Content discovery is arguably the defining aspect of any content platform.
Newspapers rely on editors to shape the look and feel of each publication while social media sites rely on algorithmic approach utilizing social connections, likes and views to try to figure out what you, the reader, want to see.
Steem is first and foremost a content platform rather than a social network. At it's very core it attempts to prioritize the content based on the signals it received from users who are invested in the platform.
The downside of this approach is immediately noticeable to everyone who visits a Steem based content feed for the first time - a weird mixture of brilliance, memes and re-purposed bovine manure.
Steem algorithm favors the larger or better connected accounts in terms of content discovery. Early adopters who have been on Steem since the beginning and have gained a large following rely almost exclusively on support of other early adopters, while the wealthy accounts lean towards using upvote bots to promote their content - both ways are quite effective and send the content up to the top of the frontpage.
The sad fact of the day is - there is no way to appear on the front-page just by producing good content. None. This makes the platform inaccessible to new users, it slows growth and it will ultimately be fatal.
There have been numerous discussions on how this can be fixed, and I would like to contribute my stab at the topic in a form of a new product which attempts to improve one major part of the equation - content curation.
Before that, let's just skip back a few months - January 2018, I just joined @builteam in a quest to re-think their products and services. Buildteam's main product at that time was @minnowbooster, a marketplace allowing to monetize user's voting power. It's one of Steem's largest and most used commercial products to date.
Minnowbooster comes from a place of love (it's main purpose is to help small accounts grow into large accounts), but to me it highlighted users inability to grow their accounts organically which could only be solved by finding new ways to promote and curate content.
Fast forward to today, after 6 long months of development we at @buildteam have launched the new, completely re-thought and re-engineered Steemvoter (beta).
Our vision for the new generation Steemvoter was to create a product which empowers every one of you to curate and reward quality content. A product which would be simple enough to use, but powerful enough to tip the reward scales towards creators and away from people who are milking the reward pool for purely profit.
The single feature which I'm most excited about, and which was the reason for this post, is Steemvoter Guilds. It's a disruptive new way to we aim to give power to promote quality content back to every one of you.
When you create a Guild, you can choose any number of accounts on Steem to serve as a curators for your guild. Whenever these curators post, resteem or upvote content which matches the tags you defined, it will trigger a guild upvote - all the followers of your guild will automatically upvote that content, potentially sending it to the frontpage of Steem feeds.
As your guild grows in follower size, adding new curators will instantly reward them with visibility and ability to pierce through to the frontpage, rewarding those who deserve it the most.
I invite you all to give the new Steemvoter beta a try - support creators by following a guild or create your own topic based guild and add the authors who represent it the best.
Thanks for reading
Paulius