Up until now, chainBB has very much been an experimental project. I believe it can be much more than that, and I've been working on building out a plan of how this could unfold. To continue I need to break out of my bubble and opening up the flow of ideas, primarily to get feedback from you. That's what this post is all about.
If you're new here, or are just generally unaware of what chainBB is, I'll give you a brief primer. chainBB is a different interface, modeled after traditional forum software, built on the Steem blockchain - which is the same blockchain that Steemit.com uses (Steem and Steemit are different things). Data is shared between all the different websites (steemit.com and chainbb.com included) providing a decentralized community unlike anything else in the history of the internet. I won't dive too deep into the details, but I'm happy to answer questions in the comments and further reading can be found here:
introducing chainBB.com
chainBB - A Review of what may become way bigger than steemit.com by @cryptoctopus
chainBB - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
I'd also invite you to continue reading this post itself on chainBB within the /f/announcements forum:
https://beta.chainbb.com/announcements/@jesta/chainbbs-path-forward-a-discussion-on-revenue
Building an organization around the Steem blockchain
To put this entire post in perspective, I want to outline what I'd like to achieve:
To build an organization to continue development of this new type of social platform (one comparable to Steemit Inc).
To provide infrastructure for the users of the Steem blockchain.
To hire talent that adds value to both the organization and blockchain.
To contribute when possible to the evolution of the blockchain itself.
To accomplish these goals, two primary resources are needed: time(people) and funding.
Most in the crypto world have caught onto this ICO craze as a way to meet those goals, but I don't feel that's the correct route for this product. There may be a time and a place for a fund raising event like that, but it's unsustainable and not the only way. The approach I want to take is small and incremental growth, which is starting with just myself building out this prototype, expanding the team when possible, and building this around a sustainable revenue model.
I am still not 100% certain this is possible or that I'm the guy to do it, but I am exploring the potential with the above in mind.
The hurdles of the Steem Ecosystem
When evaluating the potential here, getting to intimately know the Steem ecosystem (good and bad) is incredibly important. I have spent most of the last year focused on this topic and think my understanding at this point is more comprehensive than most. There's still a lot to figure out though, and I'm hoping this post is the first of many that slowly start a dialog about how I (and others) can best build these types of organizations.
At a high level, a couple of the most challenging barriers to break through include:
Adoption: Resolving pain points preventing main stream participation.
Competition: Competing against Steemit's home field advantage.
Revenue: The service itself needs to somehow support itself and at least have a non-negative cash flow on upkeep.
I've come up with a few approaches to dealing with these and now is the time I want to start gathering feedback on them.
Instead of one massive post, I want to address them one at a time, and to start with I want to talk about Revenue.
The Revenue Model
The first implementation of Revenue I'd like to discuss on chainBB is simple as it's core: selling/leasing forum hosting. Any user will be able to reserve/create a forum on the Steem blockchain and have it hosted on the chainBB servers at a cost. They are then free to build their own community of users and do with it as they wish. Upgrade can be purchased with increased functionality, and more features can be added to provide additional flexibility/features to these forums, and provide additional sources of revenue.
The customer is those people who wish to start, participate in, and build communities within a forum interface. For those who don't want to host via chainBB, but would rather do it on their own server, that's fine too as it's an open source application and the data is all derived from the blockchain itself. However, there will be no support (from me) at this stage simply because it's such an early product, and it's not a simple setup like phpBB (yet).
As an example, this post was written on chainBB using the new /f/announcements forum I created earlier today. It's got this one post in it and will be where chainBB users can see updates related to the service.
What I need to determine is what the community feels is acceptable for it's cost.
Currently, I propose the following price structure for forums on chainBB.com:
1 STEEM: You get a basic, non-moderated, chainBB hosted, Steem powered forum.
50 STEEM: Unlocks the ability for you to moderate the content of this forum.
250 STEEM: Unlocks beneficiary rewards - owner now earns 5% of the beneficiary rewards for posts made through this forum. Break-even point for owner is 5k STEEM generated by it's users (5000 * 0.05 (5%) = 250 STEEM).
This type of unlocking structure would also allow for further expansion - features such as custom themes, domains, homepages, and other things people may want for a larger scale community (think bitcointalk). These amounts could be permanent unlocks or they could be yearly subscriptions. All of these options are still being evaluated and I'd love to know what you think.
Questions I think people will have...
Why wouldn't I use a free alternative?
Fundamentally, we've all been spoiled by the perception of "free". Very few things are actually "free" - normally they're either selling your data, taking ownership of data, or advertising to you. They use these to generate revenue off of you to pay for those services and take profits. They don't want you to pay, because both of those forms of data are way more valuable than whatever you'd be willing to pay out of pocket.
Steemit is "free" today because it was funded with mining very early on, but doesn't generate revenue at all off of you. That's a finite amount of funding that cannot last forever. I won't be surprised someday if Steemit has a cost associated to it.
None of these are suitable options for chainBB to provide a truly free platform - so I'm working through alternatives.
What's happening to everything on chainBB currently?
All the existing forums are going to be removed, but you'd be able to create a forum for whatever you'd like. The existing forums have no owners and I don't have the capacity to maintain them or systems to assign moderation of them.
The great thing is that none of the posts are going away - they're all on the Steem blockchain! The minute someone recreates one of those forums and configures it appropriately, it will exist.
What is forum moderation? Can posts be censored?
In a sense, you could make that argument. The moderators of a particular forum will be able to remove topics (posts) from displaying within that forum. The post still exists, it's able to be loaded by tag and URL, just not visible in that forum. The moderation on chainBB will do nothing to the way the post displays on Steemit.com.
The goal of moderation itself is transparency, and to that end it will be on the blockchain and visible to the world. Users will also be able to see all the posts that were moderated, much like you can view the spam folder in your inbox. If you don't approve of how a forum is run, you're free to start your own forum with the exact same content, just moderated differently. Imagine if /r/Bitcoin or /r/btc could be duplicated and instantly contain all of the removed posts - that's what you're able to do with the power of a forum on a blockchain.
How will the beneficiary rewards work?
For the top tier forums: a beneficiary reward (proposed at 5%) goes to the forum owner for each post made from that forum interface. There are no payouts from chainBB, these accounts will be added as the posts are created and rewarded the moment each post is rewarded (see the @chainbb account on steemd for example). chainBB will be reduced from 15% to 10%, keeping current amount an author would return on chainBB in tact. The recipient of the beneficiary reward will be free to do with those funds whatever they choose, hopefully in ways to increase participation within their community or as a reward for those who contribute.
When I initially set chainBB's beneficiaries at 15%, it was for this reason. The goal was and still is to keep the percentage at a consistent 15% from authors, while being able to reallocate that 15% in different ways to support the project. However, if this new product launches and offers 5% to owners, chainBB will remain committed to that agreement even if other percentages change.
The system in the future could be expanded to allow:
Configurable accounts which the owner can set. If a forum had a team consisting of an owner and 3 hired moderators, they could automatically divide beneficiary rewards between them (say 2% owner, 1% each moderator = 5% total).
Potentially increasing the 5% to x% for additional higher tiers
What about the "Communities" (proper) feature that Steemit Inc is working on?
These two features (forums and communities) will both play well together. The forum protocol at this point is incredibly small with very specific features, which as far as I'm aware don't overlap.
Once communities is released onto the Steem blockchain - the chainBB forums can use the community protocol to add more features and options. Users will be able to seamlessly participate in these communities either on steemit.com (with the primary community interface) or chainBB.com (with the forum interface).
Isn't beneficiary rewards enough?
Currently no, sadly. If this is to become a true rival to other platforms, it needs a team and an organization behind it, which costs money. The overall beneficiary rewards that chainBB currently earns (15%) covers the upkeep for a forum with hundreds of daily active users, but it won't when we reach 10k or 1m. Since launch, chainBB has averaged ~50 STEEM/day in earnings, with nearly 40% of those rewards coming from my posting alone. The higher tier forums will also reduce beneficiary rewards by 33% cutting into whatever growth may occur.
The hope is that the STEEM/day rewards will increase as forum creators start engaging and building their own community, and will be supplemented by the costs associated with forum hosting. The beneficiary rewards themselves may be more significant someday (or less), and over time how beneficiary rewards work with chainBB can be altered.
My questions for you, if you made it this far
How do you feel about the proposed pricing?
Is 1 STEEM too much of a barrier or is it too low of a price?
Would sharing in 5% of the revenue of a forum be encouragement for you to build one? Would the price stop you?
Are you interested in starting a forum? (I may get some early adopters on board at this point, dependant on feedback)
Basically any thoughts you have about how this could be priced are appreciated. It can't be free like it exists now for an indefinite amount of time, and I can't continue development forever if it can't help pay my bills. But this is a project I'm passionate about, that I want to work on, and want to engage with you with to try and figure out. Discussing these ideas with you will help shape how this feature is released.
Also for those of you that are curious about the state of chainBB - most of the above is already developed and waiting to be released. If you've visited chainBB recently, you might notice some new shine on it's UI :)