Bitshares has great built in exchange . We should be more open for new customers, especially those who cannot find help or proper service in other places.
A lot of exchanges has "Request new Coin" mechanism (some of them are automated):
https://poloniex.com/coinRequest
https://bittrex.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202583854
https://c-cex.com/?id=vote
https://www.cryptsy.com/coinvotes
...
We should strive to do better than that.
1) We should make it fun.
2) We should add prediction markets (let people guess which coin will make it next).
3) We should add chance, frequent rewards, for the people who can correctly guess which coin will get the most votes in the next election cycle for example.
4) We should develop ways to let coin creators who pre-mine to lock up a certain dollar amount value of their token in order to get on the exchange. This way coins which don't have much of a market cap won't make it.
5) We should offer some sort of premium services for issuers, coin creators, DAC creators, who want favorable treatment in certain areas.
One way to monetize would be to simple let ads display in the interface. I don't know why Bitshares isn't monetizing ad space but it should. The profit from this should either go to the users who view the ads as some sort of interest, or it should be burned.
Doing that would allow an attention economy to be born and it would monetize the attention real estate of the GUI. Of course the coin makers would have to pay for this premium service, they would have to pay for our attention. The result is we'd be able to get people off of the forum and onto perhaps a more decentralized communication platform.
I requested to the developers to put in a troll box but so far they haven't listened to me on that. I would also hope they monetize the attention real estate because it's an optional source of income which is being put to waste. It of course should be opt-out for people who don't want ads, but those people should not get the income stream.