Dear @aggroed,
Community building is the most important thing on Steem.
Bringing more people on Steem is a thing, but.... Keeping them here is another big thing.
According to the Steem BI Team, only 10 % of users remain after 90 days.
I want to share my experience as the french community leader.
As you know, I was on Steem to blog about my stuff (as I am already a blogger and youtuber) but as a french speaking person I couldn't share my posts in french. So I started to build from scratch an entire community (they were nobody, so it was easy to onboard the new one).
For 6 month now, I 've published a video (and more recently article) explaining Steem (and all it's secrets: internals, tools, ecosystem, ... in french).
I am proud now, to see that after 6 months full time on Steem explaining how does it works and building the community behind the scene (French Discord Channel), a lot of people are staying and contributing to the community ! Because they understand how this plateforme works (having bits of information in your language every day makes it very easy to learn and assimilate the concepts).... And they take care of this platform they know and love ! If a spam is arriving the whoooole community is explaining to the person that this is spamming. I can tell you how many succes stories we have about spammers who became pilar of the community after so many long hours of training. But alright, we are still small.
Today, the french community get even rewards for their posts (because I did everything I could to find for theses "rewards"... with OCD curation for example).
So… Building community is a thing, but, who cares about the Community Builders ?
I've looked for support. Chatted a lot, explained my project (Teaching Steem and improve french minnows onboarding, coaching them), explained what I needed and what I did… I even build a website that gathers all the values informations for Steem onboarding process, all this content could be translated and made available to other communities. And I got no support at all from the persons well known as Community Builders ...
So, by the way, I have set up a special Discord channel for Community Builders if anyone is interrested to share it's experience. Together we are stronger.
So, I think we should also onboard the community leaders. Help them. Because I would have left Steem if I had not the confidence that French is the 5th language in the world and that french could find it's place on Steem.
So, yes, we need to spread the word about Steem, we have to bring people here, we have to educate them (because, believe me, the Marketing of Steem is not helping to keep the people here)... Who would like to stay in a place where it's clearly written Your voice is worth something and you give the best of you everyday and you don't get this something... even if you do the High quality content ?
I would also have left if I didn't truly believe in Blockchain technology and how it can change the world… Not every new minnow has the same believes and expectations.
So community builders have the task to explained to the newcomers how hard it is to make money here but why it's better to be here than another social media.
And by the way, if you find that Steemit looks ugly, that's why we have Busy.org ! :D Believe, me, all the people (non tech people) I have shown Steemit.com went far far away.... But they all falled in love with Busy :-)
After 6 months, I am still posting everyday high quality content, taking care of newcomers (Minnow coaching in french for example). By the way, I am still looking for support ;-) Feel free to contact me if you can help.
Roxane
www.comprendre-steem.fr
RE: The importance of community building on Steem