As a new user, interacting with Steem has been both a breath of fresh air and slightly perplexing. After making two blog posts, I wish I would have found the Steem community sooner. There's clearly new thinking here. I love the potential and seeing everyone working together to build a better community. Personally, I've grown through my interactions with others on Steem.

On the flip-side, it's difficult to find the best content associated with a certain field. I comb through programming and math tags, fields I'm familiar with, and the content is not what I would expect. That being said, I have a wild idea on how we tackle that using User Authority. Beforehand, here's a little about myself in this intro post.

My Background

I'm normally what most communities would call a lurker. I used to passively consume content and rarely interact beyond upvotes. However, over the past 2 months Steem has changed that dynamic. I've come out of my shell and started interacting. I thank you all for creating this community that has promoted such a positive change in myself.

Now lets quickly touch on the boring stuff: I have a degree in math and work in the tech industry. I enjoy watching and acting in improvisational comedy (yes, and!), reading fiction and writing. Now that's over with, let's talk about Steem.

Community User Authority

(Image from Pixabay, CC0)

@scipio and @holger80 created user authority (UA). It's a great idea and a large step in the right direction; I highly suggest you read about it if you haven't already. While it's the right direction now, we may need to complement it with other ideas in the long-term.

We can all agree that no one user knows enough about every subject to have dominion over all communities. So my suggestion is this: User Authority should be tied to community boundaries. That's not as crazy as it sounds! Stick with me for a second and let's use Steemit's resident physics expert, LeMouth, as an example. LeMouth should have significant influence on posts in physics or steemstem but minimal influence in underwater basket weaving (presumably). Extra dimensions in the page-rank algorithm that divide along community boundaries would allow this. UA doesn't need to be absolute across the platform and reputation could be earned in applicable fields. This is similar to how moderation occurs on highly reputable communities such as r/physics and r/science.

We can even take this a step further and tie post rewards back into the community. Where communities on Steem currently rely on one hyper-delegated accounts to divvy up rewards (like Utopian-IO), that work can be passed off to the blockchain. A percentage of every post is passed into a community pool. That community pool is not answerable to any account, powers up all its rewards and multiplies (upvotes) posts based on how many users with high community UA liked the post. Accounts with minimal money invested in Steem, but high community UA, could largely influence payout in certain communities. Far beyond what their Steem-Power would reasonably call for.

Conclusion

Anyways, that's my new-user idea. As a noob my opinion might be eschewed, and possibly rightfully so. But I'd argue that sometimes fresh eyes are good! Anyways, Steem is a grand concept that I want to see thrive. So I thought I'd add my two cents.

Steem helped me improve myself and I plan to spend much more time in this community.

Thanks to you all.