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Thing is, a community needs an identity and just writing under @steemSTEM doesn't mean you're actually part of the pack.

Someone mentioned adding "sub-tags" for steemSTEM posts like @steemstemengineering (as an example). Within these tags it would be possible to create sub-communities that engage with eachother's work. I know there are some problems with implementing sub-tags but just a suggestion as to how we could get people involved in their respective fields. SteemSTEM in general is, in my opinion, too broad to have 100% involvement on all levels.

100% engagement was never expected. However we have almost no engagement and that is the problem.

Honestly, I didn't realize it was that bad. I was under the impression that there was a lot more involvement and feedback on STEM posts from fellow members.

Some posts do but then I mean a lot of posts you can look at and around 60%-80% (sometimes 100%) of the replies are spam and since the number of spam comments on any post averages to around 4-10 (author depending) it shows that there isn't enough engagement.

What I would like to see is 2-3 real comments (at least) for every spam comment on the good posts and for the posts that need more work and aren't quite there to get at least 1-2 real comments for every spam comment, even if the real comments are suggestions on what could be done better or something. I mean its a two sided coin as well because authors need to also try to find ways to actively encourage engagement but that encouraging engagement means nothing is only 4 people actually read the post with 1 of them being the author, 2 of them being curators and the 4th being some random kid going through steemit to see why the post got voted to $40 and how they could get those votes.

true. We have to:

  • find ways to reward engagement, as it's obviously not working to the necessary extent with our current system
  • get people to join the curation trail in large numbers, as you can't expect the crowd to curate the steemstem-tag with all it's spam. We have to make clear that we are curating for them, but we need their votes.

I am going to decrease the number of people I am following and focus on steemstem content creators. That way it will be easier for me personally to filter spam from good content. This is something we all could do.
A problem I see with subtags is that we will have tags that are very small (like #de-stem) and some that will be huge (like health). Cheers!