Contests have been around forever on Steemit. They're a neat way of interacting with the community and encouraging content creation, but they're fundamentally flawed: they require someone -- or a group of people -- to pool together their own funds, which are then distributed to a small selection of people that then are most likely to dump the prize coins.
With Steemit Inc itself looking to reduce costs, the community should be looking at ways it can do the same, while still encouraging people to post on the platform. The most common method of doing so is to run a contest and hand over to three, or five, or however many people, the funds saved; though now the price of Steem is incredibly low, and we want more people posting and buying rather than dumping.
The solution is curation. Contests themselves are fine, but the focus should be on encouraging content creation and rewarding it through curation, so that participants aren't just receiving a reward that can be dumped on the market, but receive a 50% earning that is locked to the account, accumulates SP for those participants, and further integrates them into the Steemit platform as a valuable member.
While there are many initiatives that focus on rewarding undervalued content through curation, there's a plethora of voting power that's going unused and content that's going undiscovered. Curation initiatives can't curate everything, as much as I'm sure they'd like to. My advice to those, specifically within the #film, #tv, and #movies tags, is to focus on contests that provide interaction: comments and upvotes from the community.
And to those outside of those tags thinking about running contents on Steemit: feel free to tag me in future events. If you're encouraging exceptional content to be created, I'm willing to support it with the current 31k SP I have. Together, we can focus on building accounts and turning minnows into dolphins rather than keeping minnows minnows with the coins they'll just dump on the market for next to nothing. Let's encourage art and creativity to flourish and show that community does exist in all tags on the platform.
