What WE as the community can do to improve STEEM and push further growth

Hello everyone, I hope you guys doing all right :)

Were you also overwhelmed by the complexity of the platform when you joined Steem? Do you think it is annoying that good content is rare on this platform and bots spam the hell out of the newsfeed? I want to address some topics on this blogpost to improve the user experience on Steemit.

Being 2,5 weeks active now I could say that I know the basics: I made a couple of posts, commented on people’s blogs, upvoted some posts I like, included some markdown styles and inserted pictures and today I am going for GIFs. Sounds pretty cool and I think I am ready to catch some whales:

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Hell no, I am far away from understanding the website/blockchain completely. It is still a long way to go:
I have to make a couple of experiences, learn some techniques, but I will continue posting in order to be a bit more successful on the platform. Although I am still quite new, I can give some advice or recommendations to increase the popularity of Steemit:

Complexity & customer experience

First of all, I want to say that I know that it is not easy to build applications on the blockchain since it is a relative new innovation. Besides that, I totally love it and I think that is also the reason why I actively participate on this platform. For the moment I just want to switch to the point of view of a new customer which has barely something to do with the blockchain.

Comparing Steemit with other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit or Twitter I have to say the developer team made it really difficult for people to participate on this channel. The first hurdle of a newbie/plankton is that after the registration, people have two choices to activate their accounts: Either the person waits two weeks or he pays money to get immediately access. This might be a problem for mass adoption because a lot of people do not want to pay for services before they tried it out. The other aspect is that since they already registered, they want to experience & feel the community immediately. After 2 weeks, the hype might already be over and users do not even want to start their journey anymore.

Second, for new users it is quite hard to start to write a blog. That means starting out of the blue is too complex for most of the people. Before you can start, you have to read a lot of tutorials in order to participate in the community. The functions and options are not intuitive and people have to look all over the web to find solution for their problems. One example would be styling your blog, the user has to read the mark style guide. Another major issue is that you need to have enough RC power to post actively, comment on people’s posts and upvote and resteem content from other bloggers. For more information about RC you can read my related blog post, explaining this issue in more detail. There are many more hurdles which discourage new users to stay active on this platform. Increasing the user experience especially for new people is a major topic to manifest the success of Steemit.

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Bots

Another problem I see is that there are a lot of bots around spamming the current news feed. There are a lot of posts created by bots which reduces the visibility of good content creators. This fact highlights the issue that good content creators are overseen and readers have an extra hurdle to find something interesting. Don’t get me wrong, some bots are worth having, like checky, statistic bots and several more but there is also a lot of spam bots around which should be banned from the community in order to create a better user experience. Maybe by implementing a evaluation system for bots, and deleting the unnecessary ones would help to solve this problem.

Upvote other content

Above all, I see a lot of people only posting their blogs without interacting with other people. This is not the intension of a social media platform ;) Blogger should at least upvote 10 posts a day and write some comments to get the community growing. I also think that issue correlates with the above-mentioned bot thematic, since it is really hard to find content which you like to read. Steemit is at the moment not a place of favorable content where you can find blogs which you enjoy reading really easily. I, myself also do not upvote as much as I should but I already planned it to do it in the future. Furthermore, it is just a suggestion to others to support minnows but also whales to create a living out of Steemit. Don’t be too selfish and try to support others. Related to that I wrote a blog about my idea where Steemit could head to in the future:

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Conclusion

There are several more topics which could increase the user experience than those I just mentioned. Complexity, Bots and upvoting other peoples content are only the tip of the iceberg. I only want to make a statement: that the community has to work on a better user experience which would lead to more users that would lead to a price increase. Yesterday, I was looking for the member numbers of Steemit for the first time: 1 Million, I was a bit shocked and happy at the same time. Shocked because I thought way more people would already Steem and happy because that means there is a lot of potential in this platform. At the moment WE can influence the development of this platform by creating a nice user experience with good quality of posts. Create a platform where people like to waste their time :)

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I think it is worth to talk about this topic!
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Have a good day everyone and I would love to see you around
M