Over the last few days I have seen postings on both the Ethereum and Bitcoin subreddits basically calling Steemit a scam that has failed because in order to even break into the front page you need to be famous or well connected. I don’t believe in their overall conclusion but I agree with some of the points they are making. The fact of the matter is, at this moment in time the new user experience feels like a multi level marketing scheme because to have an upvote worth even a penny you need to go out and purchase steem power. I understand this is how the system is designed, but to people coming into the community it can turn them off right away. It is very important that we retain a large amount of new users especially with new platforms like Steemit because the majority of the time you get one shot and if they aren’t drawn in, they are gone. I wanted to talk about what changes I we need to make in order for a new user to feel like they are part of the steemit community.
Make New Users Feel Like They Have Some Power
The biggest problem I see facing Steemit right now is that new users don’t feel like they have any pull on the content that gets seen or upvoted. Some might call this a “feature”, but in reality it is another way that users are being pushed away from using the platform. There needs to be a way that lets users feel like their votes are being represented, even if they don’t have the steem power to back them up. New users are going to look at the platform and if they don’t feel like they are represented, they are going to leave. The majority of people engaged in the crypto community are not early adopters, if we look at bitcoin, many of the people in the community have less than a single bitcoin. Even if they took that bitcoin and put it in steem power it still wouldn’t make them feel like their votes are being represented. If we want to create a social media platform that fosters healthy engagement of new users something has to be done.
Make Tags Feel Like Their Own Separate Communities
One big problem I am currently seeing is that tags feel less like communities and more like twitter hashtags, this needs to change. Tags should feel like subreddits or boards on a forum in order to engage in community activity within certain tags. New users are also intimidated by the front page, when they majority of them, even if they make a good post, will only get cents. We have seen some attempt to create engagement in certain communities, like contests on the photography tag, but we need to go above and beyond that. Many users on other social media sites stick to one or two areas of interest and don’t look at the front page. If we don’t show new users that there are communities where they can find their place, they will be less intimidated by the system as a whole.
Give The Ability to Choose What Communities/Tags You See
I believe this feature is coming, but it is a very important one that I have to talk about. It’s not a very hard idea to understand. People want to see content they are interested in, not a bunch of content they don’t care about. We need to have the ability to filter out the tags they don’t want to see and be able to still have the trending/new/active, ect. ranking of posts to explore.
Move The Payout Period Down Or Change The Trending Algorithm
Recently we moved the payout period down to 12 hours and there were many complaints that people weren’t able to see the content because it was a short amount of time. While I sort of agree with this, I don’t agree that content should be on the front page for sometimes more than 24 hours, which is the real problem. People want to see new content more often and 24 hours seems like a large amount of time for something to be on the front page. A solution to this could be to simply change the trending algorithm to weight posts on more than just the money they earned. If we look at reddit as a model, you rarely/never see anything keep the top spot for 24 hours and their solution for new content has proven successful thus far. There is not a shortage of content at the moment so why should we have the same ten articles trending for a day straight? New users want to see different content multiple times a day and it is the developers’ job to make sure that happens.
Changing The Price Reference Period Down From 7 days
This is mostly just a personal preference, but I think that the reference period should be 3-5 days rather than 7. The price of crypto moves too fast, especially in a smaller less liquid market like Steem at the moment. We are often seeing price references that vastly misrepresent the price and values on the site. This could be a change made for the time being until we mature.
Addressing The Downvote Situation
It has become pretty obvious in the last week or so that people are abusing downvote button, mostly just out of spite for a post doing well. If you look at the front page you will see posts that break no rules, with an amount of upvotes. While I don’t think this is an immediate problem, because the accounts downvoting have almost no pull, but it still sets a bad precedent to new users who think they can just downvote anything they don’t agree with. There needs to be a system set in place that will punish those who abuse the downvote feature to a point where they will lost the ability downvote altogether.
It is imperative that we give more power to the new users and in time it will benefit everyone that is already in the system. If we don’t work hard at retaining new users, the system will fail. If no one wants to buy the currency because there is no demand, people will leave. Right now we are growing, but we can’t relax because the growth could hit a ceiling. If we make the user experience better now while it is earlier we won’t have to worry about franticly doing it in the future.
-Calaber24p