3 Things I'd Like to See in Steemit's Roadmap, 10 Days From Now
According to a comment from @ned, on this post, by @schattenjaeger, the long awaited Steemit roadmap for 2017 will be out in about 10 days.
To be honest, I like the fact that decision makers in charge of Steemit are not rushing it. We're in a very volatile market and opportunities may appear at any moment.
Take that Medium stuff, for instance. If you don't know what I'm talking about, recently Medium announced they'll scale down their operations, by letting go of 50 people, because they business model - advertising - seems to be inefficient. After his public announcement, the founder of Medium was pretty much hammered with suggestions on he should follow the Steemit way, somehow, by integrating the technology, by merging, etc. Nobody knows if this will happen, or if there are any official talks about that, but my point is these situations can appear at any moment and in order to make the best out of them, one must be flexible and adjust fast.
Now, back to the roadmap.
Since we know it's gonna be out in 10 days, let's speculate a bit. It's Friday evening, it's been a long week and we can all afford a little bit of daydreaming (or eveningdreaming, to be politically correct).
Here are 3 things that would be very neat to see - at least for me - in the upcoming roadmap:
1. Integrated Marketplace
It may happen in many ways: by acquiring PeerHub, by integrating some open source marketplace code with Steemit codebase or by building it from scratch. Having a marketplace will work wonders for users retention here. Steemit is in the unique position of offering people money first, and only then something to buy with them. Most businesses work the other way around.
Joke aside, I can clearly see a huge benefit by having a marketplace built into the core Steemit codebase.
2. Direct Advertising
By direct advertising I'm thinking of a way to let writers "co-brand" with certain advertisers, which will then have a visual on their page. It will be a transparent way of promoting brands or products and I think everybody will have something to win. I can even think of a way to let people know that some posts are already paid, by having an extra option for rewards (besides declining payout, 50/50 and 100% SP). It can be something like: "post pre-paid with 100 Steem by advertiser name".
Advertisers can also be contributors to the reward pool, in the same transparent way. Instead of having roughly $7000 per day as reward pool, as we have right now, they could contribute, let's say, an extra $3000/day and choose which tags / authors will they allow their pool to be shared with.
Something like that.
3. Oficial Curation Guilds
Given the link between SP and curation rewards, I think the platform needs a built in mechanism for creating and managing curation guilds. As the platform grows and people will have less and less time to get involved directly, it only makes sense to automate a part of their activities, but in a sensible, manageable and transparent way.
Again, there are many ways in which curation guilds can be implemented and we already saw at least 2 projects gaining visibility in this area (Streemian.com and SteemVoter.com). That means there is already a demand from the market for such a service.
Ok, now it's your turn. Name at least one thing that you would like to see in the upcoming roadmap.
Let the games of speculation begin!
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
My top includes:
< insert ^THIS image >
I want a profile page that I can customize as the 'face' I present to the public. My avatar is insufficient, even with it's super powers.
Hi, @seablue! Just in case you haven't seen it, I have a "workaround" for that:
Help Your Readers, Help Yourself - Today's Tip for an "Easy STEEMIT Hack"
I'd love to hear what you think about it, and how your vision of a profile page would differ? ;)
That is an excellent idea, @creatr
Thanks! If you try it out, I'd love to see your "front page." ;)
Good point.
I see we overlap on all 3: marketplace, advertising and curation guilds. Also, flagging / downvotes is a really important issue.
I agree with you the list seems right on
Centralized curation guilds are a great idea in my opinion. The biggest turn off for new users is not gaining even pennies on their first couple posts (after their introduction post that is). If there was a way the Steemit.inc main account could be used to vote hundreds or even thousands of posts (at 1% or something like that) every day, I think that would go far in our user retention problems. I think that and steem not being nearly distributed enough are the site's two biggest problems.
Look at @timcliff commentary about an integrated onboarding system. I think the Steemit.inc account as a pico-faucet for their first 10-12 posts could be integrated with that, and possibly with gamification. But we must also be mindful about the effect of "habituation". If people get used to being paid no matter what, once they're out, "in the wild", the effect of the real world will hit back in.
I think all three of them are good ideas.
It would be nice to see them implemented.
tipping https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/let-s-get-tipping-going-on-steemit
marketplace
curation guilds ( trustless at blockchain level)
Some good points @dragosroua.
What I'd really like to see is some personalisation options.
I'd like to be able to have my own mini-website that I can make my own - put my own picture on it, put links to stuff that I want to promote so people don't have to scroll for miles to find something I posted a few days ago.
Or so I can cross pollinate with other Steemians. sure I can resteem a post, but it has no context. I can't gather a bunch of posts from different authors together and present it in a static way. i could put it in a post but that will disappear in a couple of days and all that work is lost.
With my own site i can put this page up and continually add to it. Think of it as micro-curation. the posts that I'm interested in are brought to the surface and presented as a collection. so if you follow me and a re interested in the same things as me, this is like have another set of very specific tags for posts.
It will also let you differentiate yourself. Right now my blog looks like everyone else's blog. It does not reflect the amount of effort I put into it. With my own micro-site i can display the amount of effort I put into Steemit, and in that way (potentially) those who put in the effort have better looking pages, attract more followers and make more money.
So there you have it, my idea for the road map - in a concise ramble. ;-)
That sounds very good. There is a project, called Reprint, by @jesta, which allows you to integrate Steemit with your own blog. I don't know the status of the project, but it looks like something that you would like to build on.
Groups, of course. I don't think Steem can scale for big masses without them. Better to implement them sooner than later.
Just wrote a post about it: Feature I'd like to see in the roadmap: Steemroom (group functionality in the blockchain)
Yeap, groups have been mentioned by a few other people. Thanks for joining the conversation and for making your voice heard. The more we express our intentions and expectations, the higher the chances that they will be, eventually, implemented.
Any comments on the feature itself? You think it would work well if it's implemented in a way I've described it?
I'll probably publish a feature proposal in GitHub to get more attention from the devs. It would be great to hear before that if there is any flaws in my thinking. Or something other that is essential for groups to be functional in Steem.
I will look over it in more detail later on and leave you a comment.
Thanks! Here is little bit more information, earlier I was thinking about this from a perspective of ownable tags.
AKASHA already implemented tags that can be owned, but I don't think thy have the whitelisting thing in place. Ownable tags could go very well with direct advertising.
I think the second idea may greatly help in building up the community! But all three ideas are great!
A FB style wall where you can write direct to the Account holder.
And the ability to Click on a Tag and get every Article with that just Tag showing.
At the moment if you click on Story you get a couple and then a mishmash of other Tags. Otherwise I agree with a lot of what has been suggested.
Tag disambiguation, I need this too, I find a hard time finding some articles some time, although I know they are under that specific tag.
I'm with you on Curation Guilds. That's been on the waiting list for far too long... If I were to pick 3 things I would say
There are also lots of frontend features I'd like to see like About pages for users to link their best posts, a feed that shows what users are voting for, a checkbox for resteems, and PERKS! I would love to have some perks that you have to work your way up to by powering up.
Edit: I want to add
4. SMART VOTES
I hope we can finally have an upvote downvote system that ends the social stigma attached to the flag.
To be honest I agree so far with both you and @timcliff, wondering if there is a way to setup something kind of temporary map, and maybe update it as it goes, lets say an outside calendar like a school calendar that can have let say
xyztask is expected to be finished on xx/xx/xxxx UTC and show progress reports as they actually work on the task this way we as users can have an idea of what is being worked on and what is already on the consideration list. Only add the dates for completion to the tasks that are being worked on, and have a voting system so users can vote on tasks that want improve to give the dev team an idea of the big things people want. Also a suggestion form, so others can leave their suggestions to be reviewed.A gantt chart showing the amount of tasks covered so far would be very nice, I agree. Never saw it in any public project I followed, but hey, we're Steemit, let's keep innovating! :)