Reducing friction for critical mass adoption of steemit

Promoting community discussion and a 5K STEEM development incentive

Before a user invests time and energy into a social platform, they have to know they will receive value in return. The conundrum that every social platform faces is that the greatest value is only realized when there is a critical mass of individuals on the platform.

Cost Curve - economics of social media

The steemit core value proposition for content producers and curators is compelling - get paid, for what you currently do for free.

This provides steemit users with a unique benefit of participation, but with any new social platform that might like to attract existing communities, there is likely to be significant friction to critical mass community adoption.

“I don’t want to be one of the first on the new platform, there won’t
be anyone else there to participate and respond to or upvote my posts, plus I
don't want to have to maintain my posts in two platforms
until everyone else comes”

This is the purpose of this post, to encourage discussion of thoughts and ideas on how to potentially overcome or minimize this challenge - how to quickly achieve that tipping point of a self sustaining majority community participation, putting steemit on the path to critical mass adoption?

Here are my thoughts on a couple of ideas, related to reddit community adoption that I would like to open up for input and discussion.

What if users could estimate the SBD/SP value of their previous posts and curation?

I imagine it’s difficult for anyone to estimate the steemit value of his or her posted content and curation before investing their time to use the platform.

“If I go to all this effort to switch/learn/use this new platform, is
it going to be worth it, am I likely to be rewarded 50c or $50? Is it worth it
to change?”

Until there is a reasonable history of steemit user rewards, this lack of information that contributes to a new users decision to adopt, may be a point of friction.

If we we’re to develop a tool to simulate the expected steemit payouts for reddit’s top users or a set of popular subreddits active users over a particular time period, publishing this information could help mitigate this potential point of friction and will likely help accelerate adoption.

Top reddit karma users from karmawhores.net

For the modeling to work, assumptions would have to made that recognize the reddit's system of curation does not necessarily map to steemit's:

• Relative SP could be simulated using reddit karma
• Curation would map to reddit up voting

The results of this modeling could be published and somehow targeted to the subreddit or users to highlight the value of their posts.

Probably not allowed, but a bot that posted in the thread “This post is estimated to have earned earn $1.45 on steemit” – would be a powerful message.

What if, when they visited steemit, the users content was already there?

For an active user in an existing community to adopt a new platform requires a significant leap-of-faith commitment and investment of time - but not if their content and community is already there!

“I don’t want to be the first on this new platform, there won’t be
anyone else there to respond/ upvote my posts”

By enabling a user to opt-in to cross posting, we could remove a lot of the friction and potential objections for adopting steemit:

• The user only has to post once and it appears on both platforms.
• They wouldn’t feel that time invested in the new platform will be wasted if they decide not to continue
• The users potential audience is always stemmit + reddit
• They get the best of both worlds until steemit reaches critical mass community adoption

This could be achieved using some form of cross-posting bot authorized to post on behalf of the user. Possibly on steemit signup or later as an option to link your existing reddit account.

Thread context could be kept by enabling the bot to cross-post any user content not currently on the steemit / reddit system and could also allow non-yet-steemit reddit users to claim ownership of their steemit account/posts and possibly associated SBDs/SP.

Practically, reddit has extensive API support including a comprehensive python wrapper PRAW which I imagine could be leveraged by tools developed by our own community such as @xeroc’s Piston and python-steemlib.

Although, I’ve specifically discussed ideas around attracting reddit’s userbase, I imagine the general ideas may be applied to other existing community forums.

Adoption Accelerator

If the resulting community input and discussion sees merit in developing any of these ideas or results in new ideas to remove friction and aid rapid adoption of steemit for existing communities, I'd like to help support it.

I will happily donate 5,000 STEEM to help accelerate development of a community driven initiative.

If your interested in using the accelerator to help realise any of the ideas discussed,please post your proposal in the root of this thread along with your credentials and plan to see the idea come to life.

I'll organise some sort of community vote, two weeks from now (Sun 15th May) to decide which idea / proposal should receive the funds.