I wanted to talk about something I think is pretty underrated on Steem and how we could improve it.
I know there are those "resteem services", they kind of had the right idea early on but obviously were just trying to make some easy money with no effort and are mostly ineffective at accomplishing anything.
What I mean, though, is for us to use resteems more responsible. Especially now with 50/50 we could give a lot more power to resteems. Not just as a way to resteem your friends, I admit I do that sometimes, but to resteem as a curator. There have been many cases in the past where I have unfollowed certain users because all the do is resteem, if they don't understand how spammy that can get onto someone's feed then I can't say they didn't deserve it - I endured it for some time before it got too much. So at the same time as you can see there are consequences for being a bad resteemer, who knows if I will ever stumble upon that account again or naturally follow him - which in his case may mean less future rewards cause the chance of receiving a vote from me may be gone forever.
One thing I think Steemit should add (unless steempeak beats them to it - paging @justineh for the idea) is to add notes to resteems. Say you want to resteem a certain post for a certain reason the same way I did a few weeks ago, where I didn't really plan on voting it up cause it seemed shady but I wanted it to receive more attention from my followers so they could weigh in their opinions on the post. You click resteem and similar to retweets it will ask you if you want to add a comment with it that your followers will be able to see on their feeds above the post or wherever.
Resteems are way stronger nowadays with the 50/50 EIP, it can turn everyone into a successful curator - if you are good at it. Say you find a very good intro post that has no votes and you give it a 100% upvote and resteem it to your x amount of followers that enjoy what you usually resteem. They will naturally vote it up which means you'll receive much higher curation rewards for that one post that day, it turns everyone into their own curation guilds in a way.
If only we could create some sort of added incentive to be a good resteemer, say a bot that checks for stats of resteemed posts and how well they did afterwards but giving it some time for them to have the chance to be "missed", so people don't resteem posts at 3 minutes and expect to do well in that tracker, cause if it gives extra incentive to good resteemers like rewards then people will obviously try and abuse it, like most things in life. :P
Since we don't have tags yet though, it would be great for people to look out for resteems. In many cases the author who resteems may leave a comment, give them an upvote on the comment just thanking them for resteeming it which lead you to finding the post you enjoyed. Give the post a nice vote of encouragement, leave a comment thanking the person who resteemed it and give them some more value naturally.
I think it's a powerful tool that is kind of underrated but we could make it bigger by using it correctly and efficiently.
I remember on Twitch there was this thing that people used where right before they were about to go offline on their stream and had a large audience, they'd go and "raid" another streamer they liked or enjoyed their content - bringing their audience onto their channel before going offline. Shortly after that Twitch added a way to broadcast others streams on your page when you were offline - they saw how valuable it was and kept the viewers viewing so they adapted fast from something that just started as a simple thing people started doing cause they felt it was the right thing instead of letting the audience scatter all over the platform. Of course it's not exactly like resteems but we can easily give it more value by using them properly and curators curating them effectively if used well.
Who knows, maybe we can make the resteems as magical as big upvotes are over time - it could turn users with low stake into power users as well if they have a big following that loves their resteems and always curates them.
Anyway, just a thought and something we could focus more on now with the recent changes since the HF. Let me know your thoughts!
