How to bring a new dynamic to steem?

I'm often reflecting on what I am doing (I = @achim03). I hope I'm not the only one doing this;-). I asked myself recently whether it was still worth to spend time on steem. I wonder whether you ask yourself the same question?

Is Steem becoming a ghost town?

In the past, before the hard fork, it was lamented that people didn't spend time on steem and just used upvote bots to maximise their revenue on steem. It was expected that after the hard fork, people would take time again to read posts and to do active curation. I realized that the problem was not how steem was built, the problem is in fact human nature.

We want to make our money grow and we want to work the least possible to do so

People need to optimize their time

After a first couple of weeks with renewed energy, curation activity seemed to develop positively but people, like myself, tended to realize that it was quite time consuming. What was the solution? It was to follow curation trails. This offers an automatized way to curate quality content, hoping that the trail we follow does a good job in finding such content.

Is that bad?

In a world where everything tends towards optimization and efficiency it is in my opinion totally normal that we tend to optimize the return of our invested time and money.

Quality content is more rewarded

After the hard fork quality content is generally better found and rewarded. So there is incentive to produce quality content on steem. There is also still an incentive to keep steem power because it allows to generate revenue from curation rewards.

One thing that tends to disapear is the interaction on the posts

The big loss of newsteem is in my eyes the strongly diminuished interaction on the posts. In the past it was possible to get some interesting rewards from commenting on other people's posts but this has become much more difficult now. Without comments, steem looks a bit like a ghost town and people spend less and less time reading content on steem. This is not only bad for the interaction in itself, this also affects practical parameters like "time spend on site" which has an impact for google ranking and also on ad revenu for steemit for example.

The challenge is to bring people back to read posts and comment

I think it is in everybody's interest to bring people back to the posts and to make them comment your content. More interaction means more life, more time spent on the site, better google rankings and more ad revenues. This means that steemit needs to sell less steem to cover its costs and therefore better steem prices.

How can we do that?

We made some tests regarding upvotes of comments. If you have a lot of steem power upvoting of comments can become quite interesting. In terms of revenue, comments behave exactly like normal steem posts. With enough steem power you can cross the threshold of 0.02 usd to give an actual value to the comments. You will equally earn 50% curation rewards on these comments. Often there are very few other upvotes on comments and you can get the big part of the pie.

Let's now think about an optimization of this process. Let's say you want to promote interaction on your posts and you say that you will upvote the best comments with 100% upvote power 24hours after publication. Now let the readers of the post know about that and give them the opportunity to upvote what they consider the best comments before you. If they choose the best comments, their curation rewards could go through the roof! This could be one way to incentivise interaction, comments and upvotes of comments on posts.

What other ways do you see that would help to encourage interaction on posts?

By @achim03

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