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     5 years ago 

    That is a tricky question. Do I think that school students would benefit from , and enjoy Steem? Yes. But the challenge is to get them to take the time it takes to sign up and learn about it.

    My father and I talked about this, and we think there are four obstacles: Days of waiting for account completion, confusion about the need for keys and the long master password, widespread suspicion of cryptocurrency, and absence of trendiness.

    I have advertised Steem for 4 years in any and every way to anyone and everyone who would hear me (everyone in my school has heard about it at some point), and yet only a small number of people from my school joined, only a few posted at all, and only 1 actually stuck around for more than a few weeks.

    For recruiting from schools, my father thinks that there's something to be learned from the way Facebook began its roll-out in the early 2000s by focusing on and saturating one college at a time, and I think that it's important to reward posts that don't require long attention spans but still demonstrate quality.

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     5 years ago 

    Thanks for this feedback.

    We are certainly working on making the signup procedure quicker and easier, and for making the whole onboarding process smoother.

    Very interesting idea about the original Facebook roll-out method. I wonder how we could use that sort of approach with Steem...?

    The Steemit Team

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     5 years ago 

    Very interesting idea about the original Facebook roll-out method. I wonder how we could use that sort of approach with Steem...?

    This is not my forté, but for whatever it's worth, here's some brainstorming:

    • Start with colleges, not high schools, just to minimize potential legal/regulatory/ethical issues with recruiting students under the age of 18.
    • Pick a few starting colleges
    • Set up a "fast pass" to the account creation process so students from those schools can get quick/immediate account creation.
    • Set up and manage Steem communities for the schools.
    • Identify on-campus "influencer" students from other social media platforms or other research (maybe focus on comp. sci., journalism, communications, and other "friendly" majors?)
    • Hire some of them into 1-semester part time jobs to bootstrap the schools' communities with photography, videos, or articles about campus life; to share those articles with followers on other platforms; and to recruit their peers into the Steem community.
    • Provide them with guidelines about privacy, copyright, key security, accessing exchanges, etc.
    • Advertise on campus, near campus, in the school newspaper, give away T-shirts & gear to students, etc...
    • Make sure the communities are well-curated & moderated until they get off the ground. Keep rewards at realistic levels to manage expectations, but don't let them be ignored.
    • Partner with Appics, Actifit, and/or others on the initiative?
    • At the end of the semester, transfer community ownership to... someone... not sure who... faculty? admin? student? alumni assoc? endowment? Might vary by school...
    • New semester, new schools. Experiment with different sizes and types of schools. Revise the program and scale up for more schools per semester as time passes.
    • Hopefully, at some point, the network effect will take over and new schools will start coming online without active recruitment efforts. Not sure why, but for some reason the number "50" sticks in my head for the number of schools when Facebook hit some sort of tipping point. Maybe achievable in 3-4 years?

    Don't know how useful any of this is, but that's what came to mind for me.

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     5 years ago 

    Thank you for this. Some excellent ideas here.

    I will bring this into our 'ideas folder' to see how it could be picked up in our future planning.

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