Communities

For several reasons, I am still in full agreement with this excellent statement from the 2017 roadmap:

We believe that high-quality content and communities of content producers and their audiences are the primary driver of growth of the steemit.com site, and in turn the wider adoption of the platform and STEEM. To this end, we wish to enable many users to build communities in parallel around curating specific types of content valuable to their audiences.

1. I didn't even see this post because both the trending page and even my feed are out of control with content that is not as focused as I would like. Communities would fix this for me and make it easier to digest the content that I want.
2. I can't wait to experiment with setting up my own community and SMT. For me, this seems like the biggest immediate use case for SMTs and the one I am most excited about because it is the easiest.
3. SMTs and Communities would be a great place to play around with features like Author/Curator payout percentages. They could even act as kind of test net to see what the communities like - what succeeds.
4. Communities seem to be the next logical step to keep Steemit on track as the nextgen blockchain social app. This step would be in alignment with simplicity, velocity, and the 2017 roadmap. It is a big step, but one that needs to be taken sooner rather than later IMO.

In summary, we need communities as a driver of user growth, a better way to digest content, and a place to play with parameters and SMTs.