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A Chat With The SteemSTEM Team
SteemMag:
How did you get to know about Steemit?
SteemSTEM:
@coinbitgold: I got to know about Steemit from a DAO and ethereum article after the DAO “hacking” incident. I was doing some research on the ethereum blockchain and smart contracts. I registered and observed the posts. Did not entirely have an in idea what I was getting into. Eventually, i decided to write an #introduceyourself post and was surprised to see replies a day after from total strangers. Since then, I was hooked!
@herpetologyguy: My father introduced me. I truthfully understand very little about cryptocurrencies or exactly how Steemit works, but I am an avid blogger who is always looking to share more of my material. A few minutes browsing the science-tagged posts was enough to convince me that Steemit was worth my time and energy!
@lemouth: I heard about Steemit via @cryptoctopus who teased my curiosity about cryptocurrencies and the possibility of getting paid for blogging within an online community. I was part of an online community some years ago (connected to hiking and the mountain sports; I was doing sport at that time :p), and I appreciated the experience so that I decided to give Steemit a try. And after a few days I was convinced, and I am still on board.
@logic I think, it was from a cryptocurrency news website.
@justtryme90: I historically was a frequent redditor and cryptocurrency enthusiast. I subbed to a number of crypto related subreddits and in a post from one of those subreddits a user was discussing a crypto based reddit alternative. I was intrigued and signed up!
SM:
What’s the science community on Steemit like?
SteemSTEM:
The Steemit STEM community is both small and yet surprisingly large and diverse at the same time! It is small in the sense that we are only a handful of active bloggers / users. However, large and diverse with regards to the variety of fields covered. The members of this community consist of both people with high degrees in their fields and also educated people who just like science as a hobby and do a great job posting about it.
Some users are even quite new to the sciences and are sharing what they are currently learning, their passion shines through the posts they make and is equally as exciting as a more technical post. Still, we certainly need many more writers from different STEM fields, and attracting additional good bloggers is one of the challenges we face.
We initially had some worries that highly technical writers may not have much of an audience on Steemit, but that is certainly not the case as the community has been excitedly responding to both technical and more popular science posts alike!
Overall, the community is supportive and has been both sharing quality information as well as eagerly helping newer or less experienced writers unlock their full potential.
SM:
What inspired you guys to start SteemSTEM?
SteemSTEM:
We all believe in doing something valuable for the scientific community. Many of us have actively complained on both steemit and steemit.chat about the lack of recognition for STEM posts from the early days when we all signed up onward. @coinbitgold set things in motion with her academiaspotlight series, where she was trying to highlight the works of STEM bloggers in order to get them more exposure and a larger reward.
Even after this only a few users could be helped, and we watched as more higher quality science posts were still getting microscopic rewards while pseudoscience or other low quality postings were becoming trendy.
We continued to organize a bit on steemit.chat because of our mutual desire to make this platform better for all science posters. The spirit of being supportive and having common goals aligned us while our desire to promote better science directed our focus.
From these early days we continued to grow and felt that forming an official group, steemSTEM was the best way to further engage the community, continue to bring together likeminded Steemians, and increase the quality of postings on the platform not only for ourselves but for everyone who visits.
SM:
What have you been able to achieve so far? And further expansion plans?
SteemSTEM:
We have formally organized into one chat room #steemSTEM on steemit.chat. Here many of our members have been actively involved in discussions with Steemians that have been criticized for inaccuracies in their postings.
Some steemSTEM members have begun acting as reviewers for these posters works in order to help them improve their content as well as their future postings. This room has also been a good source of inspiration for others as ideas for interesting postings are often times discussed!
We have been adamant that this chat should be about discussing ideas rather than just posting links like so many other steemit.chat channels, and this we feel sets it apart.
Additionally our outreach programs have begun. We have secured some funding from our introductory posting and have been in touch with a few established bloggers. We are also actively generating a list of good outside bloggers to contact, and this is something that the steemit community could really help us with.
If there are any STEM related blogs that you actively follow and would like us to reach out to those bloggers to try to bring them to steemit, please let us know in the #steemSTEM chat!
In all, we have a lot more work to do, be that internally, helping improve the quality of current Steemian STEM bloggers or externally with our outreach program. Additionally, we have plans to incorporate contests to help spread rewards and Steem Power to more of the STEM community on Steemit! We are all dedicated to improving the quality of STEM on Steemit and welcome any one who has been thinking about blogging about a STEM topic, but hasn’t jumped in just yet to join us in the #steemSTEM steemit.chat channel.
Thanks guys for taking the time to have a chat with SteemMag.... You truly are doing an amazing job with SteemSTEM . Looking for more awesome stuff coming from you guys...
A Chat with the Man behind Steemit Wish List
SteemMag:
When and how did you join steemit?
@timcliff
I joined near the end of July, pretty much right when Steem was at it’s peak price. My brother told me about it, and I was immediately blown away! I bought in $250 worth of Steem, which at the time was 66 Steem. I’ve been here since.
SM:
What inspired you to start The Wishlist?
@timcliff
I noticed that there were a lot of really good ideas being discussed in the community, and I had created a few idea posts as well. I wasn’t sure if the development team was even aware of all the ideas that were out there, so I thought it would help to try and organize everything into one list, so the dev team could review all the requests.
SM:
Which features on Steemit has impressed you the most?
@timcliff
I really like the reputation feature. I am an RPG player at heart, so anything that involves “leveling up” I naturally enjoy. I also think that hiding the negative flagged comments was a really key feature as well. It came at a time that spam/bots were really frustrating a lot of users, and it actually resolved it. Followers/feeds, and Resteem are pretty cool too. There have really been so many great improvements! It’s hard to list them all
SM:
What further features would you like to see on Steemit?
@timcliff
Oh, boy. See wish list? It’s probably not the ‘sexiest’ feature, but really a super easy to use posting interface is probably going to be my top choice. If Steemit is going to be full mainstream, it will need to be easy for the “average user” to create posts.
For example, right now my mom likes to type up posts, but she emails them to me to post on her behalf, because figuring out how to upload pictures to a third-party site and then reference the URLs is too ‘technical’ for her. The interface needs to be designed for people like her.
I am also really excited to see what they come up with as far as curation guild support. The voting imbalance has been causing a lot of issues/frustration. It’s gotten a lotbetter since RHW, Curie, and similar projects have sprung up though. I can’t wait to see how it improves when the whole community can do this on a larger scale. The customization of personal profiles (including avatars and achievement badges) will be really fun too!
SM:
What next for The Wish List?
@timcliff
I’m not sure actually. We’ve given the dev team a lot to work with 🙂 I’ve been shifting a lot of my efforts now into my latest “Steemit.com Development Updates” series, which focuses more on what features the dev team are actually working on.
I think the community is interested in this now that all our ideas are out there via the wish list. Hopefully we will start to see more of the ideas we suggested start getting worked on and showing up on the site! Eventually we will probably get to a point where a lot of new improvements have been made, and we will be ready to start thinking of the next round of wishes to offer up to the dev team
Thanks @timcliff for taking the time to have a chat with SteemMag.. Looking out for more awesome initiatives from you.
This Week On Steemit
A lot of interesting events happened this week. And in case you missed them, we’ve got your back. Here are some of the most important events that happened on Steemit this week.
~Steemit releases new updates : phone verfication and sign up flow refactoring , Transfer to savings and a number of other changes.. Check out @ausbitbank’s postSteem maintains last week’s position on the coinmarketcap.com’s crypto market capitalization list to a current 9th.
~@jasonmcz makes Steemprices.com open source.For a comprehensive list of dedicated Steem apps. check out SteemTools.com
Meanwhile, SBD maintains last week’s rates ranging from 1 SD = 0.92 -0.95 this week
~$0.28 and $0.38 were the lowest and highest value traded this week for a unit of Steem respectively.
Steemfest Tickets Giveaway #3
This is the third and perhaps final Steemfest tickets giveaway. In all, about 5 Steemians have won free SteemFest Tickets courtesy of SteemMag.
I’ve got about 2-3 Tickets left to give out. And as usual I don’t really have a criteria for dishing it out. Just drop a comment in page 1 or 2.
27 days to go
Are you going?
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