Hi All,

It's been 3 weeks now since I finally discovered and started using SteemIT, and I figured it would be a good time to note down some of my thoughts, from a software and service perspective.

I've worked in and around software for the better part of 15 years, so I get into the habit of almost subconciously reviewing any software that I use.

I came into it with a familiarity of the Reddit Experience - so some of what I write may be somewhat influenced by my years using reddit.

Tags

I like the tag functionality, but I really feel it is very incomplete. It is nice to be able to tag a post with multiple categories, but it feels kind of pointless when it is so unintuitive to explore content of a particular tag - unless that tag is one of the popular ones. I've found myself creating bookmarks for things like https://steemit.com/created/australia, https://steemit.com/created/melbourne, https://steemit.com/created/epl etc.

I would love to be able to subscribe to a set of tags - and be able to browse these tags easily with the same filters that are currently available in my feed (trending, created, promoted, hot), as well as a unified view that will run these filters across ALL of my tags in the one feed. This is similar to how reddit provides a "Front Page" view that displays content to your subscribed "subreddits". I feel that this feature is essential - and unfortunately missing.

I also feel like it is pointless enforcing lowercase sensitivity on tags. They should just not be case sensitive. So "Australia" and "australia" should be the same tag. This is problematic when using on a mobile phone, as a lot of mobile keyboards like to capitalise first letters of sentences.

In general, I find it quite difficult to find new good content. The trending section seems to show more or less the same content that you've seen in prior days (maybe it needs to change to a 12 or 24 hour cycle?) and the created stuff shows a lot of content I'm not even remotely interested in.

There seems to be a lot of content in other languages - which is fine, but maybe it would be nice if we could filter this out (or in, if you're looking for content of a certain language, it would be mutually beneficial).

I'm not sure how NSFW content gets tagged, but i've seen some slip into my feed despite my settings requiring my interaction to view some of these - has been potentially a potentially sticky situation when browsing on my lunchbreak at work

Economy/Reputation

I've lumped these two together because they're so intertwined. This is really where SteemIt is unique. It makes people accountable for the quality of not only their posts, but their comments. I think the concept is fantastic. However, it's not perfect (and I'm not suggesting I know how to perfect it).

The concept of "whales" is often discussed here. People who have put the time in to post quality content over an extended period of time are obviously rewarded for doing so. That is fine by me. And by extension, they're seemingly given responsibility of almost moderating content post by "minnows". This is in theory fine, but it can be somewhat problematic, potentially.

I think there's a case to argue that this kind of arrangement could lead to some sort of censorship. I haven't been around long enough to know whether that is the case, but in theory, people who come on here and post unpopular opinions might be somewhat silenced. These could be technology related viewpoints, or geopolitical/religious perspectives on contentious topics. I would hate to see peoples potential earning be affected just because they put time and effort to express a perspective that is unpopular.

I also wonder how it could be potentially influenced by people who come in with a lot of money. If I invest $1M into STEEM, I would be able to power it up to have some heavy hitting voting weight - and that will in turn help me grow my respect as people start to gravitate to those that have awarded high yielding votes. Could this become an issue once SteemIt becomes more mainstream, and some of the corporations get involved?

I do think downvoting is an issue - the fact that anyone can essentially see who has downvoted them, could lead to the potential of retaliatory downvotes. If you downvote someone with a lot more reputation than yourself, than I imagine that would not fare well for your own reputation. This pretty much means that the "whales" will proceed without any criticism whatsoever.

In general, it takes a bit of time, as a new user, to make sense of voting power, voting weight, reputation, and how they relate, and impact on not only your time on SteemIT, but the impact it has on your future earnings potential. It is clear that there are a lot of new users that don't understand what all of this means, and how to best utilise it.

There also seems to be a bit of conjecture about converting SBD to steem vs using the market place - I've read people say they get a 1/1 rate, which I find hard to believe as they would be foregoing a 5x return in conversion.

The Wallet in general can be quite confusing - especially in the early days. Trying to work out the difference between STEEM, STEEM Power, SBD, is all a bit much. I think i'm mostly there now - after reading the FAQ over and over again, and constantly searching for posts that describe these things. To date I sitll don't know if my account value is represented in USD.

The market is pretty cool - but it can be improved - i'd love to see a SBD vs STEEM timeline chart - and maybe the ability to edit your orders (instead of cancelling an reordering which is what I currently do if I wish to change the price of an order)

Feature set

I find that the feature set is still somewhat incomplete, (I'm not sure how often SteemIt is actively developed/improved - there could be better comms relating to this - There's the project manager in my coming out). I have however found that a lot of things I'd like to do/view are available through third party tools. Whilst this works, the end result is that i have a collection of services I use sporadically.

Steemd is great, as I pretty much use that to check if I have any new activity that I need to be aware of. The notifications within SteemIt are sketchy at best, so Steemd fills this void.

SteemVis provides great to view your pending payouts, but it's quite simple. I'd love to see some sort of time based progress of payout, voting weight and reputation analysis. I don't knsow of any service that offers this currently.

busy.org is an alternative UI for SteemIT - I use it mainly to check the rewards relating to a post - it provides a breakdown of which users vote contributed to most of the reward.

SteemWhales is nice, but runs quite slow, at least or me. It provides a visualisation of the distribution of reputation, account value, and a whole lot of other parameters, also presenting the evolution over time of all of the above. It doesn't seem to include my own username however - instead advising that if my account is real it will be added within 2 minutes. It's been like this for over a week.

I've had a play around with a couple of the mobile apps available on android - so far I've opted to continue with the mobile web based SteemIt experience.

If there are any other services that I haven't listed - it's because I don't know about them - it would be great if you could tell me about them in the comments below.

Overall

I'm pretty impressed with the service overall - it is quite revolutionary. I've used reddit A LOT less in the past few weeks, an do do feel inclined to put a bit more time and effort into my posts when there's the potential to earn some sort of income as a result. It would be interesting to see how this evolves as it will undoubtedly become more popular over time.

Here's to hoping being a relatively early adopter provides future benefits.