Adapted from original, credit: Marshall Ramsey
I have been on Steemit for less than a day so far and I have to say that I absolutely love the concept, and the implementation is obviously working. Having a legitimate community that lends itself enough credibility to create value out of creativity and interaction is absolutely amazing.
However, I have also spent multiple hours reading up on the mechanics making Steemit work, and I still don't have all of the answers to some basic questions. While I'm sure you could all jump in and answer the specific questions I have, I think that it points to a more serious issue. The user experience for newcomers is not even close to intuitive.
Luckily, I am the type of nerd that loves diving deep into new concepts and conducting this sort of research. That said, I think that this community will most benefit from gaining traction with users that are not nearly as concerned with the inner workings. For those of us that do care, this would serve the purpose of helping us build the community.
I'm not sure I am knowledgeable enough to set forth reasonable suggestions for improvement. However, my gut feeling is that most of the mechanics and features can be related to existing features in games and social networks. I think a more simplified "leveling" system (rather than having the reputation and SP both sort of serve this kind of purpose) would make it a lot easier to understand.
I don't think that the actual inner-workings and components need to be changed, but if a new user could have a simpler view of things until they wanted to get more involved, people might appreciate that.
Please feel free to disregard my ramblings, I just wanted to offer my 2 cents since I'm a newcomer and have a fresh perspective.
Happy Friday!