Since joining a few days ago, I've spent a bit of time reading posts and comments to see what people are chatting about, while trying to gauge the overall perspective of the community. Of course, there's some complaints, confusion, and a bit of frustration over people getting thousands of upvotes — while others have struggled with success.
The Steem White Paper describing the concept was originally only published in March of 2016. Yet here we find ourselves in August, and one can't help but be impressed at the phenomenal growth the network has experienced — before even reaching the 6 month anniversary mark, since the concept describing Steem was originally published.
We have to keep in mind this platform will continuously evolve over the next several months, and hopefully, for years to come. Steem is still in its infancy. Facebook started in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room, and was initially only limited to his fellow Harvard students in 2004. After extending membership to the public in 2006, close to 20% of the entire world's population is now on Facebook in 2016. It didn't achieve overnight success, and it took years of hard work to iron out the wrinkles.
Consider the people already here — the techies and anarchists, bloggers and cryptokings & queens — the early adopters that will have an important part in guiding this platform into the future.
There will be some growing pains along the way, until the market powers within this system reach a calming equilibrium, the voting power across the network becomes distributed amongst a wider number of people, and a more diverse range of content is added.
I've already mentioned Steemit to several of my friends, who I think would be interesting contributors and offer some appealing content. I'll be helping them make their first posts in the days ahead. I encourage you to do the same within your network. Mentor newcomers, and see how you can help people craft an interesting introduction, and compose posts to add more engaging content and varied insights under a growing cloud of tags and topics.
Let's work together, put forward new ideas, and discuss how we can take this project into the future through our contributions. Let's conceptualize different ways to improve the features of the network and website, and pass them along to developers.
This is our chance to build something extraordinary for the future. Let's not squander such an amazing opportunity!
Feel free to comment below and share what features you'd be interested in seeing, and what your personal vision for Steemit would entail.