Hello, I'm a relatively new user to steemit. This is actually my first post! So far, I've been enjoying steemit a fair amount. It definitely has it upsides, and I'm glad to be here this early in. However, there seems to be a certain amount of polish missing as well as a sense of incompleteness. What do I mean by this? As much as I like steemit, as there are a fair amount of perks that come with using it, I often find myself wishing for features present in other sites. And ultimately, I feel that improvements on this end will go a long way improving usability and general enjoyment, helping steemit catch on.

Features that would go a long way:

"Subscriptions" to "Communities"

On sites like reddit, we're allowed a certain level of personalization by being able to subscribe to communities of our choosing. To some degree we have some level of personalization on steemit by being able to follow any users we like, but I feel this is inadequate. Additionally, this fails to give exposure to new users that we may have liked seeing the content of. Steemit already does have something akin to "subreddits" in the tag system, but not being able to quickly access the ones we like most besides the most popular ones on the side is a minus to me. If a way to "subscribe" were implemented, it would go a long way of making more tight knit subcommunities within steemit. Having these influence our steemit home pages would be convenient as well, and would make the steemit experience feel more personal to the user.

Private Messaging

A social platform such as this one really suffers from lacking a private messaging feature. It's one thing to be able to communicate via commenting, but what there it's difficult to get very personal this way. Exchanges become one off events, and while mutually following can mitigate this somewhat, any type of personal conversation is difficult without some method of private messaging.

For me, these are the features I would like to see the most on steemit. While there are definitely other things that could be improved on the platform, and much has been done already, I would like these features at the bare minimum. Well, that's it for me. I'd like to know what other features users would want to see as well.