead of sitting through YEARS of classes on things being told lies about how in the future someone's gonna value that and give you a job, and basically hanging on trying to pass exams rather than actually learning something, in 3D CGI art your education and "qualifications" mean exactly jack shit. No one cares that you attended this fancy art school or that seminar or so forth. Show me what you've made. Oh you haven't made anything, because "you didn't get hired"? Well perhaps you should make something then? You know, show people the goods of what you can make. And hey look at that, build an actual audience while you're doing that! Then you can go to some cool artist you want to collaborate to, or apply to some studio or something and show them hey look I'm freelancing and do things for fun but look what I made and what I've learned etc.

Long-ass argument lol but basically I enjoy it because it feels like it's one of the last things that at least on the user experience is somewhat meritocratic. You look at thing or you listen to thing, and your brain tells you whether it's good or not. It may look for bullshit arguments that rationalise it towards either good or bad based on completely external factors, but basically what you see is what you get. So I like that. I can't say that I'm any big shot in actual artistry but hey I'm genuinely trying and even in trying it makes me appreciate the stuff others do so much more.

And well, if I could squeeze a very basic livelihood out of Steem that'd be grand, because if I don't get that there is no more TESSEL, friend. And I would very much like to spend my time thinking up cool new things to make than being stressed out trying to work every angle to somehow make a living. People can then harp on up and down over people being greedy or abusing the platform or selling out or not, but the fact is we don't live in a dreamworld and if you don't even deign me something so basic as money to pay the rent and bills then frankly I'm not gonna spend time here. The number one selling point of Steemit is the fact that monetisation is built into the platform and decentralised. For better or for worse that is, it's far from perfect. It's very much a reflection on ourselves the same way the whole cryptocurrency phenomenon is. The big piece of kind of like conceptual art that Satoshi pulled on people so far to me has served to hold up a big mirror on how ugly we as a species really are. People get all butthurt, oh if it wasn't for LIBOR fucking with the international moneylending market, if it wasn't for the Federal Reserve printing money whenever they want and just hush hush the quantitative easing along, if only it wasn't for the US government doing all the fucked things and passing one corporate serving law after another, oh then everything would be great. Well here's your completely unsanctioned, raw as fuck free cryptocurrency with no LIBOR or CIA or Federal Reserve or WTO shitting up your economy. And yet we see the same shit, exchanges fleecing people, people bending over backwards to try and scam every little bit of money from regular people while talking big game like investing in this week's shitcoin is somehow sound financial advice. I was actually majorly burned out from Bitcoin and altcoins after about 2015 and left that smouldering pile of shit behind me because frankly fuck it all. However, Steemit is the first I have directly experienced to actually do something. Like seriously, 9 out of 10 altcoins do the same thing bitcoin does. Who the fuck cares. But this shit actually does something, people run a big forum on this thing, it's great. It could be the future of media.

But anyway coming back to the original question lol I think the big problem of Steemit right now is definitely the lack of users. A lot of the bad things around the culture of Steemit would be solved easily by there just being a lot of genuine users exercising critical appreciation of things that would drown out the bad stuff. That and the tags suck lol. I just don't like tag based platform management, it always ends up a tangled mess where everything has 10 tags in the post and you have the same shit everywhere because of the tag spamming. I REALLY hope the Hivemind / Communities stuff ends up helping us out of that, it would be cool to set up little collectives where you can focus your efforts on making that nice rather than always feeling like you're up against the whole platform.

So right now for me at least, Reddit and Facebook are the home of information. Steemit is useful for its own purposes but those two is where I go to actually see good stuff. Like I said this can be helped by having more actual users here. Likewise I don't know what can be done to curb the relentless shit posting, all of actual enforcement on this platform is entirely down to cashed up vigilante people going around whacking people with flags whenever they feel someone overstepped some rule of theirs. This sort of thing never, ever actually works lol. There are not clear rules here and it doesn't even matter because you're not gonna be able to do shit about the fact that someone just slammed you with a -10 dollar flag. Or even harasses you constantly flagging everything you make because frankly they're not right in the head. Worse yet, make a bot that harasses people with flags automatically (yes those exist, abusereports is one of them). To me personally that is infinitely more hurtful than any shitposter on the platform. I can choose to not look at shit posts, I can't choose not being flagged by some abusive asshole. And indeed that too can be overcome by having enough users but you still need literally thousands of new user upvotes to make up for that 10 dollar flag, which is in itself super lopsided tbh. The business case for buying Steem as a regular person has yet to be made properly, because right now you wouldn't pay money to use Facebook or Reddit so why the hell would you pay to use Steemit?

Please forgive that this is so long winded and rambling haha.