100 percent of the liquid rewards for this post will go towards rewarding engaging and insightful comments. . .
Hello everyone! Yesterday my father and I contributed thoughts in a comment thread on this post to the Steemit team on how we think user growth, and in turn, Steem growth, can be achieved from where we currently are. We are at the unique point in the stages of community building in which we, the current community, can decide what is best for growing the community from here. @steemitblog's "100 Days of Steem" is a great initiative to start things up. Now this post is for discussion of ideas ranging from marketing, to ideas to make user experience better, to systematic changes that might be ideal.
At the same time, this post is yet another post in my series of experiments with utilizing the experimental @penny4thoughts account (set up by my father) to reward engaging discussion (see about the initiative at the bottom). I am going to quote @remlaps and @whatsup in the section to follow, then I will ask what your opinions on the matter are.
Thoughts from @remlaps and @whatsup
Here is a quote of my father's thoughts on how we might build a community amongst college kids in a similar manner to how Facebook built their community:
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.
In her article on the same subject matter, @whatsup states:
So, in a way it's a chance for a fresh start. We often had constant conflict between content creators and other projects and we got focused on "Quality Content again and again. Due to that focus at times we let projects get defunded or attacked for the sake of trying to vote up the best articles. Yet, it never seemed like we achieved it, because stakeholders all have different opinion of what hold(s) value.
She finishes the article by asking:
What else should we focus on?
New Dapps?
Content?
Rewarding casual content that is more consistent to most social media?
Your ideas?
What do you think?
Although this may seem redundant with the post from @whatsup, I want to use @penny4thoughts to encourage and reward discussion. Please also go participate in the discussion on her post.
Where should we go from here? How should we market? How should we post? How should we curate? How should we proceed? What needs to change?
DISCLAIMER
Please focus the discussion on positive areas for improvement for Steem. This is not intended to be a gripe session. Assume everyone here is familiar with the concept of HIVE, and is not interested in hearing about it again. I will personally mute any authors of spam or disrespectful comments.
The Initiative
Right now, it is important to develop the discussion aspect of Steem. In order to do this, the experimental account, @penny4thoughts was created by @remlaps.
If the account (@penny4thoughts) is set as a beneficiary, it will evenly distribute the liquid portion of the post's rewards to the authors of comments that the post author upvotes with 100 percent voting power. For this post, and all future [Discussion Posts] in the category 'penny4thoughts', I will be setting @penny4thoughts as a beneficiary for 100 percent of the posts' rewards, and I will monitor the discussion and upvote valuable contributions.
Additional Information About My Use of Bidbot(s)
I am using bidbots to try to increase the amount of liquid rewards of these discussion posts so that there is more stake for rewarding engaging discussions. I know that the use of bidbots has been looked down upon, but I think an exception can be made when trying to enhance the community through rewarding positive discussion.