I've been on Steemit for nearly one week and I'm getting familiar with it. Below are some of my thinking about steemit. Unfortunately so far steemit is not what I had expected before I joined in.
Firstly I would like to say that steemit is really a fantastic idea that connects postings and blockchain technique (can it be called so?). Its advantages over the traditional media platforms are obvious: free of political censorship (in theory), the decentralized non-modifiable database, and the built-in tipping system that can be used to stimulate good bloggers to write good posts. This is probably the major reasons that make me feeling worthy experimenting on this new platform. And it indeed makes me write this :->
Within this week, I have been browsing on steemit now and then although haven't made many footprints. I find several potential issues on steemit.
The community is too harmonious. Till now I haven't seen any hot/famous critiques about the problems of steemit posts on steemit. This is not a good phenomenon in my opinion. If a community would like to become better and larger, its members should reflect on it quite frequently. I only see praises, sometimes out of unknown reasons. The harmony also resides in the fact that posters only like to share the publicly recognized opinions, rather than those that may cause debates. Subsequently, the comments are full of applauses, many of which are a waster of time. And quite often I see some comments under the posts in Chinese merely say "good write", even for those who cannot read Chinese! Ridiculous, eh?
The mechanism of modification needs to be redesigned. It may be seemingly reasonable to provide a 7-day window for the posters to improve the posts. However that is far from enough. Good posts can be updated quite frequently. The 7-day limit makes the posters write short articles which does not require annoying (!?) modifications later. What do you expect these articles on steemit would be? And that's probably the reason that I've always heard that steemit is a platform that can make money by posting, but not always a platform with high quality articles and good posters. Blockchain database can be fancy sometimes, making money is essentially important sometimes, but not always.
Okay, here goes the complaints on steemit.com. Yes, after pressing the "POST" button... I don't like to talk more about this since it has already been mentioned by others. Overall, there are lots of issues with respect to the website.
And I'd like to provide some suggestions on steem.
There should be a mechanism to encourage posters to write long articles with deep thoughts. Different scoring strategies should be calculated for different articles, e.g., articles of some categories should be more weighted than others. A daily/weekly/monthly topic can be made to encourage posters to share their opinions.
Steemit should encourage the debate and should have some approaches to deal with those non-sense comments. I'd suggest a community-driven moderation strategy, stackoverflow may be a good example.
It may be a good idea to allow the posters to choose the modification window. And in case some edits can be lost, there can be some internal version control systems (VCS) like git to support committing, rolling back etc, which I think are good complementary.
Steemit should encourage people to tip/upvote on some posts in a rational way rather than a "win-win" money game. To me, I think steemit can focus on 1) why paid media like traditional newspapers/journals still have some portions of readers 2) how to utilize the intrinsic of blockchain database. One application scenarios I can think of on steemit is to encourage the readers to write novel/story series, where tipping/upvoting should be quite straightforward.
Anyway these are just my thoughts. Steemit is a good experiment and is still in its beta stage. Of course I hope the community can grow stronger like their so called centralized platforms.