Thoughts on Steemit's Learning Curve

in #steem7 years ago

Is Steem's learning curve preventing widespread adoption? I recently joined Steemit and the Steem ecosystem and have been more and more hyped up about it as I learn more about it. There is a lot of potential with this system and I seriously believe it can be the future of social media. However the biggest obstacle I see to any kind of widespread adoption of Steemit is the very high learning curve. I've been a computer geek since the 90's and it still took me a couple days to figure things out and I still have more to learn. Unfortunately this is a big problem in today's society with it's very short attention span. This is why it takes 5 minutes to get up and going on Facebook or Twittter, they make sure its easy so that new users don't get frustrated and lose interest. I imagine their have been quite a few people who have tried Steemit and have said "screw this" as soon as they realized how complicated it was. It can be intimidating to some people with so many factors to consider and learn such as the 3 currencies interacting in unique ways, witnesses, powering up and powering down, and 5 different passwords. Let me ask you this, do you think your grandparents could handle getting on Steemit by themselves without your help? That is stereotyping a bit because I'm sure there are plenty of Grandparents out there who could handle it, but personally for example I know my Mom or even my significant other would be completely lost trying to use the platform. This might explain the large number of inactive accounts. If this issue could be seriously addressed maybe with some easy to understand built in video tutorials or something, or if the system could be simplified in anyway, I think it would go a long way towards getting more people onto the platform. I am not saying Steemit isn't going to be huge one day, but it is something we should think about as a community. When the internet first came out their was more of a learning curve for using it then there is now, and as it became easier to use it spread like wild fire. Busy is a good example of trying to make Steemit more user friendly, with such touches as style buttons instead of requiring HTML to make something bold for example like Steemit does. But a person who just heard about Steemit isn't even going to know Busy exists at first most likely, I know I didn't know about it until I had been using Steemit for several days. So they might give up before they ever even make it to Busy and experience it's more intuitive UI. I hope user friendliness becomes more of a priority in the Steem ecosystem so that everyone regardless off their technical skill level can easily become an active part of the community.
Thanks for reading!
-RenegadeTrader

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