Hi,
I appreciate the thoughts to the smaller accounts / newer people joining the platform, encouraging retention and all. Before we get into that, it appears that some have developed the misconception that the platform is growing, on nearly every metric, STEEM has passed its peak by about 2-3 years.
As far as retention; that's going to be a challenge regardless, when the majority of people on the internet are consuming content not producing it. So, the push should be to keep the content producers (that will always be somewhere between 10-30% of users) to maintain the sense that the content produced is being noticed.
That comes down to keeping morale up. What harms the morale of content producers?
- The sense that nobody opens the post
- getting consistently low rewards for the effort while seeing that others with copy pasted (or otherwise low quality) posts that might get 100's of dollars in rewards
- Seeing the disparity in value of accounts (Avg post is rewarded 1-2$, that makes a PILE of posts rewarded pennies to allow some to make hundreds of dollars)
Now, briefly on curation. The intent of curation is to have people vote up quality content so that it might make the hot or trending pages, getting more readers, more votes and ultimately more rewards. Of which curators get a taste.
How it works in practice? I get X votes per day, so, I login, open the new page scroll down to 14 minutes since posted and any post that has a payout is worthy of a vote, if an article looks interesting then open a new tab for after curation and scroll up till I get to the top or my SP is spent. Get to reading, oh, this is a great article but it made nothing, so no motivation to give a thumbs up and my SP has been spent already on the 20 articles I didn't bother reading but had the best potential for reward. Meaning, the quality posts are left behind.
What are some solutions?
The best thing that could be done in terms of preventing demoralized content producers -- Remove ANY display of a posts value. It offers no value to the user to know what a post is worth to the author. Maybe even going as far as not giving the options to vote for a post that was not read, we shouldn't want clickbait titles to be the most rewarded.
Next would be a challenge, but reworking how rewards are calculated would be something worth examining. I understand the owners and whales want to have the most rewards, but that leaves a situation where 90+ % of users can offer little to no value to rewards, and most of the posts must be aimed to get a vote from the top 0.00003% of users, that is a massive disparity. So, a system that adjusts values of rewards based on active users SP over the active SP of users for that day would minimize that disparity. So, if, as appears, that 1/3 of whales are not active, that their SP would not factor in, which would make smaller accounts have more influence on that day.
Post tagging system should be improved to better reflect the topics of discussion. Tagging options are mostly so vague that a topic could fit in most tags, and when searching tags wind up getting far too much unrelated material.
Also, a system that would remove rewards for people who, for example, post porn without NSFW tags. That's not going to do any favors if people start thinking that browsing at work risks loading NSFW content.
I could probably rant on, and I realize you guys are probably thinking "who does this semi-active minnow think he is telling us how to run our show?" and since the answer is just another nobody, I won't hold my breath that this will be seriously considered.