This Is Why Communities Should Be A Top Priority!
In case you don't know, "communities" is a steemit feature that was supposed to be activated by late 2017 - early 2018. What this feature will do is make Steemit easier to navigate, by making it more "reddity", offering the option to members to create and moderate their very own communities, much like the subs on reddit.
However, it's now mid March and judging from the announcements made by @steemitblog it feels like it will take quite a while until communities materialize.
From my interactions on the platform and reading other peoples blogs, it seems to me like most people here seem to be more excited about SMTs rather than communities. Heck, even the two latest post by @steemitblog is only about tokens! But if you ask me, it's communities that have the potential to bring Steemit to the masses and make it one of the top sites.
Why? Take for example the political sub /thedonald/ from reddit:
As you can see, just that one sub from reddit has probably more active users than the entire Steemit! And this is a sub targeted to a very specific demographic that only talk about one topic! As for more "family-friendly" content, like the today I learned sub, the numbers just get crazy:
Of course politics, til and funny cats are one reason behind the huge success of Reddit. But what I think makes it really stand out compared to other social media sites like facebook are the thousands of small and sometimes odd communities that spontaneously form.
Some, like ToasterRights and PicsOfDeadToasters, which serve a purely, I hope, comedic factor:
Others, like CarpetsforAirports which are just weird:
And some, like the quite popular dragonsfuckingcars(!), that humans words aren't enough to describe:
Even the weirdest weirdo can find a sub on reddit and feel part of a larger community!
Regardless of what you think about the above places, all the people there have something in common. They have found their own community and unlike the majority of people on Steemit, they don't create content expecting to make money. They create content to have fun and interact with other people. They do it for the lulz or whatever.
This is in my opinion what Steemit seriously lacks at the moment. We have too many people who have joined this place just to make money forgetting the most important thing. To have fun. Steemit is first a social media/blogging platform. Making money is an added benefit. And if you don't have fun... content gonna suck.
And this is why for the most part, Steemit is boring. Even the trending page is depressing, probably the worst front page in the entire internet! Even the occasional new guy that pops in there ( typically thanks to bid bots) doesn't bother to take the extra mile to write something worth reading..
Communities are one of the few things that can actually make steemit more fun and bring the masses. With all the censoring going on facebook, twitter and youtube I am sure thousands of people want to jump ship and bring their friends along them. But as is, the tagging system offered by Steemit can't offer them a viable alternative. Everything is just lost at the sea of spam, plagiarism and the occasional post that is actually good.
I guess my point is tokens are good but last time I checked Steemit is supposed to first be a Blockchain-based "blogging and social networking website". I would prefer to see it first become more social and then see other features like SMTs. Or at least for people to discuss and request this feature more often!
Do you agree? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
"Even the weirdest weirdo can find a sub on reddit and feel part of a larger community!"
Really? Even me? I could find a home on reddit?
I'm all ears :-)
Hahahaha! where do you get these things? you comments are always funny each time trump posts. lol
It's just how he was born. Poor creature :(
lol! actually, i think he's cool. adds a certain colour to the comment section. lol. i'll be looking out for this. Dude seems to have the perfect picture and meme for every conversation. and a darn good text to back it up. lol
yes my friend, even you!
https://www.reddit.com/r/earrumblersassemble/
&
https://www.reddit.com/r/amiugly/
(closest things I could get :P)
All ears indeed! Lol
Hahahahahaha Until my stomach pains laugh.
You are of course 100,000,000% right (if that's possible), however I have come to realise that the Steemit monster moves very slowly indeed.
I used to get frustrated and angry at the apparent lack of interest from the Steemit team to listen to the community and improve the system and ultimately grow it.
However I have since read 'Dreaming In Code', and I now realise that this is what happens with an open source system. There are no financial incentives, nor are there imposed deadlines which if not met, can kill the project.
This generally means that things will take a lot longer than in a traditional corporate environment.
So where does that leave us? I guess in exactly the same place, but with a bit more understanding. Communities will come eventually, maybe next week, maybe next year, but they'll come. :0)
Cg
Sure enough. Anticipating that
You are so right! I really like to replace Facebook. The #tags can not do that job in that way.
It is too much about tokens, upvoting and begging to follow - and this is done more and more by bots parsing tags and comments.
I've been here on Steemit for 2 weeks and I already avoid trending page. It is rare to see any good posts here.
I just checked first 4 trending posts for steemit tag. All top voters were bots. I'm actually not against use of bots, but this is just ridiculous.
Wondering how many of trending posts reached trending naturally.
Frankly, very few. and that, as you've stated, is due to vote buying. Someday, we could have this fixed or removed totally, maybe. It's up to the devs, since communities hardly have a say on here.
Hmm....
Thanks to your post now I know about communities. I haven't even heard about such project being worked on, while at the same time I see articles flooding my feed about SMTs.
A sentence which should be included in Steemit guides. Absolute truthful and crucial statement for 'financial success' ( even saying it sounds dumb but..) on Steemit.
Thank you for this new information for me. I think it's probably new to others, so I will re-steem it.
Thanks for the resteem! Maybe I should write a new white paper for steemit!. I find the lack of weird animal penises in the current one really disturbing!
lol
Hahaha, we are here to ''fill the gap'' ;)
I see I'm not the only one who particularly liked the line: "Even the weirdest weirdo can find a sub on reddit and feel part of a larger community!" I thought, oooh! That sounds cool!
I honestly don't understand a word of what you were saying about the tokens...I haven't been following the latest developments. But I am excited about new ways to find one's communities. At least as far as my own experience on Steemit goes, I had a few weeks of trying to figure out where to find "good" posts. I haven't looked at the trending page in weeks! Now I have found a couple of discord groups and once you find a few good posters, things kind of snowball from there, but I'm sure there are ways to make it easier to find one's weirdest weirdo home :-) I'll look forward to that new feature one of these days!
This is actually great news! The present situation leads us to conflicts like this Call to bot owners to block top 50 rewarded authors!. I really hope that this tool will solve this problem and irritations will become less. Those who love art will be in their topic, those who love beer will enjoy their company;)
Communities is for the people , STMs is for the money.
I understand the choice.
I don't agree. SMT can become a real game changer for the Steem platform.
Both communities and SMTs will have an opportunity to make apps built on the top of Steem blockchain better - communities for Reddit-like experience and SMTs for everything, really.
There are more apps than just Steemit right now and Steem is already used to power up platforms that haven't been made for blogging. This trend will continue and blockchain has to adapt to it - SMTs can do the job and make Steem the blockchain that powers up most of the internet.
Communities are important, I'm also waiting for them, but I think they will be even more powerful when each community can make their own SMT, and thus their own voting system.
Well, facebook has no SMTs, just a more vastly enganged community. Even if SMTs come out, steemit will be way way more undervalued if you don't bring the masses :)
Steemit is just an app on the blockchain. A successful app , but still an app. I guess Ned and company want to make Steem something like Ethereum or Neo. The way to do that is probably through STMs. I think that STMs will bring more value to the blockchain than a successful Steemit.
That's my opinion, I could be wrong.
SMTs won't make Steem Ethereum-like because SMTs don't bring smart contracts to the blockchain.
Well, one compliments the other, but its easier for STMs to get adopted if there is already an big community waiting for them then the other way around :)
Yes indeed! The presence of active communities here on steemit will surely and most definitely play major roles in the general growth and development of the platform. Something which is very important and should be prioritized to say the least. Well, it isn't too late considering that we're still relatively early into this crypto space and as such steemit still has more than enough room for improvement both in the short and long term. I hope this becomes a reality sooner rather than later though.
I completely agree - it seems like Steem are betting the farm on SMT's and focusing all/most of their attention there.
But the Steemit website (which is supposed to be the flagship dapp) itself sees very little development.
No offence to techie's (I'm 50% techie myself), but when they run the show, they concentrate on squeezing-another 2% network/blockchain performance, rather than building the community.
The Steem blockchain is already light-years ahead of most of the competition - and ALL the competition in terms of transactions per second. But that will be wasted if you don't build the front-end to attract people, and make them want to stick around.
And you'll never build a real community, when all they care about is how much money every post/comment/upvote/delegation will make them.
There has to be more focus on content, and rewarding good content, rather than a trending page full of throw-away crap, the majority of it only getting there because of the massive SP of the author.