The Internet has always been the information highway and has democratized access to information and thus knowledge.
Asking questions, answering questions, and sharing knowledge is an integral and historic pillar of the Internet. Even since before the www as we know it now.
Over the years there have been several large Q&A communities online, with as most known probably Yahoo! Answers and more recently the runaway success that is Quora. According to Alexa Quora is a top 100 destination worldwide and top 50 web property in the USA. Quora is also valued at $1.8bn.
Musing.io is a recently launched Q&A platform on Steem blockchain, offering its users potential rewards in crypto for both answers and questions. Being built on the Steem blockchain @musing has the unique advantage that sharing knowledge for the first time is rewarded with more than social capital, than to Steem’s built-in rewards mechanics.
Launched in May 2018, the platform has so far already accumulated close to 8,000 questions and received around 17,000 answers.
Founded by sole founder and developer @jonching, the platform has grown to more than 200 daily active users already. Steemian jonching, who previously worked for a startup, has worked on Musing pretty much full-time since launched, both developing the backend and front-end, as well as the UI/UX, all while also managing the platform’s Discord server.
After launching the platform, and several tweaks to the actual method of operation on the Steem blockchain, jonching is now turning his focus to start fundraising for Musing, as he hopes to be able to hire additional developers as well as a designer. So far the complete development and management of Musing has been self-funded.
Asked about where he sees Musing go in the next years, jonching was bullish about the potential and strength of building a Q&A platform on the Steem blockchain, both because of the unique rewards opportunity the Steem blockchain can offer its users and SteemApps built on the blockchain and the strength of Q&A in search engines.
At the core, our purpose is to give people the power and incentives to create and access knowledge from others. Today what you see is much like Quora on Steem, but I believe it can be much more than that. I believe that one day, we could be the first website or app you think of when you want to know any and everything. For many people, Musing could be the front page to the internet.No other question and answer platform today rewards its users. DTube and DLive are obviously incredible, but one differentiator for us is that people can already earn today on Youtube and Twitch. A Q&A platform that rewards its users is something that the world hasn't come across yet.
Our other strength is in the nature of our data. Since we create text-based content on Musing, there is a huge opportunity for SEO. Many people today discovered Steemit through Google. In fact, if you check websites like Similarweb.com, you can see that search engines are how the majority of people discover Steemit. I think that Musing can do the same and more at scale. Question and answer websites have historically performed very well on Google Search, and with our incentives, we can definitely make a name for ourselves to the outside.
At this point in time Musing suffers the same “hindrance” experienced by other SteemApps, the slow and costly signup approval process, but with HF20 on the horizon later this month that situation will be solved and signups will become more streamlined thanks to the switch to resource credits.
“Musers”, as Musing contributors are colloquially called, currently can already subscribe to follow popular Musing topics on the home feed. Other than that the platform is still in a rather barebones MVP setup, which makes entirely sense with not many details about next year’s upcoming SMT platform known yet.
Steemians can login to Musing.io with their Steem account thanks to integration of the popular SteemConnect authentication app.
Musing recently expanded its team with community based curator who review questions and answers contributed to the platform, and forward them for upvoting. Curator follow a simple yet focused mostly on longer form quality answers set of curation guidelines. Musing doesn’t only reward text-based replies though, if contextually correct also image based answer will be rewarded.
Not that long ago Musing received a significant delegation of more than 400,000SP from Steemit Inc., via @misterdelegation. This has resulted in current upvotes for answers of around $TU1.10, $TU2.20, $TU3.30, and $TU4.40, which are very respectable upvotes for what on Steem are technically “comments”. At going market rates this means that a decent and committed Musings contributor can earn around $TU10-20 on any given day. If curious about the (personal) potential Musing may have, take a look at few answers I submitted recently and their respective rewards.
I have previously written about the potential of Q&A apps on the Steem blockchain, an obvious implementation and perfect fit. Musing is not the first Q&A platform on Steem, that honor was reserved to the iOS app @what-app. While it seems that @what-app may have become one of the first Steem interfaces joining the SteemGraveyard, for Musing, also thanks to the delegation received from Steemit Inc. the future looks bright.
Gifted with a talented and persevering founder, the possibility for Musing to evolve towards a fully fledged SMT once the platform is launched is open. How SMTs and a possible ICO will help define the future and whether Musing can become a competitor to Quora and possibly also enter a niche as first designed by Jason Calacanis with Mahalo, rests to be seen. Alternatively, Musing could also spread out in multiple verticals potentially becoming a blockchain based StackExchange alternative with rewards in crypto.
There is no doubt that adding actual rewards to sharing knowledge, answering questions is both an obvious use case for Steem and a possible ticket to mainstream success for Musing.
This post was initially published on theSteemobserver and cross-posted with SteemPress.