The Problem: Platform Does Not Encourage Powering Up or Activity
Upvoting famous bloggers has succeeded in getting good content here and probably lifted the user count.
But these authors have no incentive to power up. They make good money and increase Steem power by writing. It's so easy for them to get Steem power they sell it every day. The reputation and feeds system encourage curators to vote for sure things and so once an Author has a track record it's a nice business for them.
The Gamification Solution: Get People to Want to Increase Steem Power.
When I joined I quickly tired of seeing no impact from voting and wanted to give at least 1c in value.
Highlight the Steem power needed to get to one cent votes.
Perhaps a button that says make your vote count 1 cent and tell them how much they need to buy and give them an address to send the amount of Bitcoin.
Highlight the User Categories
We already have them let's make them a status symbol. Show each users category (dust etc) on every post. When they make the next catoegory give them a bonus. Maybe every day someone moves up there is a steemd post with everyone who leveled up and the sbd from the post are distributed evenly to those leveled up.
The Curation Solution: Curation Rewards only if Post Exceed the Average of last 5 Post
Take these forfeited curation rewards and pad the curation rewards of the above average posts. This will
- Discourage camping out on the feed for curation rewards it should distribute votes more evenly.
- Force you to read to see if it's better or worse than average. It makes it more of a game. Show the average next to the rep score to help? Will it be better or worse? That's fun.
- Give people an advantage vs computers. it takes more thought ( or more complex peg ramming) to win curation.
- Make curation profitable for smaller $100-1000 accounts that have time to read.
Interesting ideas.
I think increasing active users is number one issue for steemit now.
With synereo coming in September it's important to get activity levels up or all those users we educated on blockchain social networks will go to snyereo and get paid to read. There is going to be a fight for "drivers" ala uber and drivers are readers not posters
https://steemit.com/steemit/@dennygalindo/synereo-a-real-threat-paid-to-read-easier-than-pay-to-vote
I agree with you that finding active users - and, more specifically, active readers, - is Steemit's biggest challenge right now. Without an extrinsic source of demand (like the Steemit account buying SP with funds used to sell advertising) it's going to struggle against the power law distribution of rewards to persuade people to power up.
Users might be satisfied with blogging-as-a-rewards-card if overall quality was obviously on an upwards trajectory, but curation is not working that well right now (more like a rich-get-richer scale-free-network than a meritocracy) and so, if you were judging by the trending page, you'd think that quality was going down not up.
Both Synero and Yours.network look like they could challenge Steem if those problems don't get ironed out.
Changed the front picture.
this has some of the same topics.https://steemit.com/steemit/@r4fken/steemit-proposal-further-gamification-of-steemit-we-need-badges-and-stats-achievements-scores-medals#@dennygalindo/re-r4fken-steemit-proposal-further-gamification-of-steemit-we-need-badges-and-stats-achievements-scores-medals-20160823t144200162z
My new idea on activity. https://steemit.com/steem-ideas/@dennygalindo/steem-idea-ways-to-increase-active-users-activity-lotto