How to grow the Steemit Community and separate us from our competitors
I love Steemit. I love the idea, I love reading about the people here, and I love the valuable advice it has given me.
But in order for Steemit to grow to it's place as the number 1 content providing website, we have to do our part.
If we look at our competitors, I'm not convinced any of them have the great pros steemit has. The two that come to mind for me are Medium and Quora, and frankly, unless there is any payment option for the content providers for those two websites, steemit should organically take them over.
Medium basically allows people to ruminate about a subject they are comfortable with, and Quora gives people points for answering questions. The kind of numeric points don't really translate into anything of meaning. A quick google search can tell you as much.
I am not saying that these use cases are without value. I have learned a lot from Medium and Quora posts. But it's not fair to the people who write for Quora and Medium, out of the goodness of their hearts, that they don't get paid for bringing traffic to the site. A good article should have a good pay day. And that's where steemit comes in.
Now I'm not saying Steemit is without it's faults. A redesign would be nice.
One complaint I had was that it took me a while to figure out how to search for users, (putting an @ sign after their steemit.com/ and then writing out their names, e.g, steemit.com/@ronnieg). Maybe this could've been done manually, as a user search bar, rather than defaulting to a google search which is kind of pointless.
Another complaint was that the payment system can be better explained, or even automated so that we don't have to buy SteemDollars, and that we can directly withdraw dollars and the conversion process would be done for us.
Of course, there are other, more structural complaints, such as many posts being undervalued, but I have been very impressed by steemit's community and their willingness to make posts with the most merit have the most traction.
All in all, I believe these thing will be fixed over time, and Steemit will be a much, much more popular platform years into the future.
But for now, I'm excited to be one of it's early users, and I will do my part in advocating for it's use in Facebook, Linkedin, etc, and if you are Steemit user who likes the vision, you should too!
Sources:
https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/medium-facts-statistics/
https://steemit.com/statistics/@arcange/steemit-statistics-20171117-en
good read man. learned pieces and bits... keep it up. found that on reddit..
When you're getting nothing from other services, even undervalued is an improvement. The influx of new users is huge in Steemit and it takes time to find worthy authors to support. But it is in stakeholders best interest to embed good contributors to the platform, it just can take time.
I've seen the people I follow slowly but surely build a following and a good income from Steem. I'm consider dropping some of them and finding new authors to support. I guess many like me with decent stake are thinking the same.
As Steem ecosystem grows as whole, putting out great quality content will eventually get you noticed as it will reward the finders as well and the whales. It's a win win. Also people shouldn't be too shy to self promote. There are discord groups and steemit.chat that let you do that.
I'm also quite excited and believe we're just in the very beginning! Steem on :)
"When you're getting nothing from other services, even undervalued is an improvement." Wonderful, thanks for the comment my man. Always good to have a burst of positive energy.