The fact that you can literally post about whatever you want (text, photo, video) and make money is pretty incredible. But no matter how creative you are, there is only so much creative juice you can squeeze in a day before that blank page becomes daunting. It is nice to have contests to focus on, specific tasks that give focus to users. It also build communities as we are all working on the same thing and it is something to share.
There are contests now like steemitphotochallenge but unless you know about them and keep on eye on them they are easy to miss. And yeah we have the tag contests but you have to check it, not everyone uses it and people are not always enticed to use it. It is work to run a contest and if you don't get the upvotes, the prize is coming out of topic.
So here is what I'm thinking, we need a dedicated space on the home page that shows contests and the people running them. Maybe we can have a banner somewhere that displays what contests are currently happening, or a special tab for it. It will help give the site focus and give new users a chance to make steem outside of the voting process. Gamification will help too, but this will add another layer to it.
What do you think?
A TROPHY FOR EVERYONE
*my upvotes/rep disclaimer: @whatageek/my-steemit-account-where-i-stand-on-bots-self-votes-and-multiple-account