I believe steemit has reached a crossroads, a point of no return. It is essential that the direction/culture/behaviors on steemit evolve into something fairer, more considered and less driven by the greed of crowd mentality.
The extremely complex user experience, especially for beginners, lets steem down as a platform. Is it a blogging platform? A social network? A video sharing site? A showcase for creative writing? Or an amalgamation of all of these functions? From the outside looking in, it seems it is attempting to be all of the above. I sincerely hope that it succeeds in this multimedia model, but history shows that focus is one of the keys to a successful enterprise.
This is why I am focusing on what I know! As a creative writer with a lot of writing experience and previously published works, I was very confused/disheartened with steemit in my first three months of use. I honestly think I would have left if it hadn't have been for 
The proportionally low payouts that creative writers (fiction & poetry) receive on this platform.
The issue of losing first publishing rights on stories and poems.
The idea of WritCoin is to create a dedicated (SMT) currency to reward only quality creative writing on steemit, while marketing both the token and idea to traditional publishing houses as an opportunity to invest in a growing concern as well as sourcing new talent for anthologies.
First, lets take a brief look at SMT's and what they can do.
Steem’s Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) give anyone the power to launch and sell Proof-ofBrain [1] tokens, which are tokens distributed by “upvote” and “like”-based algorithms and can be integrated with websites to align incentives and spur growth, while websites are empowered to adopt sustainable, currency-centric revenue models.
Page 1 SMT Whitepaper
In 
As I understand it, this means SMT's are similar to Ethereum ER20 tokens, but based on proof-ofbrain and running on the steem blockchain. This brings all of the benefits of steems lightening fast transaction times and vote/reward functionality.
So how could this work in the WritCoin scenario? One way I envision this working is to run it like an ICO where people buy the coin as a stake in a dedicated community of creative writers and a proportion of the steem raised in the token sale is held as a mechanism for upvoting quality content. The rest could be used for marketing toward mainstream publishers, held for burning and for projects such as self published anthologies.
To an extent this mechanism would be self regulating as plagiarists/spammers would be unlikely to want to buy a token with their ill gotten steem if content creators are going to be under review before being accepted into the writers community. In this scenario, community candidates would have to be vetted based on past content and reputation on steemit. This idea would take a lot of administration but would be the most effective way to ensure a dedicated community of talented writers are rewarded based on the quality of their work rather than just their networking ability.
Pitching this idea to mainstream publishers would be the biggest hurdle but I feel that if the token could be presented to them in the right way, showing how it is nurturing excellence through crypto currency mechanisms, they could be convinced. This could go a long way to redressing the balance of talented writers losing first publishing rights. If we could convince publishing houses to buy and hold the tokens, with the understanding that the upvote reward from the SMT's steemit account is considered recompense for the writers who are selected for anthology, then everyone would be a winner. The publishing house would get a source for new anthology content, as well as free new-media exposure on a platform in an emerging market. The writers would get a place in a paper anthology from an established publishing house, a must for any serious writers CV.
To make this idea fair the WritCoin SMT vote functionality would have to be used as a community metric, possibly a way for the whole community to vote the most exceptional content into a shortlist for editors at the publishing house to review for publication. Also, it could be used as way to measure the (%) level of votes from the SMT's steemit account to particular content based on consensus.
All of this is just an idea at the moment, born of a desire that new writers on steemit don't have to go through the confusion and disenchantment that I did. I hope that my theoretical SMT has made you think and I am very keen to hear any of your thoughts about this in the comments section.
© Rowan Joyce all rights reserved.
The images in this post are creative commons, please follow links to credit 1 & 2. The WritCoin logo/coin was designed by me using Gimp image editor. This post was in response to the 
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