The Steemit Guild System
Steemit needs Guilds. Not like 'dragon-raiding-Guilds', but writing/art/niche development Guilds.
To accomplish this, there needs to be a core of whales, or an imported Whale. The role of this whale or group of whales will be to finance the development of talent and ideas within their chosen niche.
For instance, if someone who is really interested in toy trains wants to develop a community of content creators around that topic, they had better get busy and find a wealthy individual who ALSO loves toy trains to create a Steem account and buy enough Steem power to make a difference with their votes.
As is being discussed, the idea of sharing voting power has been presented. I think this could be a very useful tool in growing out the concept of 'guilds' within Steemit.
Individuals with promise could join these groups at will or leave, but whatever they create can be shared or even rewarded automatically among the rest of the guild's shared voting power via a programmable smart contract of percentage allocations to each account and how often their posts can be voted on.
This could and would create a situation where artistic work is subsidized through the free market. Whales would have a vested interest in seeing their particular 'guild' successful outside of their niche because it helps their content curation bonuses. They also get more quality content in their desired niche, while attracting more talent to write on those topics.
Getting an invitation into a guild with prominent whales could be the equivalent of being employed within the Steem platform.
As long as the content doesn't suck (subjectively), they can continue creating content that is all but guaranteed to get decent upvotes from their guildmates.
What are your thoughts?
Great idea. It's a better way of marketing the idea of patrons for each content category. Guilds are also pretty cool. Guilds could eventually counteract the influence of the lords ( whales).
More on guilds here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild
http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=lnq
Imagine guilds get into the habit of posting at a certain time together so they can capitalize on their guild's membership for upvoting before the bots jump in.
I thought this has been abstracted as the tagging system. People will self-organize and try to contact one another, maybe even end up doing most communications on steemit.chat. However, what you're getting at is some form of smart-contract. How do we avoid abuse of "non-valuable" content since there's an autovote element to it?
The Guilds must self-police. Each member of the guild would have economic incentives to do so, since the whale sponsor is sharing their voting power and well-upvoted content that is garbage would look bad for that guild
We just try it with a list of different tags so that posts do not go as fast under. The idea is very well accepted. Look at it once.
https://steemit.com/deutsch/@uwe69/deutsche-tag-auswahl-fuer-die-suche
"Getting an invitation into a guild with prominent whales could be the equivalent of being employed within the Steem platform."
Might there be a way to automate the "invitation" part. E.g. if a user posts enough articles on a given topic and gets a high enough reputation, they're in?
This is a great idea. It would open up more genres of content on steemit, and attract more users by having a larger variety of posts. I think the idea of trying to get whales to join and create communities that would promote certain topics of posts is a really cool idea!
Yeah, I thought of this before too!
I'm happy you made a post on it though. I'd love to join a proper guild for scifi stories, or poetry or whatever. I'd certainly make use of this feature.
I like this concept a lot @Blakemiles84 . I'm thinking the guilds might operate similar to how FB groups and G+ communities are currently functioning but with the learnings of what's wrong with them. Maybe there can be sale for certain guilds where you use your SP to acquire? As SteemIT evolves, there's no doubt that there will be influencers that will want to sponsor these guilds. Intriguing.
I like what you are suggesting, but I think what you are really describing is more about getting patrons to join the platform and up vote content in a particular niche. The interesting thing is the patrons can support things they believe in without having to give their money away and in fact they can make money from this process.
I absolutely endorse it. But how would someone find the cluster of posts representing that guild?
Or do you mean by the guilds considerable voting power the post would show up in the trending section?
It would be nice if we would have some kind of category system like reddit does.
Good idea and kind of a natural next step in the platform evolution.
But before that we need smaller steps like:
-organizing not only by tags but by categories, areas/subareas, points of interests for the users ( based on profiles), linking categories
Etc. :)