Problem: One of the biggest challenges that the Steemit community has in growing the platform is that there's existing content-based social networks that have huge network effects already in place.

It's historically proven to be extremely difficult for newcomers to displace the incumbent network effect businesses on the Internet. UI/UX and other technological innovations generally are not enough (if it were enough, Craigslist, Reddit, & Ebay would not still have such a large market share of their respective categories). Business innovation is how incumbents are typically disrupted and the business model innovation that Steemit has is what gives it a chance to displace Medium, Twitter, and Reddit and find it's place in the mindshare of the hundreds of millions of users already using content-based social networks.

For me as a user on Steem, the monetary reward potential has already forced me to shift some of my time spent on Medium, Twitter, and Reddit to Steemit. I've spent years building my reputation on those platforms though so it's not an easy change of behavior. As a result of time spent on those platforms, I've now got 2,944 Twitter followers, 1,300 Medium followers and 3,946 Reddit Karma and get lots of engagement and distribution. I've discovered that new Steemers face a tradeoff between the distribution benefit of existing networks and the monetary rewards benefit of Steemit.

When I post on Steemit, I'm giving up all of that good-will I've built up for the past 5 years outside of Steem. The idea though is that what I'm sacrificing in engagement and distribution from a high caliber network that I've built up, I'm gaining in monetary rewards. There's a monetary reward-per-time invested at which I'm willing to make that sacrifice (see to the right of the breakeven point in the chart below). There's also a point at which the sacrifice is not worth it to me (to the left of the break-even point).

Proposal: Steem users that provide social credentials on existing platforms (Twitter, Medium, and Reddit) should receive more Steem Power for their contributions, and the increase should be relative to their social reach.

When someone like Neil Strauss posts on Steemit and shares it with his 118K Twitter followers for the first time, that is much more valuable to the network than when I join Steemit and share it with my Twitter followers. The incremental value of that post should be reflected at the protocol level, because as this thing grows the community is inevitabilty going to miss high-value content. When high-value influencers balance the tradeoff between distribution and monetary incentives, I believe most will simply drop off unless this is reflected at the protocol level.

Implementation could be something like:

• User connects their Twitter to their Steemit account (could add Medium, Reddit, and others as well)
• User must have 2 years of posts and could check for other heuristics to prevent spam accounts from gaming the system
• A "Influencer" number is assigned to every user based on their magnitude of influence. (10 for >50M Twitter followers, 9 for >10M, 8 for >1M, 7 for >100K, 6 for >1K, 5 for >100)
• If 10, multiply STEEM power reward on an ongoing basis by 2. If 9, multiply STEEM power reward by 1.8, etc (not sure exact numbers here but something along these lines). Also, give bonus at the beginning for having that influence

What do you guys think? Is this a proposal that could increase the value of the community? I'm sure there's problems with the approach that I'm not addressing, would love to hear them in the comments.