10 ideas for STEEM

While reading about steemit and the STEEM blockchain, I started thinking about different possibilities for this technology.
The way I understood it, the idea of Steemit is to reward content creators, both by given the best ones more visibility (voting mechanism) and with tokens (financial rewards).

While anyone with half a brain can create their own custom token on the Ethereum platform, I think there is still value in having a token such as STEEM that can be used on multiple applications. For on, using STEEM is easier because the tokens are distributed by the blockchain and not by the user.

Here are some ideas for using STEEM. Some of them may already exist, others might not make any sense. I just wanted to share my thoughts to get ideas flowing and get some feedback from the community.

• Steem for restaurant reviews

I've been traveling a lot lately and using apps like Foursquare, Google and Facebook to find good places to eat. But Foursquare has lost popularity and doesn't have many new reviews. Facebook and Google reviews are infiltrated by marketers, so the ratings are useless.
It would be nice to have a platform where reviewers are rewarded for writing good reviews and sharing useful information.

• Steem for fitness activities

I'm a runner, cyclist and mountainbiker and share my activities on Strava and Runkeeper. Other people I know use Fitbit. Most of these platforms have a way of liking each other's activities. It would be an extra bonus to get a reward when finished a long workout in the means of Steem.
Not sure if this brings any value to other users but it would make the STEEM platform much more popular.

• Steem for news curation

Nowadays, when I read the news, there is so much fud, fake news, clickbait, ... I would just like to see news articles that are actually valuable to me. I want to select a topic and see the best recent news articles on this topic. I think Flipboard works a bit in this way where you can upvote shared content. Digg and Slashdot are also related.
Curating and sharing good news articles takes work because the user needs to go through the bad stuff before finding the good stuff, so it would make sense that those users would get rewarded with STEEM.

• Steem for hotel reviews

A bit similar to the idea about restaurant reviews. When visiting a travel website, how do you know if all reviews are genuine and how do you know the bad reviews aren't removed? If put on the STEEM blockchain, reviews can't be removed. And reviewers have an incentive to give a review, which brings value to the next person looking for a place to stay.

• Steem for photos

Sites like Flickr and now Instagram allow you to like each others photo, but the real money goes to the platform unless you start promoting some products in your photos, which takes away the idea of sharing great photos. Another example is Pinterest, but they also allow non-original content.
It would be nice to see a platform where users can share their original photos and get rewarded for sharing them. And somehow the blockchain can also act as a witness of who was the original creator (at least within the STEEM platform).

• Steem for book reviews

I love books and I like Goodreads, where you can find books and read other people's reviews. But the reviews themselves are not curated and the reviewers are not rewarded.

• FaceSteem

Create a network of friends and like their posts, but the best ones will be upvoted and rewarded and lame posts downvoted.

• Steem for volunteer work

I'm not sure how this would work, but if people could write about someone's volunteer work and the volunteer would get rewarded (not the writer), that would be a good way to reward all those people that help improve society and make othe people feel a little better. Maybe this one is a bit too far fetched for STEEM and needs a different token. Let me know what you think about it in the comments.

• Steem for poets

I'm not into poetry but some people are. And poets don't tend to make a lot of money. So a platform where poets can be rewarded would help them in improving their art.

• Steem for graphic artists

I like graphic art, street art, illustration and so on. But other than liking them or sharing on Pinterest, I don't have a good way to send them a little love. STEEM is perfect for rewarding good graphic art.

• Steem for cartoons

Who doesn't love those short cartoons that we used to see in newspapers, like Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert and many more. But who reads newspapers in the digital age? A lot of them used to be easy to read online, then via newsletters and now a lot of them are behind a paywall because it is so hard for the creators to make money out of their art (only the big ones do). I would love a website/app build upon STEEM where I can browse daily comics and reward them with STEEM!

What do you think about my 10 ideas? It was a quick brainstorm, some of them might be silly, others might not make sense for the STEEM platform. Let me know in the comment.

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