How to make Steemit better

Some thoughts on how to retain old users, get new ones and increase user activity.

Problem: Noise-to-signal ratio is too high

Currently Steemit offers everything for everybody. That doesn't work, because people want to focus stuff that they are interested in. There are some who are constantly searching for something new, but most of us are not like that. Usually we just want to read about stuff that we already know we are going to like.

Focus on subcommunities, not individual users

We should be able to subscribe to tags and not only follow authors. Sometimes I feel that following individuals make Steemit more like a reality tv show where people are constantly fighting for everybody's attention.

Steem is not a one community, we are too big for that. We need to separate different topics much better than we are currently doing. It's too much noise here, it takes too long to find the stuff that a user wants to read.

Think about Reddit – users are subscribing to subreddits they like so they don't have to read everything.

This decreases conflicts because users who disagree with each other don't see their posts.

This is why I don't think curation guilds will be a huge success for Steem – probably a little bit helpful but not going to do much. Curation guilds won't help to build the community, they help only some users to get more money.

Focusing on communities will help new users also to find upvoters and followers. When the best way to get lots of upvotes is to get lots of followers, it basically means that you have to be famous before you can earn money. But if users are mostly following topics/tags, they will notice newbies much more easier. Your first post can become successful if you post it to an active subcommunity where everybody will see it. Currently lots of newbies go unnoticed because it's really difficult to reach the audience that they are writing for.

This the priority of preferences how I'd like to use Steemit:

1. Read posts published under a tag I've subscribed to and written by an author I'm following. I want to get notified when posts like these are published because it's highly likely that I'll like them. I want to get notifications even when I'm not on Steemit.com (email and RSS feed are good choices for me).
2. Read posts published under a tag I've subscribed to. Like a subreddit or a group in Facebook. I don't need notifications for these posts, but I want to see them first when I'm browsing Steemit.com.
3. Read posts by a followed author. When I've read all the posts that I most likely want to read, I will check if my favourite writers have written something on other topics that I might enjoy.

This way Steemit could offer users want they want to see and more chances to actually build subcommunities. It's double win.

Currently the tag system doesn't work like it should. Only the most active tags are shown and the rest have to be bookmarked or searched. To see what are the most active tags is not helpful for me.

Support for other languages

There is a lot of demand for Steemit in other languages besides English. We need to make it available in the UI. Some people are already writing posts in other languages like Chinese but currently Steemit doesn't handle it well. I don't understand Chinese so I don't want to see Chinese posts. It's just noise for me and decreases my user experience.

One reason why I haven't been active here lately is that there have been more stuff I've wanted to discuss in Finnish. But because there is no reasonable way of building Finnish community on Steemit I've used other social media platforms.

What are our core strengths?

Instead of complaining, which many seem to be doing nowadays, focus on what works right now. User activity has been declining, but there are still users here. Why? Can we make Steemit even better for the most active users? What differentiates Steemit from all other platforms? What is our niche? Maybe there are several niches?

One target group could be all those people around the world who can't currently discuss freely and openly. Steem is uncensorable and this is one of our core strengths. We should be making it clear to the world instead of focusing on how to make money by writing.

Don't get me wrong, earning money is great, but it's not the only thing Steem is build for. Let's try to get whistle-blowers to Steem, this is perfect platform for them. It is why adding support of other languages is also very important. Some of the societies that mostly need free and open platform don't speak English.

I'd guess that demand for uncensorable discussion is also high among people who don't like how platforms like Twitter and Facebook are using their algorithms to distort discussions. But first we need better ways to build communities until we can handle a lot of people who have strong opinions. We have already seen how much "normal" users dislike some individuals like @dollarvigilante. We need to have ways to completely separate discussions about cryptoanarchy and gardening.

Have people forgotten the steem dollar? You know, the fast, free and price-stable cryptocurrency? We should be building more usecases for it to create the network effect. Steem is a platform that combines open and free discussion/publishing and a payment network. I think this is one of our core strength that deserves more attention. Why people are not buying and selling stuff with SD?

Especially people in countries with financial problems and banking restrictions should be made known about the possibilities of steem dollar. It might be a great way to fund whistle-blowers or other dissidents and rebels too. Just remember that there is no privacy.

I'm not worried about the future – at least not yet.

Some people seem to be panicking because the price has been declining. I've seen so many cryptoprojects and they will always go up and down.

It's through trial and error until we find a system that will answer to a demand, it will satisfy some kind of niche. Worst thing people can do right now is to focus on complaining about the price or how stupid other users are.

In times like this it should be priority to focus on our strengths: we have an amazing piece of blockchain tech that is getting even better soon.

The fundamentals of the Steem blockchain are still very strong. Problems are mostly in the user interface/experience.