Here are some suggestions for things that could be developed as part of the Development Incentive Program. For now I'm just talking about them as community proposals, but at some point in the future I might pitch to do some development myself (of either these or other ideas).
Right now the structure of the platform makes it kind of hard to keep a post relevant unless you're directly talking back and forth with someone in it (in which case you'll get notifications when they reply to you). One feature that could make things more discussion-friendly would be to be able to "subscribe" to a post and get notifications whenever any new comments are posted, even if it's not a direct reply to something you posted. I think it would be beneficial if these notifications showed up differently than the current notifications, e.g.:
I haven't looked into the code to see how hard this would be to implement, but I think most of the notification functionality is done in the condenser frontend rather than deep in the chain so hopefully it would be doable.
Right now the frontend puts a little Steem logo flair element next to the title of posts that are set to 100% powerup rather than 50/50. Since having beneficiaries is also something that's done on a post-by-post basis we might want to add flair elements that signal some of those usage models, such as when people burn rewards by sending some percentage to @null, maybe something like this:
Burning via setting beneficiaries seems to be popular lately, so that would probably be the main usage model, but it could also make sense to make something special for @steem.dao, or maybe move beyond hardcoding and establish some sort of framework to support community accounts, charitable contributions, dapps, etc.
I mentioned this in a comment on the DIP announcement post, but I'll repeat it here: We could add tweet embedding. So when you post something like this in the editor:
https://twitter.com/steemit/status/1576048538965794817
Instead of looking like this in your published post:
https://twitter.com/steemit/status/1576048538965794817
The frontend does some magic so it looks like this:
This is something that other social media and blogging platforms can do, so I assume there's some standard way that Twitter has you do it, and the Steemit frontend does embedding for YouTube links so it's probably feasible to embed other things as well.
These suggestions are lighter-weight than some of the total revamp ideas that some people are considering, but I think it's worthwhile to have a range of ideas on the table. I also have some other slightly more elaborate ideas that I'm planning to post as their own posts before the deadline.