12 ideas to improve Steemit
Some of these improvements have been suggested before by myself and others, but I feel it's still important to reiterate them to remind the admins these issues are still important to the user base.
1: The value of whale upvotes needs to be nerfed more, and minnow votes need to be worth more. Right now I'm practically obligated to pay for whale votes, which makes the rich, richer without having to do any work. God knows how many whales are scamming the system by upvoting themselves and other whales. It's only a matter of time before a handful of millionaires buy up a ton of Steem and aggressively scam the system to death. That's not a vulnerability the admins want to leave unplugged.
2: Alternately, or in addition to #1, I would like to see upvoting power be based more on community involvement than by the value of your Steem power. Every time you vote, you decide what content is most valuable and thus what content is most likely to appear on Steemit in the future. With the current system, you can buy $30k worth of Steem power, and make your vote count more than the people actively building the community. If this continues, Steemit will stagnate in a downward spiral of insincerely jerking off rich people. If the power is put in the hands of content creators and curators, then consumers will turn to them. Then Steemit will revolve around increasing the quality of posts that are relevant to the topics users value most.
3: Give users a dedicated profile page, not just a banner. If we're going to build a community, we need to get to know each other better. We need something that looks like a dating profile or a Linkdin profile.
4: Give users a customizable table of contents page that gives easy access to their posts, organized by topic, date, upvotes and comments.
5: Give users more community building tools, like the ability to join tribes or circles or communities. These communities should have their own profile page and member lists as well. The tribes should be able to make private and public feeds.
6: Give users a graphical interface that allows them to subscribe to forum feeds like Reddit, so I can narrow down the content that shows up on my wall to only the topics and people I care about.
7: Give users a karma or reputation score on certain topics, like "philosophy," "cryptocurrency," or "photography." Then let users sort those categories by the "local heroes" of that topic. This way, niche authors don't have to compete against the juggernauts of the cryptocurrency categories.
8: Give users the ability to subscribe to, or limit seeing posts from, different countries or regions of the world. Maybe have a sliding scale. I'm a little interested in Southeast Asia. So I don't want to block posts from there completely, but I don't want 80% of my feed to be in Korean, any more than a non-English speaking Korean wants their feed to be 80% English articles about America.
9: Give users a way to toggle their feed wall, so that they can see shared links (like Reddit), original content posted on Steemit, or a mixed view that shows both.
10: Give users a robust service-based market place like Fiverr that accepts Steem as payment. A crytpocurrency that can't be spent is more like a penny stock than a currency. Steem will never be worth as much as Bitcoin until it can be spent at as many places as Bitcoin. In order for people to accept Steem as currency, they need to see people using it as currency. If Steemit empowers its users to be able to buy and sell services internally, it will set an invaluable precedent in establishing Steem as a legitimate currency and not just a speculative investment in a gimmicky social media site.
11: Give users a robust phsycial-goods-based marketplace like Etsy... for all the same reasons stated above. There's currently a Steemit tool that allows this, but you might not know it exists or where to find it, because there's no link to it from your main page. That needs to be fixed before Steemit can fulfill its potential.
12: Give users the ability to limit what kind of bots have access to interact with their account. I want plaigarism-checking bots to have access to interact with everyone's account, but I don't want regular users to have the ability to spam me with meaningless comments begging for upvotes. I don't want Randowhale to be able to automate selling its votes, because that just creates economic inequality, as users sell their hard earned cash in exchange for slices of the voting pool Randowhale didn't have to do anything to earn other than have a fat bank account.
If you liked this post, you may like these:
Maximum revenues for posts. Not showing amounts of the upvotes gathered. Not showing reputation. Autofiltering/junking of reposts. There are a lot of things that could help Steemit to become less burdened by the flaws of human nature (of course, I also confess 😄).
I like the idea of maximum revenues for posts. How did I not think of that?
#1: I kinda disagree because the big accounts get there for a reason, right? I see it on every social media channel that people use to complain that the biggest accounts get the biggest part of the cake. But dont they deserve it for their dedication?
#2: But this is the rule of Steemit and honestly I would do it this way too. I mean... I would like to have my community invest in me and support the ones who do.
#3: Yes, I would love that.
#4: Great idea!
#5: Good idea but our community is maybe not big enough to split the attention. Great idea for later.
#6: Kinda cool but... I rather have the content of this platform in focus. So we all can get more of this platform. Let the other platforms co-exist.
#7: hmm.. no opinion about this xD
#8: Love this idea
#9: Would be cool
#10: YES, YES, YES!
#11: Agree
#12: Absolutely!!!!!!
Thank you for this great post and suggestions. I cant wait to see this platform grow and evolve.
Those ideas are frigging brilliant and if you ever run for president I will vote for you :)
Lots of good ideas here. I completely agree about a separation, like subreddits. I also think there should be a way to downvote, but not flag.
I've thought about how we should have a way to downvote but not flag, but I forgot when I wrote this. I've also thought you could take that to the next level. Be able to upvote and downvote based on abuse, relevance, editorial quality, sourcing quality, agreeability, etc. Value is multifaceted. So we should be able to vote accordingly.
Some of your points are good, but others to do with the economy don't really take into account how this economy comes about.
The money that people get from upvotes comes from investors money. Without the investors we don't have any money.
The investors take a risk in investing in this form of cryptocurrency social media. There was no guarantee that it will succeed. They could lose all their money.
The magic behind the system is Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS). This is a flexible, scaleable, low energy way of running a blockchain. It is a departure from Proof of Work, which requires huge outlays in mining equipment and electricity costs. DPOS requires people to have a stake to guarantee the integrity of the system. Without the stakeholders their would be methods of gaming the system that would cause the system to fail completely.
This is the technology we have bought into. New technology is on the way, some of which will improve the Steem blockchains functionality. For now though, this is a system that is working.
"Steemit will stagnate in a downward spiral of insincerely jerking off rich people. "
Don't look now, this is already happening:
https://steemit.com/curation/@lexiconical/exposing-advertiser-circle-jerks-in-trending-reward-pool-rape-and-bookingteam-com
#7 is an amazing idea.
Many of your other ideas seem to be somewhat anti-capital. I've noticed a distinct anti-capital bias on Steemit, as people seem to resent whales.
Whales have more say in real life too, and it's not as transparent as Steemit. I don't think Steemit was designed to equalize everyone's stake - not according to the white paper at least.
We need to attack the kind of systematic, large abuse that I noted in my article link above much more than we need to worry about whale stakes, IMO.
I appreciate the fact that every time you comment on my posts, your ideas are relevant and meaningful. I read your other article, and it resonated with me, because I've seen the same vacation rental posts and thought, "Oh, shit. Someone figured out they can get away with stealth advertisement. I hope this isn't the start of a trend."
I try to tell myself that increasing abuse is inevitable, means increasing user interest, and may not be that bad of a thing.
Unfortunately, it's hard when my posts aren't making anything anymore and copy-pasta is rakin' in the bucks.
Great ideas! Totally agree on all of them.
Randowhale is a smart cookie!
some great ideas :)
Many good ideas. Excellent work.
The two suggestions that are concerning are trying to limit whales power and trying to limit bots. Effectively both are censorship. Which never ends well.
It is definitely an intriguing idea to try to limit whales power, particularly when you are a minnow. But will you still feel the same when you are a dolphin?
STEEM On!!
Someone could buy $10 million in Steem and make their upvote worth $1,000. That obviously can't work for the platform. Even a $50 vote is insane. If we maxed out voting power at $10 or $20, I wouldn't feel butt hurt about capping out.
Future isn't all bad if we can attract $10M of Steem investment at a single swoop. If the goal is to maximize price of Steem.
If you are investing in the platform, with either your time or your money (or both), then actions that increase the value of the platform should be perceived as positive.
STEEM On !!