When I stumbled across Steemit, it immediately reminded me of ZapChain. Sadly, it been announced that ZapChain will soon be gone and I find it unlikely that it will make a comeback. While JoyStream seemed to neglect the necessity of monetizing their product well enough, they did do a slightly better job of incorporating Reddit's best features into their platform.
Here are a few things I would like to see on Steemit:
- A link to a Help page on Steemit.com - Some basic rules/guidelines, a list of FAQs and answers, etc. I had to do quite a bit of searching to find answers to what I believe are basic questions. Speaking of searching...
- A search box - If I'm about to submit a post on a piece of news that I just discovered, I'd like to know if there is already a discussion going on in order to avoid multiple conversations on the same topic.
- A way to subscribe or follow categories I'm interested in - Many of the tags and topics listed on Steemit.com are of no interest to me. Sure, I might scroll through them if I'm bored, but most of the time I'm looking to find quality content on my favorite subjects quickly and I don't see a way to do that, yet.
- First and foremost, however, I'd like to see some moderation.
In case there is any concern, let me first point out that I believe censorship in most forms is bad. Nevertheless, in order for a productive discussion to thrive, some forms of censorship are necessary.
Participants should ideally self-censor, of course. If I'm talking about an upcoming event that will significantly impact my life, it is in my best interest to avoid derailing the conversation with non-sequiturs. If ne'er-do-wells are attempting to sabotage meaningful discourse, however, it is in the best interest of others to remove them. By allowing off topic posts to propagate within niche topics, Steemit ends up with an unattractive signal to noise ratio.
While writing this, I clicked on the "photography" tag. Out of the twenty-five most recent entries, nine were posts that were really about a subject other than photography but included a photo somewhere in their content. One had nothing to do with photography and did not include ANY photos. These nine posts should obviously be removed from the category of "photography" since they would be of little use to anyone looking to discuss the art or process of photography. "But, edd," you might say, "tags are not categories! Why can't I add any tag I might feel is relevant to my post, no matter how tangental?" To that I would answer, as long as tags are the only method by which posts can be filtered, they must also be considered default categories and should be treated as such.
Reddit thrives because a subset of its community is granted moderation privileges within their mini-bailiwicks, which greatly increases the amount of relevant discourse. Steemit would do well to follow suit.