Growing and Expanding Steemit Through a Developer Fund Proposal

The goal for many of us in the long term is to not only increase the price of steem, but more importantly to increase the use of the website. Steemit is good and the developers are doing a fantastic job, but we need to realistically look at who our competitors are and the budgets they have to make good and user friendly applications. We also have benefits by being smaller and being more agile, but we also must use this to our advantage.

There are many developers working on Steemit implementations that have the potential to bring in a mass amount of users (dtube is one that comes to mind), but these developers still have to work a regular job most days and don’t have enough funds to hire people to help them. The Steemit creators have a bunch of steem, but we cant rely 100% on them to fund every single project, especially when the community should be the ones that should get a vote.

In addition more use of a budget for advertising at meetups, organizations, ect will get people to come to Steemit and start posting here. More content and more importantly better content benefits all of us and retaining/ growing users is paramount in having that done. We have done fantastically growing organically, but that growth can be much higher if advertising and spreading the word is done right. So what do I propose?

Dash has had relative success with their developer fund and taking a percentage of the block reward in order to fund projects and advertising in and out of the space. First I propose that a tiny percent of the block reward that is currently getting distributed ( maybe 2%-3%) be put directly into a dev fun that has a sole purpose of funding existing and new projects made to create a better infrastructure and bring in more people to the community.

We could have witnesses vote, but I would much rather prefer that the community as a whole would be able to vote yes or no depending on the voting power they have. This would make sure that the community as a whole and the biggest holders of steem would have the most say on what projects should be funded and move forward with. It could be a simple implementation site where you sign in , you see a list of proposals and you vote on them. Show how much money is in the fund currently and how much someone is asking for then distribute it in waves.

I truly believe that a system like this put in place could have a huge impact on getting new users and more people into the project and invested into the currency. As creators we might lose a tiny percentage now, but in the long run it wont matter if we can bring new people in. More people will want to buy into the system and be a part of it, giving people the ability to vote will just help create more community inclusion. I really hope that the development team can consider this proposal.

Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges