RE: Steemit Onboarding: Low Hanging Fruit
I couldn't agree more with your diagnoses and prognoses regarding user retention. Having been a user for about a week now, I could easily see myself becoming one of the users who tries to create content for about a month and then fizzle out.
Steemit isn't ALL about money, but lets be frank, it is a cryptocurrency site and that is in large part what differentiates it from other social network/blogging platforms. People join and are told that if they create decent content, they will be rewarded for it. People have short attention spans and so when it seems too good to be true, they leave.
A lot of these users probably leave because they aren't honestly contributing much and essentially want something for nothing. But I myself have read some very interesting and thoughtful posts on here that have garnered a few cents.
As someone who lives in California, I had better really love contributing content to a community for less than 1$ per hour. And lets face it, a very large portion of the best content on the platform will come from people in a similar circumstance (people for whom effort and time invenstment aren't worth pennies per hour.)
I myself am sold on the idea of a decentralized currency and the altruistic benefits of a global sharing of ideas, info and stories. That is why I want to continue creating content and reading the content of others. But I do feel like user retention will be the biggest challenge for Steemit and I can't wait to see what they come up with!
I'm not really sure how to solve this
Great comment and applaud you putting your content out there! I can speak from personal experience that it takes time to build up any sort of consistency on posts. Much like being an author anywhere there are things beyond the content itself to bring that success, including the marketing and networking aspect. If I was to walk into a physical bookstore (yes there are still a few around, lol) there are certain authors that would catch my eye more than others (for reasons like reading their previous work) and/or topics that I'm interested in.
It's still a similar game to that on here, where everything we post is just one amongst a huge list of posts. There are definitely methods to help stand out in those lists while also building your name recognition/following.
If you ever have questions or like some assistance along these lines, feel free to drop me a DM in steemit.chat or you can also hop into the Steemprentice Mentor Group channel in steemit.chat . We are there just to help users out in areas like this. While we can not ever guaranty a payout, we can absolutely help improve the odds for you.
It is hard to consistently put hours and hours and hours of work into a post (not to mention the time promoting it afterwards) and see it come back as pennies per hour. You definitely seem to have the right idea though, that if it's something you want to write, and feel it's worth the time to make it what you feel it should be (quality wise) there is if nothing else personal benefits. For example, I'd written absolutely nothing for at least 10 years before joining on here. While it may not be my method to pay the bills, I'm happy with what I've produced.
I will say that I'm very happy to see the short form posts (news, til/today i learned, and funny) receiving curation now. It takes the necessity away of feeling like pages and pages have to be produced on every post, which in my mind will help to make those long posts better, since users don't feel forced to just draw things out unnecessarily.
Some of these solutions are already in the works either through the developers themselves (like the new editor which I'm stoked to see), projects like busy.org, user driven projects, or ideas that spawn from posts like these.
I'm seriously planning to try to implement something (if I can find the time) that would accept smaller user donations and provide some lottery, award or other method to help keep the new users engaged. (these prizes would ONLY go to smaller and/or new users)
But in all reality, we as a whole community are always going to have to find solutions for these and other future issues that arise. We truly will rise or fall together.