My Steem Greeter Application - A Plan to Give Hands On Steem Experience to Newcomers

Hello everyone! Yesterday's post for the 100 days of Steem was an announcement seeking out Steem Greeters. I am very interested in applying because I think that the more we focus on making people feel welcome as a community, the more we will succeed in the long run. I have some ideas that I wanted to lay out in this post that I think might help by:

a) teaching newcomers the basics of markdown and Steem

and

b) Help newcomers get on their feet while making them feel welcome

I will delve into that plan towards the end, but first I want to answer the other prompts.

My Experience

I have been active on Steem since July of 2016. My first post was in fact an introduce yourself post, and I was fortunate enough to get a huge upvote from @blocktrades on several of my first posts. The support that many members of the community gave me in my first few posts (in regards to upvotes and comments) really was a huge part of why I have stayed so long.

To continue along, that winter I posted an Art of War review which was remarkably successful. A lot of my current stake came from those posts' rewards. During that winter, I posted every day for 3 months straight (possibly missing a day every now and them). I also ran a few other series including something which has since ended (unofficially) called the weekly7, and a composer birthday series (also currently ended). I have done several series since, notably my commentaries on the Confucian Analects which were a daunting 36 articles (back then I actually managed to finish the series I started). These series helped me to remain active as an author. They also helped me to learn the ropes of Steem, as well as markdown.

Languages

I took a year of Spanish in 8th grade, and remember very little. I also took a year of German last year, and I remember a little more of that (especially since I listen to a lot of German music), but I am still nowhere near fluent. For what it's worth, I can understand music theory jargon.

Communities I have been involved in

The obvious answer is the classical music community. My father and I started it back in the day, and when @bengy got involved with the account @classical-radio, I began delegating to that account. @bengy is incredibly skilled at marketing, and much of the current #classical-music community (which might have largely moved to hive) is thanks to his skill. I haven't been as active since then because of how busy my life got during high school. Luckily, I am sitting around with nothing to do for the next few months (aside from virtual school). I am also delegating to the @classical-music account.

In regards to other communities, I attempted to start a community called Steem Salon for the discussion of ideas, but largely abandoned the project because the whole Hive thing broke out. The Steem Salon community is basically a community version of what I have already been doing with my discussion posts. A community where the posts are meant to generate discussion in the comments rather than just be a singular post held up on a pedestal. I intend for the Steem Salon community to be a hub for having philosophical discussion. I hope to build traction for it eventually.

My Plan: A system of achievement

Pixabay.com: Licensed in the Public Domain

A few weeks ago, I left a response to @vision2020. In that response, I laid out an idea to create an achievement system in a newcomer community that would earn upvotes. If I become a Steem Greeter, I was hopeful that I might be permitted to run such an idea. I was hopeful to design a layout of newcomer posts that are guaranteed to earn a 100 percent upvote (from at least me) if they meet the criteria. These posts would be in an ideal order to help the newcomer learn about markdown and Steem, and the order along with example posts would be laid out in an official post. I would hope that this system of posting would help users to build a starting base of followers, to learn about how to format quality posts, to learn about Steem as a whole, and, most importantly, to earn author rewards along the way. I hope that other greeters might also support this idea, and maybe even help me in coming up with ideas for the posts/curating them. I was thinking there should be up to 10 posts in the achievement system. I will layout some of the ideas I have had here.

• Introduce yourself post (obviously)
• A post that demonstrates the basics of markdown (I will include a link to tutorials in the sample post)
• A post about a hobby or passion
• A post that demonstrates knowledge of the basics of Steem (I will include posts, as well as the white paper, in the sample post to read)
• A post after your first payout talking about your Steem experience
• A post about the first community joined
• A post talking about posts the user has curated (why they liked each post, who the author is, etc)

I am not sure if all of these will actually be the posts for this plan (maybe they will all be replaced with other ideas), but I wanted to list some ideas. Feel free to give me suggestions in the comments. Please feel free to give feedback on the whole plan. If you think something should be changed, don't hesitate to say so. I am concerned that it might create clutter, and would appreciate ideas on how to avoid that. Set up another community for these challenges? Require specific categories? Both? Something else?

Along with that plan, I would be glad to communicate with new users through comments, discord, and email to help them to learn as much as they can. I also hope to make tutorials, and semi-regular roundup posts (of some newcomer content I want to share) to encourage new users.

Edit

My time zone is Eastern Standard Time

Conclusion

I think that what makes a good community, is a good system to welcome new users. I don't think it is always enough to support introduceyourself articles. While those articles are incredibly important, they do not always demonstrate commitment, and they do not necessarily help a user to learn about the platform. I think a system like this one would do a good job at helping to retain users. It would help them to learn about the system, and most importantly make them feel welcome and included! While I have the time, I would love to contribute to this idea!

(Note) In order to encourage meaningful feedback on the platform, I will check comment trails of users who leave superficial comments (ie "Awesome post," or "Upvoted.") and will mute any users who exhibit a pattern of leaving "spammy" comments."