RE: Specialization - jump starting new steemit sub-communities and creating insurmountable obstacles for others
I think this is first and foremost a UI issue. We need better community building tools. Right now Steem is just one big community where everything is visible to everybody. That can't work in the long run – and I'd say it doesn't work even now, we are too big to be one unified community.
What I want to see is some way of building communities where users don't have to care what is happening in the rest of the blockchain. They see only posts and comments from their own community members. That is the only way Steem can create an environment for flourishing communities.
Steem frontpage is a real problem currently. It shows everything to everybody, even when the posts are written in a language that user doesn't understand. Either the trending-algorithm has to be changed or the whole frontpage has to be rebuild.
When everything is shown for everybody, something really important or cool can be missed. For example well known AI-researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky made a few great posts couple of days ago but almost nobody did notice them. We need a way for good writers to find easily a community where they can share their texts, to be seen and get feedback. Now this system is just a one big mess.
filtering by tags and customized view in UI is certainly one part of the solution, but if speciality content writers are getting $1.23 per post, it wont make sense for them as they can probably get more advertising revenues on their own blog site.
Now that steemit.com is open source, one thing that can be done is a new site created for each category, so the front page would show content catering to that demographic.
We have the tools already, so I guess one action item is to create a website with a #trading-centric view as #trading is one of the key speciality categories.
Hopefully we can get a volunteer to fork the steemit.com site and make the required changes for this
I don't think it's really that difficult to do it on Steemit.com. It has to be done someday anyway, this site will become useless when we have ten times more active users here if it stays in it's current form.
Speciality content producers will get paid once we have some way for them to be seen (by people who want to see them). Now it's pretty much impossible for an unknown noob to get paid. It's just pure luck if they manage to get to the frontpage and earn big money because of that.
hence my proposal