I'm sticking around, unfortunately a lot of the web has been going more and more into video, and for me and other deaf people that may or may not be a good thing on account of our need for closed captioning. It's not uncommon for me to go to a YouTube video an download it's caption file and just read the words of a 30 minute video in a few minutes and move onto the next.
Steemit provides me with the reading material I'm after. Granted it's not as diverse yet as I'd like, but there's plenty people here enough so far that I do tend to have regular content fed to me from people I do follow that keep me going. I notice lately that I'll start messing with Steemit and before I know it, 5 or so hours have past from mostly just reading people's stuff.
Not to mention losing an hour or 3 writing my own content as well, depending on how much time I have that I can devote to writing, but if I have a good read in front of me, I'll stop writing just to read.
There does seem to be a culture that wants quick little sound bites, videos for background audio and the like, as long as they don't have to read it seems. Which is quite sad. DTube has it's place in the world, but I'm a lot more iffy on things like dmania even though it does give me a giggle every now and again.
My future plans for steemit is mostly to communicate and have fun with others here, write my own content on a place that I don't have to worry about censorship or hosting costs and to raise awareness of deafness and issues we deaf people face, as well as other misc stuff of interest to me. The money involved is just an added bonus more than anything.
I don't see Steemit as a money making platform, I see it as a blogging social media site, similar to that of Tumblr ... with far less special snowflakes telling me to check my privilege.
If you're interested in reading and writing in long text form, Medium could be the place for you. Honestly, if the investment and cryptocurrency aspect wasn't involved, I wouldn't spend any time on Steemit.
Nevertheless, Medium is not decentralized. So, if you are concerned about that, Medium might not be the best place for you.
Having said that, I haven't seen any censorship on Medium. On the contrary, in my experience, Steemit is the place where people can easily censor each other through flagging, which creates a toxic environment. That's one of the reasons I'm a proponent of the tipping system instead of the reward system.
I like written material as well. I listen to podcasts only when I do something else such as working out or doing the dishes. I find watching videos a waste of time, even though I indulge in that sometimes. Frankly, I don't like it that I come across Steemit posts that consist of a video only.
I'd rather watch my videos on YouTube instead of Steemit, because YouTube has a much better way of serving me what I would like. That type of machine learning doesn't exist on Steemit, which is a huge point of improvement for them.
Another point of improvement would be to filter the posts that include and/or consist of a video, and also the posts that aren't in one of the languages I speak. I come here only to read written text, the rest doesn't interest me much.
I've stated the need for better filtering, I run into video posts as well and with dtube videos, again, no caption so they're very inaccessible for me. Most people uploading to dtube or embedding a YouTube video don't accompany it with additional text and dtubers typically don't write text about what they're talking about in the video, so why bother? I consider my videos the exception when I post one without much added text on account that lately it's just me using Signed Exact English and meant for people who are signing or teaching you how to sign something. So not much else can be gained from added textual content (and even then those videos are used to embed in another article).
If I was exceptionally worried about censorship, I'd be mostly posting solely to my Flog on Freenet. Freenet Project has an exact mirror of my articles that I publish on Steemit.
Do you have any idea if there's a Steemit Feature Requests post running somewhere where people can post their FRQ's as comments and they upvote each other's comment to see which FRQ is the most popular? That would be cool.
There's this yeti dude that's working on a new frontend with new features that he'll be pitching towards the developers https://staging.busy.org/@theuxyeti/steemit-home-page-redesign-part-iv-by-george-i-think-we-ve-got-it otherwise you'd want to hit up the steemit developers themselves.
Thank you for the link. It looks like an interesting series.
Now that I think about it, we don't need the Steemit to implement these features. Everybody can come up with their own website and/or app to access and use the Steemit data, which is on a public blockchain anyway.
Steemit.com is just one of the ways to access the underlying blockchain. If you think about it, it's just a proof of concept project.
I can easily think that another website/app combination coming up with a much better way of interfacing the Steemit blockchain and becoming the number one interface to it, taking over Steemit.com.