Why did I go there?
So today I made the mistake of visiting the trending page on Steemit. This video is nothing personal to @elear or @utopian-io, however it was made to illustrate a wider point about creating value on the Steem platform.
Stuff, stuff and more stuff
It is tempting to think if we develop "lots of stuff" people will start flocking. So lots of attention is given to the development of "stuff", another Steemit like front-end (Busy), a twitter-like front-end (Zappl), a youtube alternative (dTube), a soundcloud alternative (dSound), a streaming Steem (dLive?), a front-end for people to create even more stuff (Utopian), a token system to incentivise the creation of stuff (SMT)... and so it goes on.
SO we build this stuff and throw money at this stuff and we talk about this stuff and this stuff makes it to the top of the trending pages and people flirt with this stuff... then ultimately they come back to Steemit. Just because people are simple like that.
Most people haven't got the bandwidth to wade through 50 different frontends and 500 different SMT tokens. And for the majority these alternative use-cases are not needed, if Steemit is structured and presented correctly.
Communities that's stuff I like!
For example, I absolutely love the idea of Communities. It gives focus and direction and ultimately the best Communities will be the gateways to good content (and by good I don't necessarily mean high brow, I mean content people actually want to consume). Then efforts can be made to grow those communities and provide them with the technological tools they actually need. And with the value of Steem driven up by business wanting a presence and prominence amongst these communities, the incentives will be there for developers to innovate without creating artificial drivers (by skewing existing, limited rewards).
I thought Communities was on the 2017 roadmap. I guess not however I'd love to see it on the 2018 roadmap. It would be great to see some strategic planning on how to garner mass user adoption in 2018 and less throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks!