Who Needs Steemit?

"Life is too short to remain unnoticed."
- Salvador Dali -

Fellow Steemian Hive account@pennsif got me thinking about Steemit today.

In his latest article ( Who should I tell about steem? ) he raises some interesting questions and offers his valuable insights. If you aren't following his work, I recommend that you have a look.

With the decline in the value of STEEM of late, and perceived platform doldrums, Hive account@pennsif has been revisiting his approach to achieving the goal of onboarding 100 new people to the platform this year. At ($1.08 - CoinMarketCap) or thereabouts, Who needs Steemit?

His previous approach of generically touting the ability to earn Steem here resulted in an alarming turnover rate, forcing Hive account@pennsif to rethink things.

Who needs Steemit?
Image courtesy of mari lezhava and http://unsplash.com

In his article,

(and I hope you'll read it and support his efforts), Hive account@pennsif mentions a couple of new users he's helping onto the platform and supporting with ideas and guidance as to how Steemit can help them achieve their immediate goals. I think he's on the right tack now.

Furthermore,

Hive account@pennsif's article inspired me to enumerate a few other use cases that I consider presently seriously undervalued. And so I decided to echo those here in the form of a more general article.

According to this recent article,

not only has the price of Steem declined precipitously in 2018, but user activity has seriously diminished. The data shows both articles and comments have been significantly in decline since the beginning of the year. I personally find this quite saddening. In my humble opinion, there are several use cases that we ought to be shouting from the rooftops, but in reality I hear vanishingly little about them, especially on the trending pages.

There are features of the Steemit platform that I am sad to say Steemit, Inc., does a woefully poor job of promoting.

First and foremost,

as you already know, Steemit is a fast, frictionless, and free facilitator for transferring money globally. Yes, the gateways to fiat at both ends need improvement, but the reality is that Steemit's ability to transfer value freely and easily is outstanding, possibly unparalleled. And Hive account@pennsif's insight about targeting charity and community users brings that reality into an immediate, local, readily available, non-spoofable focus as a medium of exchange and savings for charitable and community projects.

Even when the absolute value of Steem and SBD is low, it's ability to act as a store of value and as a medium of exchange is outstanding and worthy of serious consideration by any organization or community.

Second, and hardly ever spoken of,

is Steemit's amazing value as an archive of one's thought in writing. Where else can you find a reliable and free store for your information and your authorship?

I expect my descendants to be able to see what this crazy old coot (i.e. me) had on his mind, for generations to come. I would also think that charitable and community organizations would highly value blockchain storage of membership rolls, meeting minutes, project newsletters, and etc., ad infinitum.

Finally—

and this one should be shouted from the housetops—Steemit is potentially an incredible information resource for any sort of knowledge base. It's present most woeful lack is a missing index structure. As presently implemented in a linear sequence of chronological posts, access to and even awareness of the huge existing body of information is woefully lacking.

This is of course something that I am attempting to create a prototype of with My Steemit Library. I've only begun dabbling with some tools that I hope will one day make the creation and maintenance of similar libraries a more automatic process. I would love to see Steemit, Inc., take appropriate steps toward creating a global Steemit library with easy access to all topics by all authors.

My final point, stated another way, is this:

Steemit Needs Readers!

Everyone should be queuing up to join Steemit as readers, as thirsty consumers of knowledge. We need to spread the word that Steemit already has a growing archive of high-quality content on many topics of broad interest.

The "write for pay" inducement should—and in many cases this is already true—be a magnet for content creators of the highest quality. Consequently, readers ought to be signing up and subscribing to authors and groups that write on whatever topics of personal interest a reader may care to peruse.

Access to Steemit is almost like having a free account on an "expert system," because Steemit provides the back-channel of comments that readers can use to question and interact with experts on almost any topic of interest.

One sterling example of a large, knowledgeable, and growing community here on Steemit is #homesteaders. Everyone in the world who cares about homesteading should be signing up here on Steemit just to read and follow the incredibly diverse and extremely high quality content on the subject.

These are a few of the under-promoted,

yet compelling use cases that I see. I would love to see "the powers that be" make a bigger deal of issues like these.

My hat's off to Hive account@pennsif today.

Thanks, Hive account@pennsif, for stimulating my thinking in this area!

Readers, what other Steemit use cases and motivations for onboarding do you see?

_FIN

P.S. If you have an "in" with anybody at Steemit, Inc. - Would you please ask them to get rid of these damn, extremely annoying "off-website" arrow/boxes? The have, overnight, made Steemit ugly. There are much better solutions.

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Thanks for your time and attention.
You are why I'm here on Steemit!
I have very eclectic interests and hope, over time, to write about them all.