Some thoughs and reflections after writing in Steemit for a while

I found out about Steemit when I googled up "blockchain journalism". It was after I saw a TED talk about blockchain in which its potential as a intellectual property was explained, and wondered if someone already did something with the idea.

I was happy to be invited in and started reading and writing. It's been several weeks since, and I think this is a good time to share some newbe thoughts and ideas.

To begin with, I must say that I am not sure yet exactly how the reward system works. But I make steem money and I get to upvote and promote posts I like, and this is all just a game as far as I'm concerned. Writing is something I do because I have to. It's good to be recognized and rewarded, and it's nice to be able to reward others, but the exact monetary value is not that important for me at this point.

So let's talk about something else, let's talk about my user experience as a writer and a reader. Well, sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, so I apologize for using hard words but there is no way around saying that: It sucks.

I mostly use the steemit mobile app, for reasons I will soon explain, but for the purpose of accuracy, I am now using the website. Both are just terrible. Really. If you want steemit to pick up some value, it has to be made better. Much better.

Remember what your'e up against. Your'e up against mature blogging sites such as WordPress and richly featured community websites like Vingle and Tumblr, all have a soothing, feature rich mobile app. Furthermore, any forums site out there offers a better user experience than yours, so really.

It's not just the primitive editor and the hectic feeling of the app. It's the whole mess that the reading experience becomes, not enabling to distinguish quality content from garbage, and your using old fashioned tags, for god's sake! no one is using them any more. Everybody moved to categories and facet based filters. Any content site out there offers the abilities such as, following specific subjects and writers, to organizing content into collections. You are lagging a decade behind!

Maybe you wanted to start simple and improve, but you started too simple and now you have to make a giant leap forward. The history of technology is full of great ideas who failed because the importance of user experience was missed or misunderstood.

And you should especially make an effort to improve ( much improve ) the mobile app. I use mostly mobile apps for writing. The main reason is that I don't have much time to write so I use small amounts of free time to do that. I write when I wake up early at the morning, and when I am waiting for the train, and in other rare occasions where I have some spare time. I am sure that there are many like me. If you want to appeal to those who can't afford become professional yet and harness the power of blockchain to help us to grow, an excellent mobile app is a must. Its OK if users have to go to the website every once in a while, for example to perform monetary transactions, but the app has to support most of the writing and reading workload.

So please, I hope you will not be offended by me using hard words. My intent is to give you a wakeup and direction call. I don't know how financially sound Steemit is, and how much you can put into software development. But please don't kill a great idea because you have done much much to little to get it to users. I will keep writhing though, because in the bottom line I believe that Steemit is part of the right way forward.