Since I recently dipped my toe into the LBRY pool and their system which is 100% tip/donation based I think it's time for me to bring this up again. If you follow me you might remember me mentioning this a few times in the past.
I Can't See How You Don't See It
Donations are the solution to the comment crisis.
Would you use a donations feature on Steem?
So yea, just a few times.
What Steem has now, is a ton of functionality. But it's severely lacking in "features". To define those in the context that I'm using...
- A Functionality is something the blockchain has the capability of doing.
- A Feature is a functionality implemented into something a user engages with that hopefully gives them a positive user experience and solves some problem for them.
For each functionality, you can have several features. ie different ways of doing the same thing.
Some very powerful functionalities of the Steem blockchain are
- Upvotes
- Direct Transfers
- Beneficiary System
- Delegation
Now think to yourself how many features there are for these functionalities. How easy are they to do? How easy are they to learn about? How easy are they to access? How intuitively are they implemented?
I won't go into breaking each one down because most of you can answer these questions for yourselves. The main one I want to focus on is Direct Transfers.
I'm running a little promotion for my new community Steem Think Tank where I'm paying participants 10 Steem each to make a post in the community answering a survey about Steem. (Still 5 slots open as of now btw, paying the first 10)
If I wanted to offer around the same reward with upvotes, I'd have to be a whale. I'd have to have hundreds of thousands of Steem, or I can buy about $13 worth of Steem and pay people via a direct transfer. As a user, I'd like it to be clearly evident, as soon as you land on this communities page, that all these participants have been paid, by me, without the necessity of leaving this page or even understanding much about Steem. I'd like to be able to COMMUNICATE with my transfers in the same way that I communicate with my upvotes.
I not only would like to be able to communicate as in this case for some promotion, but if I had tools like I've mocked up here, I would only reward comments with direct transfers. It would probably "cost" me less in the end vs the voting power that I burn up by upvoting comments with enough VP to make them actually pay something out.
Imagine if tomorrow you woke up and all the Steem frontends hid how many, and how much each post made and you had to go to your wallet and figure out how much each post made by adding them up individually. I know a few people who have called for just that, but in reality I think it would be catastrophic to the already struggling user experience here. Well that's how we handle transfers and we're completely squandering an incredibly powerful functionality by not developing any features around it.
This is especially vexing to me recently because I'm looking at LBRY, a platform that EXCLUSIVELY uses this and they are being covered more favorably than Steem. Now that I've been using LBRY for a while I can tell you Steem has MUCH more functionality, but most of it people don't bother using because...*deep breath
That is all. Enjoy the rest of your day :D