Gaining Experience with SteemIt

Today is the second day in my 30-day blogging Journey on SteemIt, although, I had learned about SteemIt for the past few weeks it took awhile to receive my confirmation to join the network.

This blog post will cover my initial impressions about the SteemIt social networking positive and negatives, including what I believe needs to be improved before SteemIt can become a valuable social network and achieve success as a social experiment.

My first impressions of SteemIt, both positive and negative:

First off, I would like to start on a positive note and say that of the people I have interacted with on SteemIt, the community as a whole is very positive and motivated to see SteemIt succeed. I believe this is for many reasons including the fact that content creators are paid (versus adding value for shareholders, such as Twitter/Facebook) and genuinely believe in the blockchain/cryptocurrency technology as potentially life- and society-changing.

With that said, I believe there are significant challenges facing SteemIt. My following criticisms are about the technology behind the SteemIt social network which can befall any similar social network without the proper precautions and development considerations.

SteemIt reminds me of the early days of the Internet, Google Plus, or most failed social networks:

The strengths of social networks and to the internet as a whole are their weakness as well. The fact that anyone, anywhere can create an account and post as much as they want, for free, can lead to an environment where there is tons of "random" content being posted with very little organization, context or, to be completely honest: value.

In the case of the internet, eventually this was solved by organization by Google search engine, so if you wanted to know the best recipe for "Chicken Parmesan" all you had to do was google it. And in the early days of Google, to get ranked all you had to do was be hyperlinked for a certain phrase, i.e. "Best Chicken Parmesan Recipe" so people began to game the system in order to be ranked highly. Google improved their ranking algorithms, and it continued to go back and forth between spammers and Google to rank their content and rank high-quality content, which still continues to this day.

In many ways, SteemIt seems a throwback to these early days with random pictures of cats, flowers, random topics that I have never even heard about and have no interest in, and sometimes in a language I do not understand. Now, I understand that this may sound mean, condescending or biased, however, Steem must bring some sort of organization, spam filtering, and a way to discern between high-quality posts and spam precisely because of the reason that high-quality posts are so easily lost among the spam.

Don't get me wrong, I love cat photos as much as the next person, but to create a community requires a deep level of engagement, understanding and community that can only be created through shared interests such as Python programming, Photography contests, etc. And even among these types of communities, there is a significant difference between beginners, experts, and even subsets in these groups, such as photos of flowers, mountains, people, etc.

SteemIt Compared to Other Social Networking Sites

In the case of Google Plus, eventually content was organized into 'groups' (for example, Apple Users, Python Programmers, etc) so at least the content was somewhat organized, but still spam reigned supreme. Eventually Google Plus became a defunct social network and I actually never met anyone in real life who used Google Plus (besides me).

The most popular social network, Facebook, has over 2 billion users and most people's 'friends' on that site are friends from real life, so it prevents spam and low quality posts by real-world connections, not to mention the ability to block low quality accounts. Additionally, since you 'know the person', it adds some context and value to what they are saying and how you know them. SteemIt will never have this type of self-selective organizational structure, and should ultimately reward the most engaging and valuable content, similar to Reddit structure--which is the primary structure I believe SteemIt is attempting to emulate, without certain developments of that site.

Twitter, with over 330 million accounts has a significant spam and bot problem, but there are thousands of high-quality, well established accounts, such as news organizations which provide high quality content and therefore the spammers have very little impact on the total quality of the network. In addition, you choose who to follow and who not to follow, including well known organizations such as the Washington Post and New York Times.

SteemIt Social Networking Suggested Areas of Improvement

Ultimately, SteemIt is different than any of these social networks due to it's structure--both on the blockchain (less of a benefit or concern to average SteemIt user) and its structure where content creators are paid for their contribution (arguably the main attraction for 99% of SteemIt users). However, unless SteemIt is brought up to date with current best practices of other social networks, I believe it will fail to gain the traction needed to ultimately succeed. These best practices include:

• The layout of SteemIt social Network has way too much white space, both within individual posts and between posts and comments. For example, in twitter things are significantly condensed and therefore easier to scroll through posts, comments, and find high quality posts to engage in. With SteemIt, I find myself scrolling excessively even among a single post and its comments, and this with the fact that commenting is intentionally slowed, significantly affects my ability to engage as a SteemIt user.

• The ranking and organization. Yes I understand there is a 'feed', and tags (including trending posts), however, something which has made a social site such as Reddit so popular is the fact that the subreddits (communities) are so specific. Yes, there are subreddits such as r/news and r/funny, however, there are subreddits as specific as r/learnpython and even geographic subreddits for each state and large (and even medium-sized) city. Within Steem this internal organization is severely lacking and I believe this area is the #1 area of improvement which will benefit SteemIt long- and short-term.

• The signup authorization process should be more automated, seeing as it took me over a week to be authorized to create an account. Yes I understand the concerns of monetary costs to create an account given the fact that it's on a block-chain, but there are very few sites on the internet where you must wait for a manual authorization to create an account (which should say something about their viability).

• Slow loading times: This may be due to the fact that SteemIt is based on the blockchain, but my interactions with SteemIt are noticably slower than any other website that I continually visit. Liking-Posting-Commenting are all effected, and in some cases deliberately so, for example, limited to commenting every 30 seconds. Whether the purpose of this is intentional to prevent spamming, I only feel affected by it when I am engaging such as replying to a number of comments in a row, and if it's to prevent spam it can be easily subverted.

• The inability to down-vote. On SteemIt, posting as much content as possible is almost encouraged because there is only an up-vote and not a down-vote, which would prevent spam and create a strong dis-incentive to posting spammy content, even more than an upvote encourages content creation: If you knew that a post could end up costing money, you would be more careful about the types of content posted and ensure they are high-quality, relevant posts which add to the conversation.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. In conclusion, myself and all of us on the SteemIt network are here for a reason and that is because we believe in the underlying premise: cryptocurrency and blockchain technology used as a way for content creators to own and monetize their own efforts and the positive effects this will have on society as a whole. As a computer programmer, I will be contributing to the Steem ecosystem as I become more familiar with it and hopefully I will be able to solve some of the challenges I discussed.

I believe by making a few small changes in the structure and implementation of this network, tremendous effects can be achieved for everyone who interacts with the SteemIt social network. Imagine a world where a content creator can have a livelihood directly from their past-times or hobby, unleashing a new world of freedom and creativity for society's most productive individuals.

I believe that is within grasp for thousands of people due to the SteemIt social network, and anything less than this ultimate goal will be a failure of what is possible by this amazing technology.

Closing Question of The Day

What major impact has SteemIt or STEEM had on your own personal life?