RE: Enhancements to improve fostering of communities in Steemit
Awesome topic! I agree with your proposed solutions for handling multiple languages, representation in comments and the option to give author rewards to comments. If I have one major criticism of Steemit, it's that there's not enough real reading and conversation, compared to the quantity of posts.
I've been thinking about how to spark more delving conversations. It's tricky. On one hand, controversial topics make sense because disagreement is the fastest route to interaction. On the other hand, collaboration and inspiration are ideal goals, not bickering. Collaboration is an umbrella goal that conversation seems to me to be a sub-category of. Even a good argument is a collaboration, to my mind. How to attain it is more confusing to me. How do we solve a problem as a community? I'd love to see a future where the answer is obvious.
It would be great to be able to add a like button or emoji set separate from upvoting. This way, I could go around liking casually, upvote when I'm impressed with the quality and share when I feel 100% behind what I've read. I think that everyone would feel more love this way and it would be easier to distinguish between loving your friends and upvoting quality.
Thank you for this thought provoking post!
I agree. There's considerate incentive for upvoting without reading just for curation rewards, and comment rewards which incentives generic "good post" comments.
That why I'm talking about communities, which make people gather around a niche generating real discussions.
Steemit doesn't quite offer the support for communities like subreddits do (tags are not quite there yet) which is something I've been thinking about and may write more in the future.
I was unaware that Reddit had solved that. Cool!
While it currently makes a lot of sense to use a wide variety of tags for optimal exposure, when a conversation is happening it tends to hone. For instance, I'm having a great discussion about mansplaining with @sic-savidicus. We're basically in agreement, but still discussing intelligently. It could be tagged under a variety of topics, but to get others who are genuinely interested in joining our discussion, we'd almost have to have posts going back and forth under a sub-topic instead of only comments on a single post. Individual posts rarely get the attention their content deserves. Connecting interested parties to the conversations that are happening would be easier if posts were individually relevant longer and if participants knew they'd be likely to get a response if they entered a conversation.
Thanks for engaging with me. :)