Today I've started putting together a list of Spanish hidden gems on the wake of the original concept by @dragonslayer109 and the Russian version by @serejandmyself and the German one by @knozaki2015 and I've noticed that the voting and revenue generation (let's keep in mind that the revenue generated gets shared with authors mentioned in the post) and level of activity in general are much lower than those in other languages and obviously in English.
This really doesn't make too much sense, if 30% aprox of the Spanish population speaks Spanish, then 30% of Steemit users should speak Spanish, thus giving the language a nice base of users upon which to build audiences and the like.
After a bit of poking, a couple of chats and some thought on the matter during the day, I've come to a conclusion, part of the Spanish lack of activity may be due to the lack of Spanish whales and the fact that current whales don't really speak Spanish.
So I was asking myself, if this happens with Spanish, with its potentially broad user base, what happens with those other languages which are not so widely used, ie; Italian, Japanese, Dutch or Arab? Does this mean that people writing in those languages will never thrive in Steemit? If we accept this thesis as correct, then Steemit will fall short of its target of "universalizing" its use, furthermore, it really won't help one of the "conditions" which personally smitted me regarding the decentralized movement, cryptocurrencies and the like, the making of a more just world where individuals can thrive through their own merits and the unbanked can have financial activity away from the traditional banking system.
Bearing the above in mind, I humbly propose the use of some sort of system whereby reputation gets adjusted according to the number of users in the system per language. In this way, someone who's not a whale in the overall context of things can bring more weight if he's influential in a specific language, thus helping better remunerate those users posting content in a specific language and not just in English. The devil, obviously is in the detail, and this should be thought through thoroughly, but I think something along those lines would make a lot of sense and help in the future multilingual adoption of Steemit and its great concept.
If questions of this type aren't taken into account and addressed by the community's intellectual leaders, then we'll see how Steemit isotopes will pop up in different languages all over the place, thus reducing the potential network effect of which Steemit should benefit and hurting the progression of the project in the short and medium term. I don't think it'll have too large an impact in the long run, but may definitely end slowing it down.
So, thinking heads of Steemit, bitcoin pioneers and whales, what do you think of this? You are the intelectual leaders of the community... will you take a step forward and lead in providing thought and exposure to matters of this type? @rogerkver
@tracemayer
@charlieshrem
@ummjackson
@mrosenquist
@tatianamoroz
@tomz
@thebeachedwhale
@dollarvigilante
@rubenalexander
@ned
@dantheman
@berniesanders
@smooth
@itsascam
@blocktrades
@wang
@dan
@rainman
@steemed
I hereby apologize to the people mentioned in this post for throwing their name on the table on this matter, but, at the end of the day, this community is built top-bottom, you guys are on top, and I risk losing any reputation I may have if you decide to flag me for bothering you with this.
I additionally must confess I'm not aware of any multilingual development road map for Steemit, if there is please point me to it or any content of that sort which may enlighten me a bit. thx