What Defines a Social Media Platform and How "Social" Steem Really is

I read in the morning an interesting post by @holm that not only triggered me to express my take on the subject in the comments section but also to write my own post around his idea. Hope he doesn't minds that and I encourage you to read the post. The article is about Steemit as an anti-social media platform which kind of sounds weird but has some seeds of truth in it. The main idea in the article is that on Steemit there is unfortunately way less interaction than on Facebook for example, there aren't groups like on Facebook where you can "hang around" with people like you and share ideas on different topic and I totally agree with @holm, although I am not using Facebook anymore for more than a year and not planning on getting back either. I actually only have twitter left, but that's another story. Coming back to the topic which is the lack of interaction in here and the weak feeling of community that we have on Steemit lately I can say that I see why and how that happens. First of all in here there aren't groups one can join and receive notifications from there and engage in discussions on the topics because the blockchain was simply not designed to work this way. There is discord, but I am not a fan of it and don't see it working either as well as the Facebook groups work. So, what do we have?

Well, we have our personal blogs on which we post whatever we want and feel like worth sharing and we have our feed where we can read what others posted and comment when we find like doing that and that's practically it. There are of course the upvotes that give value to a post and that's what probably, sometimes, ruins the interaction and the community feeling. Because many of us are focused on their blogs, spend some good amount of time writing or recording their posts, launch them in the Steem ecosystem and then that's pretty much it. Votes generally come on auto mode, especially if you are a high ranked user and so Steemit turns more into a selfish way, if I may call it selfish without exaggerating, of just earning Steem without enjoying too much what social media is supposed to be...which is being social. I understand how we got here also. In order to get those big upvotes most of us have to spend a serious amount of time to actually produce the article and then once it is posted who has the time left to read other posts and comment on them or even reply to his followers. It's not like we live, breathe and see only Steemit 24/7. I get that, but I still think that Steemit is well behind other social media platforms on the communication sector due to this aspects and that's not great but it can be improved of course. If I would write for example some type of a tweet post I would for sure be flagged because of spamming the platform, but sometimes all I have to say is three phrases on a topic that paint the image of that much better than a thousand words, but that's not quality according to "the old Steemit quality standards", isn't it?
However, if we could learn something from twitter, for example, is that very often short posts lead to almost endless true interactions and a lot of traffic on the platform while some looong bots boosted posts that we have on Steem only have 5-10 comments from which half might be the spammers type of great and informative post sir, so where's the social in social media on Steemit and what is there to be done to make it better?

First of all I think we should reconsider what quality actually means and if this type of short but interactive posts are spam or can and should actually bring more traffic on the platform and increase its value and use case. I know that Steemit was at first created as a blogging platform and generally people were creating blog posts at that time, but things are changing. Steem is changing and hopefully for the better. It is now the blockchain of DApps, as some say, and not only a simple blogging platform as it was in 2016 where people would just blog and get rewarded in Steem tokens for doing that, but some don't seem to get this yet. Even the old guys unfortunately. However, Ned(@ned) seems to get that pretty good as I saw quite a few times posts of him consisting of just a pic and some thoughts which were pretty similar to tweets and Facebook posts and what's wrong with that? Facebook and twitter are two of the most successful social media platforms so I don't see why not borrow some of their features and trends and the way we post and consider a quality post should be one thing we should borrow because in my opinion interaction should be an importan criteria that gives value to a post and its deserved upvotes. I am aware though that when you agree on this tweet type of posts "to not be spam anymore" and "allow them" you will probably have tons of such posts but at the same time I think that solutions can be found to counteract that too and such users to be automatically muted on the platform and their posts hidden just to make things clear and clean. Yes, Steemit and Steem should be a "free world of express" and not only to the wealthy ones , but that doesn't mean it should become a spammers paradise either.
Bottom line I think that Steem, the blockchain, has a promising future ahead with the launch of SMTs which are a few months away and who know what other improvements but I don't think we should neglect the social media quality of this blockchain which is what defines a community the best and it's not great at all for the moment, but with a lot of potential to worked on. Now, I don't want to make this post any longer than it already is so I hope I haven't bored you with my thoughts and I would highly appreciate your comments on the topic.

Source of images: https://pixabay.com/

Thanks for your attention