Firstly, I just want to preface this by reiterating the fact that this is an opinion piece. These are personal critiques based on personal opinions. I am more than open to discussion when it comes to anything written below so please don't be afraid to leave a comment stating why you disagree, but please keep it respectful. I'm not out to hurt anyone's feelings here, just a stream-of-consciousness style opinion piece on my initial thoughts using Steemit. The intention is not to hurt Steemit - some day I hope to be very successful on the platform - but to provide some feedback from a consumer perspective that the developers might be able to take into consideration in future iterations of the platform.
Take a look at the screenshot below,:
That's on the science tag; I can't emphasize enough how bad this is; it's really, really bad. None of the content is relevant - a huge amount of all content posted to any tag is irrelevant on Steemit. I understand that many higher-tier users are bringing audiences with them from other social media platforms, but how is Steemit ever going to stand on its own two legs if users who are looking for science content are being barraged with travel videos and the "healing life energy" of Bosnian Pyramids? Compare that to the front page of reddit's science subreddit:
The difference is night and day - exactly what you want to see when looking for science content; actual science content, and they don't even have to pay their users! There's no understating how important it is that the content be appropriate to the tag, and content inappropriate to its tag should be removed/retagged, and the longer things go on the way they do on Steemit the sooner it will crash and burn.
But wait, what if Steem didn't try to take on Reddit at its own game? What if Steemit leveraged its strengths and downplayed its weaknesses? What if Steemit created a solution that would satisfy both the web-wanderers looking for good curated content, the content creators who are bringing their existing audiences over to their content on Steemit, as well as the minnows like me who are publishing original content?
My solution?
Build a wall
Not a physical wall, but a user-experience wall. Steemit needs to work on interface strategies that don't necessarily enforce certain content standards, but naturally push users to posting their content in the right place in much the same way reddit does - with one of these strategies being simply to place warning dialogues on the post submission page:
I guarantee that even a simple strategy such as this is remarkably effective; people are scared of spending time creating a post only for it to be deleted for being irrelevant to the subreddit (tag) they're posting in. Without filtering mechanisms like this, Steemit has to rely on fostering a community that knows what it wants. Teach them what is acceptable and unacceptable under each tag of the main tags, and eventually the community will begin to enforce these standards all by themselves (for the most part). The Steemit team needs to be constantly thinking about new ways to improve the user-experience of the platform, and implementing them. Steemit has the opportunity here, as a young platform, to do right everything that Reddit did wrong, so the founders simply need to sit down, look at how reddit has achieved the success it has, and then take advantage of their agility as a platform to develop a product that is better than Reddit. This is not an engineering task, this is a design task - Steemit are trying to develop a consumer-facing product, and the whole getting-paid-to-post thing certainly helps on the user adoption front, but without a solid user experience and more actively-enforced community guidelines I think Steemit is needlessly holding itself back. Take a step back from the engineering a bit, focus more on creating a juicy, beautiful product that the consumer can sink their teeth into.