So, I'm staring in awe about how steem fortunes seem to have changed simply by the addition of the Korean exchange as noted by @acidyo here: https://steemit.com/exchange/@acidyo/upbit-recently-listed-steem-krw-and-sbd-krw.
It was an immediate overnight success!
or was it?
The whole thing takes a massive community building effort. The Koreans on the platform make up roughly 6 percent of the activity on the platform. That didn't just happen. It happens through community building and ensuring a portion of rewards goes to a segment of the population such that they experience some success. The overnight success was really a 1-2 year saga about building a Korean community on the Steem block chain. It appears to me to have been spear headed by @slowwalker and @clayop. I wrote a brief thank you note, but I really want to hone in how important getting that exchange on board and building the community behind that which made us all richer and more successful.
Witnesses come in two flavors
I often talk about two types of witnesses: programmers and social. The social folks are those that build communities. I started off in Frystikken's steemspeak. I interacted in Fuzzy's whaleshares. I figured out that building community is central to the needs of the platform. Those communities start off generally as a bunch of riff raff trying to pull their shit together or just clowning around on the internet, but eventually ties start to form, plans get made, tools get built, friends get called in, buzz gets created, an exchange adds our token, and suddenly the Koreans are purchasing $8M worth of Steem.
Good content is subjective
I keep hearing that "90% of Steem is spam" from people. I think it just really means that 90% of posts aren't what I'm interested in. "Content is bad here..." I mean, I find plenty of shit that I like when I have time to read it. Trending might be a little wonky frequently, but you can find good articles, and entertaining reads. I haven't once looked back at Facebook thinking, oh I really miss that place and all the amazing content. It was 90% shit I don't care about or more. I think it really just has to do with we are really only interested in super focused things. Until you join the perfect community made of perfectly like minded people and you're all sharing a community feed I think you're gonna be stuck wading throuh stu you don't like. So, I'm not seeing the same lack of good content others are... I just don't think a blogging platform geared for the whole world is focused on exactly on what I want nor should it be.
To get a good news feed from Facebook I would follow all the people that I found had content that I liked and then literally sit there for hours trying to find the articles that appealed to me. Steem is no different in that regard. You gotta work to find the content that appeals directly to you... now yeah, we're missing a real search feature on the block, but I'm betting utopian can fix that before long.
We need more audience
I think we are missing some audience though. I have a friend who is a painter. She writes about painting on a painting specific community posting board. She gets thousands of views... she doesn't make any money, but she gets thousands of views. I think we have to find better ways to engage our audience and pull people here. That's where the recent post by @bex-dk is critical that talks about adding value with our work and also @roxane who talked about a way to force Steemit to feed your other social media.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@bex-dk/adding-value-to-steemit
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@roxane/how-do-you-automatically-publish-your-steemit-posts-on-your-social-networks-with-zapier
This audience isn't gonna magically appear. We all have to work to build it, and I'll get to work on that zapier thing to push my content to my other shitty sites.
"Steemit looks ugly"
As for Steem and the steemit.com interface known as condenser there's always going to be something else it needs. There's not going to be one solution that solves all the needs for all the people. Eventually we're going to have to have 60 skins like Nightmode, but different layouts for people with different interests. You'll get your chainbb flavor, busy flavor, dmania flavor, and a million other flavors because people don't want the same thing. So, one man's perfect website is another man's shithole. What I'm saying that a perfect steemit.com website is subjective too.
We need people
The one thing that isn't subjective is that if we want Steem to grow we need more people. It's that simple. We need some folks focused on pulling in organizations, schools, churches, classes, businesses and friends. That's what will make this place have more content in the flavors you want, more tools to do the thing you need, and more value because more goods and services will be produced on a platform that has negligible inflation (compared to fiat).
So, ask what can you do to build a community!
Because if you find an answer that works we'll have the people to solve the other problems and you'll get rewarded because most people know this place has to grow. In the meantime try not to be dicks to one another, especially new users... we need them! And if you happen to see some great community builders then try to help them out cause they're lifting up the whole platform.