A couple of days ago, @gavvet again brought up a topic I've been thinking about for a long time: How long-term oriented (= evergreen) content could be better promoted using Steem.

I thought it's about time to write down what ideas I've been tossing around to solve that issue.

Why is this important?

This is very revelant, as currently short-term or up-to-date content like news, memes, etc. are the most rewarding on Steem, while clearly there is a lot of value being provided to readers with content that has a long lifetime and doesn't get stale that quickly, like:

• Tutorials
• Analyses
• How-tos
• Stories
  etc.

It's kinda like the difference between Reddit and Medium. It's still kinda weird to see that so many people are using Medium while they could be using Steemit (or another Steem-powered platform) to produce the same content but get rewarded for it. Right now, it simply wouldn't pay off to put a lot effort into a post on Steemit (due to reduced audience compared to Medium) if you just get a handful $ within the seven days. If you could get rewards for producing great content and keep it up-to-date over time, this could be a killer feature for Steemit etc.

How could we deal with this?

So here's the idea: If a post can only generate rewards in its first 7 days but you would want it to generate rewards on an ongoing basis, then why can't you re-post it every week to get the rewards over an over again?

Of course, you wouldn't copy and re-post your article, and you wouldn't be doing that manually. Instead, it would be nice to have a Steem skin that would automatically create posts every week which basically just contain a reference to the orginal article. You could obviously use the URL to encode subsequent posts:

Let's say your original article is accessible through steemit.com/X, then any automatically generated re-post would be under steemit.com/X_n, where n is the current week after the original post.

Now you don't want to see heaps of meaningless posts with just a reference, so our Steem skin would also only display the original post, but any votes cast on this post would basically be directed to the current re-post generating rewards.

Any issues with that?

Apart from this not really looking nice on other Steem clients like Steemit or Busy, there is kind of bigger deal with that: Users can vote the same post over and over again every week, making it even easier to exploit the system. If we could avoid that happening - and I'm looking forward to suggestions and a discussion - then such a system could really help with a wider adoption of Steem and better content on the blockchain.