After reading a post from one of the developers last week that requested thoughts on a few ideas to increase Steem Power demand, my brother (who is a dolphin) and I started talking about what would make a minnow (like me) want to buy Steem Power. It would be great to have more whale investments, but in reality, this platform has far more minnows than dolphins and whales and even after the user-base explodes it will still be that way.

So here’s our thinking

There is an incentive to build or buy Steem Power if you want to be a dolphin. A dolphin has enough Steem Power to curate for profit. On top of that, they also benefit from the interest. So for a dolphin, the more steem power you have the better!

However, becoming a dolphin means working your way up to more than 3000 SP. For a minnow, who starts off with 10 SP this can seem like an unattainable goal unless they have the money.

Other incentives to buy steem

We all have dreams of what the steemit platform will be like when we leave beta mode and enter into the real world.

Some of my dreams for example

• Private messaging
• Profile biographies
• Profile pictures
• Filters
• Groups
• Tag badges for building a reputation on certain tags
• The MUTE button actually blocking troll responses from appearing in the Reply feed

I don’t claim to know what’s on the way but new features are on the way!

What if some of these features were perks instead?

Building Indicators of Status

Have you ever heard of a game called Team Fortress 2?

Team Fortress 2 is a team-based first-person shooter multiplayer video game [in which] players join one of two teams comprising nine character classes, battling in a variety of game modes including capture the flag and king of the hill.

Through various updates, hats and accessories can be worn by any of the classes, giving players an ability to customize the look of their character, and extremely rare hats named "unusuals" have particular effects attached to it and are only obtainable through opening "crates" or trading with other players. [...] Limited-edition hats and weapons have been awarded for pre-ordering or gaining Achievements in other content from Steam. [...] According to Robin Walker, Valve introduced these additional hats as an indirect means for players to show status within the game or their affiliation with another game series simply by visual appearance.

Coincidentally the gaming platform is called Steam…

People will pay for (or work to earn) STATUS

As we know from games like World of Warcraft people will spend a lot of money on multiplayer online games. From what we can see from Team Fortress2, the weapons needed to play the game well are not the only things people are willing to pay for. Gamers actually buy these hats just to customise their characters and build status.

Customising your Steemit Profile

We could do a few things to customise our Steemit profile, including the obvious profile picture and biography so that drop-by readers can see what you or your blog is all about.
PERK
Rather than just adding this as a feature and giving it to every new user, the developers could choose to make this a perk of accounts which have over 50 SP.

Private messaging

What’s to stop somebody you’ve blocked from creating a new account and sending you private messages to harrass you?
PERK
The ability to send private messages (on the front end) could be limited only to accounts which have a minimum of 10 SP. This would make it expensive for a troll to continuously create new accounts for the sake of trolling.

Reputation Badges

While we have a general reputation attached to our personal steemit account, we could also have a seperate reputation attached to a particular tag that we use. For example, if we write about medicine very often and all of the posts that we write on medicine do very well, we could earn badges for that particular tag showing our reputation for using that tag.
PERK
Rather than just have everybody start off with a handful of different badges for tags they’ve used a few times, the reputable writer should first have accumulated enough Steem Power to display their 3 - 5 high rep badges and the reputation they hold on those particular tags.

Advertising

Here’s a controversial one.

Although I know most people don’t ever want to see advertising here on steemit I’m not aware of Dan or Ned’s future plans for this possible source of revenue. Mobile applications make a lot of money from making 2 variations of the same app.

One has advertising, the other doesn’t.

If making your steemit account AD-FREE was something that could be reached before reaching dolphinhood (at lets say, 2000 SP) then this would have no effect on our curating dolphins and whales.

Conclusion

What I am proposing would make it easier to distinguish the people from the bots. Until you have built up or bought enough SP to have a profile picture, your picture could be your very own randomly generated bot.

The reputation system wouldn't be the only way to identify with other people, as just how much customisation their profile holds will also indicate STATUS here on steemit.

This might actually push a lot of minnows to dolphinhood much quicker if they are willing to pay for ad-free use of the website. And if not, they can always publish their blogs, reaping the rewards until they build up enough SP to be ad-free.

Please share your thoughts