So I've been thinking about what could be improved in order to foster specific communities in Steemit.
From all the thoughts I've been brewing, I just logged three issues for discussion on Github.
The first two are related to specific language speaking individuals. I still remember that this was one of the reasons for the downfall of Orkut, as reported here:
The Brazilian invasion: Orkut was not designed to linguistically walled. So when Brazilians took on the challenge of wanting to be the top country on Orkut (yes it was a game the whole of Brazil participated in,) suddenly the rest of the world started to see Portuguese messages everywhere. This led a decline in interest for English speaking users in the US.
We already see a lot of content in Chinese, Korean, and some posts with two or more languages intermixed in. My suggestions are:
Add first class support for languages in posts
This is so posts created on Steemit have a way of determining which language it is written in, and that users are able to pick a language (or more) to see content in.
Add support for alternate language representation of a comment
This is a blockchain level change to deal with translations and multiple-language content. Instead of intermixing content in one post, or allowing translators to repost content on their language, it would be possible to have multiple representations of the same content in different languages (or maybe one day even different formats, such as mobile, etc).
Steemit would then display the user preferred representation on the website.
Open for discussion is how these alternate representations would be awarded, especially when created by different users.
Allow post to destinate all (or most) author rewards to child comments
This third suggestion is when thinking about content were most of the value is not in the main post, but the value is added by the comments, in communities like question-based, writing prompts, or similar. Steem already rewards child comments in a post, but I feel in these communities the rewards to the main author would be disproportionate and discourage the format.
My suggestion is that, when creating a post, the author would indicate that he's giving the author rewards to the child commenters.
What do you think about these suggestions? What is needed to build communities inside Steemit?