Can Resteems save SteemIt?

Steemit is a great platform. No doubt. But it has it’s fair share of challenges. Content Discovery is one of the major challenges that pretty much decides whether steemit can go mainstream or not. If you are a dolphin or a whale I am pretty sure that your content gets discovered easily and your followers vote up your post to make sure that it's worth the time that you have spent on creating the post. If you are a minnow you will know that writing a good post is not sufficient for your post be visible and get the attention it deserves. You will definitely need an upvote from a whale to reach out to a decent number of audience. I have seen many good authors reducing the frequency of their posts because their posts doesn't get the attention that it deserves. With swathe of new users joining the platform regularly the problem is only going to get bigger with every passing day. Many new users get restless very soon and it can have a negative impact on the platform.

Minnow's posts amongst whales posts :P

If you ask me to name one issue that steemit team should address immediately I would route for fixing the content Discovery problem. During the initial days of Steemit I don't think this was much of a problem considering that streamit was a closely knit community that pomoted good content and with rewards being higher during the initial days the problem didn’t get the attention it was suppose to. But with the number of users increasing at a steady pace and the content created on steemit increasing exponentially, there is a fair chance that your content gets lost in the swarm of new posts. While curation rewards addressed this problem initially, in today’s scenario I think there is a need for redesign of how curation rewards works and there needs to be a fundamental change in how people are rewarded for the curation work. As a part of curation upvotes make sure that authors gets reward when their content has gained visibility. But the challenge of getting the visibility for minnows posts is still un-addressed.

Incentivise Resteems

The sure shot way to solve the content discovery problem would be to promote resteeming. When I look at my own habbits I share a lot of posts on facebook, where as on steemit I don’t resteem enough posts. If you look at facebook like and share are two call to actions. You like a post as an acknowledgement and you share a post if you feel that your followers or friends will find it useful. Same is the case with upvote and resteem in steemit. But if you look closer by incentivising “Upvote” to a certain extent “Resteem” is being “Dis-incentivised”. You resteem a post only if you feel that it will really help your followers. The only way to balance this will be to increase weightage of resteems in curation rewards. Though the calculations might be difficult if steem it can identify who are playing the multiplier role in making a post reaching out to masses and reward them accordingly, there would be nothing like it. It would encourage minnows and whales to find good content and resteem them. This way users naturally start looking out for good content and good authors and not just the whales and their posts.

Prompt users to Resteem

While the above approach needs a lot of debate and might need a hardfork, a simple UI hack could start prepping the users for getting used to resteeming more often. I was looking at my own habbits on steemit and I realised that I upvote a lot of good content but I don’t necessarily resteem them. So I was thinking a little nod from steemit.com to resteem a post whenever I upvote a post, can remind me to resteem the post to make sure that it reaches out to more people in addition to just me rewarding the user.

I will be writing a follow up post on how to solve the Content Discovery problem using smaller hacks. But Resteem is something that we need to start pushing right away. What do you think? If you agree with my thoughts them Resteem.