RE: Perspective: Steem was meant to be for content creators and consumers
We could focus all our effort on creating and curating content. But for as long as I've been on steemit, creators and consumers have found the UI/UX too poor to spend a lot of time finding and consuming content (finding being the worst part).
This will have to be addressed before the STEEM can grow into the mainstream. As it seems steemit inc and Ned would rather see alternative front ends and businesses succeed rather than steemit, it makes sense that they will, for the time being, prioritise this as it is crucial for people to actually want to come and consume content here.
I have spent a lot of time with active curation projects. I see what incredible work they do to dig deep to find good content that deserves rewards. However, despite a post being great and thus receiving something like a 50$ worth of upvotes, it still gets next to no views and only a few comments typically by the curation team themselves. Is that sustainable in the long run? Sure, it may help retain quality content creators, but it does little, imo, to make the blockchain more engaging, which will be required for the whole business model and value proposition to hold. Currently, it seems to me that vested upvotes means close to nothing unless you get to trending, so curating content won't do much for the active use of the site unless the user interface and content discovery is drastically different. Which I guess is what we're all hoping for with communities.
Anyways, my point is that if steemit inc would rather see other Apps solve this problem, or know that it will eventually be solved with communities, then what we see currently does make sense.
My brother is a computer genius and has been into blockchain tech since 2013. as a hobby only. Weirdly he didn't know about steemit. I discussed about it at Christmas with him (I discovered Steemit in October).
Yesterday he told me that he finally received his a super server with impressive characteristics. He bought it to run a Steemit node.
With the Steem blockchain at his finger tips, he asked me what app would be the most useful for the community. I didn't hesitate: An explorer to search and classify content.
I hope he will have time to look into it. Maybe we could implement a star system independant from the payouts and that would be in control by a high quality curation system like Curie, Steemstem and others. If we moves forward with the idea, I will post to get input from the community.
Sounds great. Personally, I don't see a future in content being ordered based on vested votes. It may make sense in terms of making the STEEM token and STEEM Power valuable, but it doesn't result in content that people want to consume being brought to them naturally.
The best would be a front end where people can subscribe to curators, not just follow people. Then one could create a feed that prioritizes content discovered and upvoted by the curators you like. Perhaps I want one feed where I can see whatthe people I follow are up to, and another where I am given content upvoted by a selected few curators I believe finds what I would like to find myself.
That is just a great idea. I would even go up to proposing 3 feed tabs:
1/ The current feed based on people one follows (i.e. like a set of TV channels)
2/ A curator feed as you suggest, basically that would contain trusted guilds like Curie or Steemstem and Steemians that re-steem a lot things of interest to oneself. Quality curation guilds should be funded in delegated SP by Steemit.inc.
3/ A personal favorite feed, that contains the people a user interacts a lot with and does not want to miss anything about.
All this would be on the personal dashboard: The follower would know he is followed by the user, yet without knowing in what category he or she was placed in.
In my opinion, that could allow, in time, an improvement in the quality of the content viewed and rewarded, and encourage authors which are consistent in quality. Those of the followers that really like a content creator's work would be able to make sure never to miss anything...
And all this in addition to a real search engine (note to self: bug my bro so he gets really into it ;-))
All these are great ideas, but it's actually kinda funny how obvious a subject-subscription layout of some kind - any kind - should be a thing. Much of the mainstream websites offer this, from Twitter to Linkedin, wordpress to minds.
People don't want to browse through random shit for an hour to find a couple of things of interest. People don't want to be told what they might want without any prior context. Even facebook, wechat and Windows 'learn' what you like with experience watching your every move.
I want to join Steemit, meet like-minded people and read things that I personally find intriguing... it's not that hard =/