Each week on the community series, we share pieces of our lives in order to have good conversations. Usually, it is light-hearted discussions like last week where we talked about quotes that inspire us. This week, we are going to brainstorm together.
Steemit continues to get better, and that is especially evident when you look back at how far we have come in a year. Steem dropping to 0.07 cents, our CTO leaving, a whale experiment, and flagging trending authors to discourage generic posts are a few items that come to mind.
However, the question at hand is where are we going? As (Captain) Jack Sparrow says in the Curse of the Black Pearl, “show me that horizon.”
I have a few ideas for discussion, and I would love to hear your suggestions to raise the quality of the Steemit ecosystem.
Improvements
1- Private messaging integration or online chat
The reason I say integration is that there are already a few messaging applications in use amongst the community - Steemit.chat, and Discord are two that come to mind. Facebook has the feature within their own app that you can switch over to Messenger.
Seeing your friends who are online and using a private message to contact them would also be useful. That may be simpler than switching from one site to another, and it facilitates easy conversations with people.
2- Open market within Steemit for Steem and SBD sales
While I have no problems with services like @changelly, or @blocktrades (I use them often) it would be nice to communicate with folks that are in need and help them out in a bind.
I read a post from @papa-pepper where he met with a fellow Steemian and gave him a higher rate than the market was currently paying. It is not feasible for a business to survive by offering a higher price for an asset, but individuals, especially gracious Steemians, can be of great service to each other in hard times.
My thought is to have a central meeting place, kind of like the open market on @minnowbooster, where folks post their offers. An escrow account would be a good idea to discourage abuse.
3- More services offering interest or dividends
In light of mentioning @minnowbooster, more services like theirs would be a win for the community. Competition always fuels innovation.
Also, whether we will see the day when our SBD is earning interest in our Steemit wallet I don’t know. A feature one of these new companies could offer is interest on your Steem or SBD for keeping it in their bank. @bellyrubbank is one service that has started recently, and there are already 19 accounts earning 45% APR with the minimum deposit of 20SBD.