Welcome to my first "interview" type post. With the platform on its way to increased growth, I thought it's a good time to disturb some of the most passionate adopters of Steem for some answers to typical platform-related questions. This is intended to be dry and non-interpretive, so I will not be offering any summary or tl;dr. The three questions are:-

• What are your thoughts on Steem's price?
• What are the 3 things you look forward to on Steem/Steemit?
• What kind of content would you like to encourage on Steemit that isn't about Steem / Steemit / money at all?

I hope this little Q&A sheds light into some of the hopes and concerns over the platform. Enjoy the read!

---

Question 1: So what are your thoughts on Steem's price?

"I'm happy that it finally recovered from the long downtrend. Much more important is that it attracts a lot of new users, and brings back old ones that gave up hope. Hope they learned something 😃"
_@pharesim

"Last few weeks we are in crypto bubble, some even say it is altcoin bubble, either case it is all great for Steem community, newcomers, long time holders, traders. I still believe Steem is undervalued, but organic growth will continue to happen."
_@good-karma

"I didn't see it coming, that's for sure. I was deep in building chainBB, and the weekend I was writing the announcement is when it really started to jump. I am trying not to be too optimistic - but it's hard with what the markets are doing. We're seeing so many coins reach new all time highs. Some coins are doubling or tripling their all time highs. If Steem did this and hit $8/$12, it would just about blow my mind. If you look at it from a BTC perspective it's even crazier... 0.0065 was the ATH, which comes out to ~$13 USD right now. Even if we matched the ATH in terms of BTC, it'd be triple the USD value. On the flip side - I don't know how much longer the markets are going to be able to sustain this, so I'm fully prepared for everything to just drop."
_@jesta

"Way undervalued for where we'll be in the next few months. There are utterly worthless crapcoins with zero development that are still dancing around the Top 10. With the quantity of money that found alt coins in the last few months, investors clearly need to be educated. The Steem token is as good or better than anything out there in terms of speed, lack of fees, and security. Backed by a fast growing social community and with some very promising third party development and without the waste of mining, Steem has far more utility than most other cryptos. Once the development is ready and we get that word out to people, Steem will go Top 3 and challenge Bitcoin."
_@donkeypong

"I think the rise has been a bit fast and it has caught me off guard. I was expecting more developments to happen before the price rose this much. I hope we reach a point where the price can be maintained, as this will allow for new users to be attracted much more easily."
_@justtryme90

"Price seems pretty good, but I guess it needs to be that way now when there's a lot more posts on the platform."
_@alcibiades

"About fully valued. Market might go mental, but it shouldn't be worth much higher than this. Not until it hits like 500k users."
_@trafalgar

"It has me a bit worried. It's shot up so fast and with SBD trading so high it seems like a bubble just waiting to pop. It could also be an elaborate pump and dump in progress. I hope not, but anything is possible. One thing I do know is that the increased Steem value has made the number of scammers shoot up right along with it."
_@fubar.bdhr

"It looks like we are on the rise, SBD is already close to 2 USD and STEEM is looking for run to same price. Of course BTC at 2000 USD with possible run to 2600 may stop our plans."
_@kingscrown

"I have the feeling that the price of 75 cents to 1 USD are absolutely right. If Steem was not pumped in the first place, it would not have had such a hard time in the last couple of month. So it just is where it naturally would be. I hear a lot followers tell me that they bought bigger amounts of steem 10-40k. They are powering up. The people now have more confidence in Steem."
_@knozaki2015

"Undervalued. Although the Asia-crypto-rush has pumped it as of recently the market cap of Steem is nowhere near its actual value given the potential of the platform. I expect it to reach at least $4 by the end of Q3."
_@kyriacos

"Good, but not there yet. Not necessarily because Steem is worth more, but relative to other cryptocurrencies it's obviously undervalued."
_@liberosist

"Look at it from two sides: as a trader/speculator and as an investor. I see a distinct difference between the two. From the speculator trader side, I absolutely see STEEM in a speculative bubble which is being driven by a couple of different outside factors:

(1) hedge funds seeking delta in a world which securities (stocks and bonds) are no longer providing it,

(2) a growing movement of distrust towards banks and how currency is being debauched, so people are looking towards crypto as a hedge - look no further than what has happened in India with higher denomination rupees being pulled from circulation and Japan and

(3) a much larger pivot by developers and companies in the tech vertical towards blockchain technologies, lifting all boats. In essence, all of these factors and others are, from my standpoint, creating a bubble in the crypto space as a whole an STEEM is benefiting from it."
_@lpfaust

"Previously I would have said that about $1 was a fair price for STEEM but that was before bitcoin hit $2K. There is a whole range of coins that have very little actual utility (unlike STEEM) and are valued at much more. STEEM should be in the top 5 at least but as we all know markets are not rational. If they were I think a valuation of $5-10 would be more appropriate given the valuations that other coins are getting."
_{@thecryptofiend}

---

Question 2: What are the 3 things you look forward to on Steem / Steemit?

"All the new platforms that are being developed."
_@pharesim

"I look forward to more use cases within Steem economy like I mentioned on my recent articles. More apps and utilities that not only bring more people but also sustain growth. Happy to see new faces and apps popping up..."
_@good-karma

"Communities: Will allow more community organizers to establish and be rewarded for their community building efforts.

SteemConnect: Will allow more developers to build applications that users can trust with their information.

More innovative ways to use the blockchain: Repurposing the blockchain for various types of content, SteemQ as an example.

These things are boring on the surface, and most of the community doesn't understand them, but once they're all up and running people will be using them without even having to understand. Each one will expand the reach of the blockchain to more users for more purposes and inspire even more users to participate."
_@jesta

"Looking forward to communities, which will provide homes for more people. Looking forward to a streamlined sign-up procedure for new users. And looking forward to seeing some of our newest users catch on and become valued members of this community."
_@donkeypong

"Communities, first and foremost. I think this is really going to take steemit in a positive direction. I am hoping to make steemSTEM into a strong science/tech community where people can go to read quality material that excites and inform them. Secondly, the change to a linear voting reward and end of "the experiment'. I want everyone to be able to vote, though I do enjoy how much my vote is worth right now. Finally, I am looking forward to the future where our user base is large and there is a good inflow of new and interesting content, especially in science. I am looking forward to when steemit is my primary source for science news."
_@justtryme90

"Looking forward to see how the communities are implemented and how users will find balance between finding their place in certain community while also writing and reading about diverse topics. Obviously, more balanced reward distribution where everyone will be rewarded according to the amount of effort and value they bring to the platform. Seeing more people coming on board with decentralised, targeted marketing for specific countries, fields etc is exciting as well. Also, more engagement and voting in the comment sections. I can see it's slowly happening."
_@alcibiades

"Aside from stuff already on the roadmap (faster sign up, communities, mobile)
1. other forms of revenue (like ads) to support steem holders and/or development,
2. reaching out to influencers to accelerate growth to avoid a price collapse, especially when we have multiple platforms online,
3. boring ass questions like these."
_@trafalgar

"a. Looking forward to HF19 leveling out the reward curve. Hopefully it will make things more even and let us dolphins (if I even qualify for that status yet) still be able to give rewards with our votes.

b. I do look forward to seeing my steem power and rep score go up every day. It's kind of like trying to get up the leader board in a video game. Lot more work though.

c. Widespread adoption. Need more real people with original content using steemit."
_@fubar-bdhr

"Messaging (not everybody is on steemit chat), full control of keys from the website (ease of often changing passwords etc) and communities. I would also love if constant hardforks stopped. Each HF instead of "fixing" 1 thing at a time modifies few, then we have snowball effects. Constantly hardforked coin is also expensive for exchanges to trade due to extra time they have to spend rolling all those changes, turning off and on markets etc."
_@kingscrown

"Steemit has connected me with literally hundreds of great (real life) people all over the world. So the 3 things are:
1) Meeting new people.
2) Being part of the next social thing (imagine steemit being the biggest attention network in the future).
3) Going to steemfest 2.0."
_@knozaki2015

"In regards to the payment system, we need to simplify, simplify, simplify. The Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars trio should move more towards concept gamification so that the average user can enjoy and treat it as such."
_@kyriacos

"Sub-communities, privacy/anonymity, linear-rewards. Oh, and marketing, of course."
_@liberosist

"For the time being, I see the two as the same thing because STEEM is only an extension of Steemit and I believe the market sees the same thing as I do until more applications unrelated to Steemit are built on the STEEM blockchain. In the minds of most, Busy and Zappl are extensions of Steemit.

That being said, three things I look forward to are:

(1) a much more active, organized and deep croowdfunding pool for STEEM related ICOs. Zappl was a shining example of how the community came together to fund this. I am really stoked about this project.

(2) @kyle's Tippy bot is another awesome and very much needed feature I am very excited about. A content site needs a way for writers to have subscribers and patrons. It's why Patreon is so successful. Tippy is the closest thing to a subscription feature Steemit can do in it's current iteration. I'd love to see @kyle see about possibly adding this feature to his Tippy bot in a future iteration. If Steemit is truly looking to attract content creators with larger followings, this is one of the most basic and essential features.

(3) Flattening the rewards curve. It's a topic which has people heated on both sides of the argument, but the reality is the user base by and large wants more say over how rewards are distributed. More importantly, if this is the only utility STEEM currently has, and by extension, the only reason to lock up STEEM through "powering up" then it makes sense to make vote power more linear. I'd love to see the developers work to make STEEM Power more valuable by possibly taking a page from the Dash governance model. The marketing team of Steemit recently put forth a growth proposals system and stated Steemit might be willing to use funds to stake some of these proposals. What if STEEM Power behaved as Masternodes did in Dash? It could pour gasoline on a fire to 'power up', giving a greater voice in who gets staked making STEEM Power more powerful."
_@lpfaust

"a) Communities - I think this will be a huge feature for helping to make the community easier to use and navigate for people.

b) Maturing of more specific apps like Steepshot and Zappl - I think these will also make the platform more easy to use for large chunks of the online population who prefer specific types of content sharing. By catering to specific forms of contents I think they will provide a more appropriate and accessible user experience.

c) Direct video hosting/sharing with STEEM integration - I think this is one of the features that those who make video content have been asking for the most and I believe it will be a game changer in this space. I'm not sure exactly how it will be done - there are technical problems to overcome but I think they will be solved."
_{@thecryptofiend}

---

Question 3: What kind of content would you like to encourage on Steemit that isn't about Steem / Steemit / money at all?

"Obviously, scientific publications. Please spread the word about PEvO (https://pevo.science/), we're still desperately searching for publishing scientists who want to join us in shaping the future of their profession!"
_@pharesim

"I like photo, culinary challenges and few other contest that go beyond Steem and money. Where people do what they like daily and participate in contest, make new friends, engage, learn from each other, etc. isn't that great?! Hope to see more of those..."
_@good-karma

"One of the types of content I want to foster and grow revolves around developers. I participate in a lot of development-centric social media (on reddit, stackoverflow, etc) and it's some of the most valuable content to me personally. I really would like to see those communities rewarded, which also might lure some of them to build things on the blockchain 🙂

Another I'd love to see is something akin to /r/AskReddit, maybe #AskSteemit, where the author asks a question and all the responses are answers and people sharing their experiences. I find myself reading a lot of posts from /r/AskReddit, because the comments on them are either hilarious, ridiculously meta, or even have some great content occasionally."
_@jesta

"I'd like to see more gaming, sports, history, movies, and fun short length content. Also, more language areas and region-specific content. There are a lot of areas where we can expand once the communities come."
_@donkeypong

"Science and Tech. I think those topics are popular with the general person, and should be nurtured. Not everyone may want to write about these topics, but a whole lot of people really like reading about them."
_@justtryme90

"Just honest, diverse content, whatever people feel like writing. Whether it be long, medium-type articles or a simple facebook/instagram posts and comments."
_@alcibiades

"Honestly anything, humor, politics, memes, science, cooking, anything and everything can be high quality content, which is what this platform needs. As long as we're building our user base and curation works, good content will bubble up to the top."
_@trafalgar

"What I came here for originally. Good uncensored bitcoin discussion. I hope we start seeing more reddit style discussions on posts with the nested comment limit raised. As it is now I still end up reading /r/btc for my bitcoin discussion."
_@fubar-bdhr

"I think we have more than enough of content about Steem/Steemit. I would like to see more food content - recipes with step by step pictures or restaurant reviews. We have here people from all over the world and sure we have food content but I feel there's not enough of it. Also I think there is surely not enough about craft beer and gaming. By gaming I don't mean giving link to youtube - but reviews of games with screenshots, monthly deals where you can catch free/cheap games etc."
_@kingscrown

" I would like to see more content in different langauges. I would love to see newspapers coming to steemit and getting paid for each article if the artice is intesting. that way I could get all my news on Steemit."
_@knozaki2015

"Original content. I would stay away from popular article spin-offs and rather focus on original ideas and concepts that stem from the author. This idea goes hand in hand with author rewards."
_@kyriacos

"Stuff regular folks talk about - movies/TV, music, gaming, sports, travel, science etc. Also, engaging ramblings like showerthoughts, til, lifeprotips etc."
_@liberosist

"The community already has a very strong following for fiction, cooking, travel and anarcho-capitalism. It tends to favor shorter pieces which are from about 500 to 1,500 words. I'd love to see more long form non-fiction. The non-fiction which does well here is generally crypto-news related topics. Ideally I'd love to see more non-fiction features one would see in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Vogue, or Pulitzer material in newspapers. We hear so much about how the STEEM Blockchain in censorship resistant, but we need to aggressively recruit those who stand to benefit the most (reporters, long-form non-fiction writers, etc.) from this feature. With them comes mainstream acceptance, legitimacy and throngs of users."
_@lpfaust

"This will obviously vary depending on what people like - personally I would like to see more original art and photography, - also more of the humorous material like that produced by @lordvader - that is some of the best work I have seen anywhere!"
_{@thecryptofiend}