5 Ideas to Improve Steemit Discovery Features

New Steemians can find it quite difficult to find their initial audience, or help their users find them. This problem has lead to many stop-gap tools and hacks that help a little minnow try to make a bigger splash when they post. Vote bots like @minnowbooster and @randowhale can help increase payouts and attention. Entire communities were built such as the #MinnowSupportProject and #Whaleshares. I think all of these solutions are attempting to solve a broader discovery issue that exists in Steemit. Posts are too ethereal and too time-depdenent So, I decided to share some ideas that could reduce those impacts and improve the discovery of wonderful content.

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1. Be able to subtract entire topics from the main feed.

Anyone that has been on Steemit for some time has noticed that the top posts tend to be Steem, Steemit and Crypto oriented. As new users join, they are not always coming from the crypto-community. They may not have an interest in some of the greater political or cultural issues of Steemit. Currently, there is no way to clear away this content they may not be interested in. And they can't upvote other topics up enough for them to even hit the primary trending page. Even a large collection of minnows can't really outdo the current taste makers and topic-drivers of the main Trending page.

2. Be able to create personalized Trending pages.

Along the same lines, it would be great to create custom Trending pages that just include the topics I want to see, both new and old. These Steem Rooms would be amazing centers of curation that could also be saved and shared with others - essentially a topic of topics. So, aside from just subtracting on the page, I can curate my own collection of fasciating topics. This should help unlock the long-tail on Steemit by allowing communities to congeal and focus on themselves.

3. Allow readers to mark, star, or otherwise save their favorite content.

A Favorite section would allow users to promote authors and older content that wouldn't necessarily be drowned out by the constant flood of new posts. It would make community creation easier and empower new tastemakers, even if they lack voting power. I could see and interact with someone's Favorites to find new authors and new content that aligns with my interests. There is already the beginnings of this stirring in the #Whaleshares discord room with the 'looking-for-niche' channel. A Favorite page could be used to link and bind communities together.

You Favorited this post/author. See who else Favorited them in the past month!

4. Resurface older content to reduce how much time is a factor for posts.

I don't have a firm idea what this may look like. Maybe this is a 'Best of Steemit'. Maybe this is an adjusting of the Trending page algorithm to highlight older content by changing the sort functionality. Maybe its a 'Best of This Week' page. Anything to highlight old posts that may have been Hot but didn't survive long enough to be seen by a lot of the community. I think more selective topics will help with this, but more thought on reducing how ethereal posts currently are would be amazing.

5. Increase Discovery within an Author's Post.

Steemit does not make it one-click simple to continue reading an author's posts, or an author's posts along a singular topic. After you've enjoyed a great blog, you need to follow them or dig into their myriad of posts, resteems and topics to continue to find work of interest. i.e. I love this content, what else did this person write thats similar or recent?

There is not an easy way to shift to a previous post by the same writer or see all of their work along a topic. A solution could reduce bounce rates on a per-author basis and allow user's to know more easily that they want to follow someone's content. For a specific example, I've gotten multiple compliments from random visitors that they like my footer. I've tried to make a point to drive readers to similar content that I may have written a few days or weeks ago along matching topics. It takes some time to curate and maintain, but ideally, it highlights what type of work I enjoy writing about, and additional articles they may enjoy. Having something like this built-into Steemit would be great for both authors and readers.

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Conclusion

Overall, these are great problems to have for a new and growing platform. There are already amazing people trying to correct these issues using the tools at hand: Bots, community, scripts, curation trails, contests, etc. Everyone is on the same page about trying to prop up new users and make them successful. I've appreciated the help I've gotten and given in the Minnow Support Project Discord room. I can't wait until some of these minimum viable solutions are built into future versions of Steemit as amazing features!

What do you think?

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