We all know it. Steemit can’t survive – not like this! Most readers are bots that only care about money (as if they have no feelings), trending page is filled with more garbage than lungs of (non-block)chain-smoker and most comments are just fishing for a whale's pennies as if Steemit is for sailors only.
But good news: Steemit can be saved!
First, let’s answer a question: What is main goal of STEEM? Finding quality content (and rewarding it). 10 people will have 12 different ideas what is quality content but it doesn’t mean the task is impossible.
What are our problems?
- Bots – not all but those that upvote bad content
- Flags – if it’s bad, don’t read it, if others disagree than you might be the problem
- Sheep voting – people vote for the things others do rather than following their own opinions
- No readers – too many posts with no readers
- Too short “best before” time – good posts should last longer than just 7 days
- Nothing at stake problem – voting just to fulfill daily limit
How to solve them?
- Rewards – What do we want to reward the most? Holding STEEM (A), writing quality content (B), upvoting/finding quality content (C). The hardest thing is C – finding gem in sea of mud. You should be rewarded the most if you were the first who found a post that was least likely to succeed – author is new with few subscribers and few successes before; much less reward if you found post later or is from someone already successful and least reward if you are just confirming already successful post. If you often vote for garbage, you should lose your voting power (it should be something else than STEEM, STEEM DOLLARS and STEEM POWER, something non-transferable, I know it is complicated enough – but it is worth it)
- If you don’t like it, it doesn’t mean, it lacks quality – ether people are voting for it because it is quality post or there is problem with the reward system, flagging only masks the problem and encourages censorship. If you think bad content is rewarded, create better one.
- Don’t allow people to see number of upvotes for first 7 days so that they can’t copy behaviors of others. It should work similarly to Augur’s voting.
- Sort new posts according to their protentional value if they are discovered to have quality content. Start with posts that are new, had no readers so far, from new author with no successes and move it lower as it gets older, read more and from more successful author.
- After 7 days, quality articles should be moved to “monthly” tab with new round of collecting reward but competing only with older posts as well. Some posts that explain something useful can be good for years and should still collect reward for that.
- If you keep voting only for not quality posts (compared to average user), you should lose voting power. If you don’t vote at all, your voting power should slightly increase next time as well as your daily limit.
Do you see other problems with Steemit or other solutions? Let me know. We should discuss it – it is only way how to make Steemit better.