How can we help Steem grow?

How can we help Steem grow?

I think many people are probably in the same situation as me: modestly experienced programmers with a technical background that are enthusiastic about all things crypto and happen to have a little free time. I thought this would be as good a time as any to start a dialogue about what ways people in this situation might contribute to the crypto-community in general and/or to Steem/Steemit in particular. I believe a lot of people are learning about crypto technologies and are starting to ask the question: how can I both contribute to and benefit from these new technologies and communities? I don't think we're looking for become-whales-quick schemes, but clearly there are valuable tools and systems just waiting to be designed.

So, I guess this led me to have a few questions that I would love feedback and inspiration on:

1. What do you think is missing from the current steemit.com website?
2. What do you think are valuable ideas for potential future apps to run on the Steem blockchain?
3. And, because I'm interested in these types of ideas, how do you think the future of freedom, governance, and community will evolve as new crypto technologies come into their own?

Personally, as for my answers, I think the steemit feeds could probably be updated somehow. I'm sure that is probably already in the works. As the number of posts starts blowing up exponentially, things will get lost very quickly in the 'new' feed, and it might start to look more like random chance whether or not posts get discovered. It looks like the follow feature is now working, so that probably alleviates this problem to some degree (at least for those who have already been discovered).

As for potential future apps for Steem, there are really an endless number, especially because posts can hold quite a bit of text, and posting has no fees.

For example, a proof-of-existence app based on Steem would be trivial to develop. I'm surprised someone hasn't grabbed up steempoe.com or something like that, slapped a client-side hashing algorithm on there and the ability to post. It would be straightforward, and I guess you could probably get some donations.

Another possible application I have been interested in is developing an education-focused, Steem-powered website for teaching and learning. The online education experiment is growing rapidly and reaching critical mass. The Khan Academy has thousands of free educational videos to watch. I am imagining a platform, let's call it Steem Academy, where users have the ability to post educational lessons and videos, ask questions, request lessons, etc... Since it would be based on Steem, this would incentivize educators to produce content, and since it is somewhat of a competitive marketplace, the best content would tend to rise to the top. The web app would basically just use clever tags and post syntax to sort and present content in a valuable way that may be more available to the average user looking for educational content.

These are just a couple of my thoughts for now. If you are an expert or hobby programmer with a little bit of free time (which I know you have because you're reading this), I'd love to hear your ideas.

Best,

Trogdor :)