5 Ideas to Improve Steemit Discovery Features
New Steemians can find it quite difficult to find their initial audience, or help their users find them. This problem has lead to many stop-gap tools and hacks that help a little minnow try to make a bigger splash when they post. Vote bots like @minnowbooster and @randowhale can help increase payouts and attention. Entire communities were built such as the #MinnowSupportProject and #Whaleshares. I think all of these solutions are attempting to solve a broader discovery issue that exists in Steemit. Posts are too ethereal and too time-depdenent So, I decided to share some ideas that could reduce those impacts and improve the discovery of wonderful content.
1. Be able to subtract entire topics from the main feed.
Anyone that has been on Steemit for some time has noticed that the top posts tend to be Steem, Steemit and Crypto oriented. As new users join, they are not always coming from the crypto-community. They may not have an interest in some of the greater political or cultural issues of Steemit. Currently, there is no way to clear away this content they may not be interested in. And they can't upvote other topics up enough for them to even hit the primary trending page. Even a large collection of minnows can't really outdo the current taste makers and topic-drivers of the main Trending page.
2. Be able to create personalized Trending pages.
Along the same lines, it would be great to create custom Trending pages that just include the topics I want to see, both new and old. These Steem Rooms would be amazing centers of curation that could also be saved and shared with others - essentially a topic of topics. So, aside from just subtracting on the page, I can curate my own collection of fasciating topics. This should help unlock the long-tail on Steemit by allowing communities to congeal and focus on themselves.
3. Allow readers to mark, star, or otherwise save their favorite content.
A Favorite section would allow users to promote authors and older content that wouldn't necessarily be drowned out by the constant flood of new posts. It would make community creation easier and empower new tastemakers, even if they lack voting power. I could see and interact with someone's Favorites to find new authors and new content that aligns with my interests. There is already the beginnings of this stirring in the #Whaleshares discord room with the 'looking-for-niche' channel. A Favorite page could be used to link and bind communities together.
You Favorited this post/author. See who else Favorited them in the past month!
4. Resurface older content to reduce how much time is a factor for posts.
I don't have a firm idea what this may look like. Maybe this is a 'Best of Steemit'. Maybe this is an adjusting of the Trending page algorithm to highlight older content by changing the sort functionality. Maybe its a 'Best of This Week' page. Anything to highlight old posts that may have been Hot but didn't survive long enough to be seen by a lot of the community. I think more selective topics will help with this, but more thought on reducing how ethereal posts currently are would be amazing.
5. Increase Discovery within an Author's Post.
Steemit does not make it one-click simple to continue reading an author's posts, or an author's posts along a singular topic. After you've enjoyed a great blog, you need to follow them or dig into their myriad of posts, resteems and topics to continue to find work of interest. i.e. I love this content, what else did this person write thats similar or recent?
There is not an easy way to shift to a previous post by the same writer or see all of their work along a topic. A solution could reduce bounce rates on a per-author basis and allow user's to know more easily that they want to follow someone's content. For a specific example, I've gotten multiple compliments from random visitors that they like my footer. I've tried to make a point to drive readers to similar content that I may have written a few days or weeks ago along matching topics. It takes some time to curate and maintain, but ideally, it highlights what type of work I enjoy writing about, and additional articles they may enjoy. Having something like this built-into Steemit would be great for both authors and readers.
Conclusion
Overall, these are great problems to have for a new and growing platform. There are already amazing people trying to correct these issues using the tools at hand: Bots, community, scripts, curation trails, contests, etc. Everyone is on the same page about trying to prop up new users and make them successful. I've appreciated the help I've gotten and given in the Minnow Support Project Discord room. I can't wait until some of these minimum viable solutions are built into future versions of Steemit as amazing features!
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Good to see Steemitizans thinking about how to make things better for everyone, some good thoughts and suggestions @somethingsubtle!
Thanks. Now, if only upvotes paid out in time, and I could spin up some websites or tools that provided demos or MVPs of my ideas.
Woohoo! Great ideas...look forward to seeing those.
You mean if upvotes paid out in real time? What is the advantage of that other than just getting the steem faster?
Good job on turning your thoughts into a post, and thanks for the mention of Looking For Niche!
I am all for increasing discoverability and personalization. Favoriting content would definitely be easier than having to bookmark on a browser level, and letting others see your favorites, sort of like Twitter, is also a neat idea. At the same time, it is a way to learn more about your Steemians interests.
It's a bit harder having Steemit resurface older posts. Steemit is based on the community curating everything, so I don't know how "good old posts" should be determined. I think your problem is better solved with a mix of your #1 and #2 suggestion of personalizing the trending page, sort of like you would personalize a Facebook feed. You would still miss old posts, but you would on the other hand be more likely to see them in the first place, if uninteresting (to you) content didn't clutter your feed.
Being able to have people share curated community feeds natively in Steemit is something like what I have been looking for
I vouche for things that can help out niches here on Steemit, hence why I created Looking For Niche. I think Steemit has great potentiel to be the go to "blog" service for everyone, if/when more discoverability and community features are implemented.
Yea, I definitely agree and am confident it'll be able to shift and adapt as more users jump on the platform.
What we can do right now is linking older posts in our own newest articles...
Yesterday I read an article by @jerrybanfield who linked to one of his friend's articles. I also found very helpful posts using YouTube since people put a link to their Steemit post in the video description.
I'm going to link helpful posts in my future articles so hopefully it makes a little difference now.
Yea, I think its a great idea to put previous or helpful posts in a subtle way in a footer or header. :)
I think all those ideas would help new people a lot. I read the steemit category blogs to try to learn new things and would find that marker very useful. I don't understand them all because I am a slow learner. I spend a lot of time looking for posts by the people I do understand so thee marker would help me. I hope the site devs read your post.
Thanks! I'm glad you like the idea.
I know the tricky part will be actually creating it. The idea is the easy part. :D
This quality content and suggestions appeals for a true difference with other social platforms and with our early-version of steemit. Lets remember, steemit is just ONE platform powered by STEEM, and we already have examples out there of how people can interact around content. But sometimes we forget that old does not mean boring and new does not mean interesting either, i think is more needed to focus on the user experience and take the good things from already consolidated social media platforms, but also propose new dynamics as the overall steem community demands it, because in fact it is a new dynamic itself to be here.
Thanks for your proposals @somethingsubtle i found particularly interesting the 5. Increase Discovery within an Author's Post and i will add comments as well so we can discover same content within a versatile author. I find my self interested in this one, thinking about my content being consumed by others and others content consumed by me.
If you like to keep sharing ideas about the technology and business about a cryptocurrency, please follow me @sono.arquetip. Always something new and interesting.
Wow! Solid ideas. I hope that these 5 ideas will be implemented in steemit. thanks!
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This is exactly what I was thinking about the other day. Its a little chaotic in here and targeting needs to be fixed so you dont lose your time searching for what you need^^
Yea, increasing discovery would go a long way to empower the guilds and communities that are starting to build up, but quickly get buried by what the whales like to read.
Exactly. I hope they fix this^^
great ideas must be considered nice to see your effort for community.
Thank you! I hope they help those up the chain hear what their customers/steem-holders want.
Great post! For me steemit's biggest problem (and it's easily solvable) is that posts stop earning after 7 days - this seems counterproductive and does not reward authors of truly useful posts that may continue to be useful - If any one agrees please spread the word to make that change!
Yea, I'm guessing this will get solved in the future once the 7-day economy is a bit more figured out.
Likely once we solve some of the discovery problems and old content becomes organically more valuable, content creators will than push for monthly or quarterly payouts based on views or upvotes or something.