With Hardfork 20 mostly settled at this point (minus Redfish still experiencing a significant limitation to their posting ability), the ongoing discussion about improving Steemit has once again turned back to the subjects of self-voting and quality. While both do present a significant challenge to Steemit’s growth and future, I want to take a minute to talk about the latter because there's already been significant positive voice on the former.
(Read @kevinwong's analysis of self-voting here if you haven't already.)
Steemit needs a ‘quality emphasis’ to survive
Demonizing those who actively promote and campaign for ‘quality content’ isn’t productive to the continued growth of Steemit because Steemit needs an emphasis on quality in order to survive as a premium platform. All the demonization approach to the problem does is use strong language to polarize the issue into the ‘quality’ and ‘no quality’ camps. In reality both camps are looking for quality, but what level and type of quality varies from person to person.
For example, some people seek to simply look at photographs, while others want to read articles about cryptocurrency. Some enjoy conspiracy theories, others silver and gold, gaming, art, and countless other subjects that are currently linked to tags without any way of filtering those tags to see exactly what you want to see when you load up the platform. Because of this (and rampant mis-tagging, which I’ll get to later), the ability to find and properly engage with the quality of content you’re looking for is difficult and severely limited.
The Solution
Communities. From what I’ve gathered, we’ve been asking for this for a long time and now it’s finally coming. With ample time between now and the implementation of SMTs, SteemInc has picked up on the idea that now is the time to execute.
Full documentation of the upcoming changes are available here.
With Communities, what we are promised is the ability to create a specific tuned ‘lens’ into the blockchain. To put it quite simply:
The goal of the community feature is to empower users to create tighter groups and focus on what’s important to them.
Communities will allow the diverse population of Steemit to tailor their experience directly to what they’re looking for, whether it’s long-form original content or micro-blogging, pictures or video. Steemit is your oyster and Communities will now be your pearl.
Hear me. Allowing anyone to post anything to the blockchain is a necessary part of the health of Steemit as a whole because it brings new users into the pool. However, helping to streamline posted content into tighter fields will not only help with the overall quality of experience for each user, but also will help with finding and curating content worth upvoting to the Communities that it matters to.
TL;DR
Hold your horses and take a deep breath. Ranting about ‘quality’ isn’t the problem, and SteemInc has it well in hand with one of the more positive changes I’ve personally seen since I’ve been on this site. In the meantime, continue to fight the good fight by curating the content that matters to you! At its core, that’s what Steemit is about.
Do you agree? Disagree? Have other solutions to this perceived problem? Let me know in the comments. Or better yet, let the witnesses you support know that you’d like to see systems like these developed and implemented to further the health and longevity of the Steem community.
Until next time, MakoAll images courtesy of Pexels.
Thanks to @followbtcnews and the PALnet Discord for tipping me off to the upcoming Communities changes!