So I received my invitation to the Akasha beta a few days ago, and wandered over to peer under the hood. Well not really, because I'm not a programmer or even a blockchain expert. But I at least kicked the tires, sat in the driver's seat and put my hands on the steering wheel.
I know most of you reading this are very bullish on Steemit and believe that it has no real competition out there. And I'm here to tell you that... you're absolutely right. I like the idea of Akasha and the vision of the team behind it, but I found the beta thoroughly unimpressive.
Keep in mind, though, that it is still very early days for the beta and a lot could change over the next months.
Anyway, moving on. The first problem I have with Akasha is that it runs in its own application. There may be major advantages to this that someone can bring to my attention, but right now I'm not seeing any. I can see that it would offer minor advantages in the form of flexibility (some features would be easier and more convenient to implement) and speed (not having to wait for a new webpage to load every time you want to do something).
It's too early to tell about the first advantage, and the second is currently mitigated by the fact that the program runs dog slow unless you have a half-decent computer and that trying to do anything on the blockchain takes forever and a day. But more on that in a moment.
First I want to talk about the disadvantages of using an application vs using the web.
Installation. Like it or not, some people just don't want to download and install another piece of software to clog up their computer if they don't have to.
Stability & Reliability. There are so many things that go wrong with software, little hardware-specific bugs that need to be ironed out by the development team, and it takes a lot of testing on a lot of different systems to find even the majority of them. A web-based system like Steemit doesn't have those issues. You just have to make sure it plays nice with all the different browsers. Plus updates can be made to Steemit and associated services without users having to redownload the software. That won't be the case with Akasha.
Public accessibility. Articles post to Steemit show up on google and can be read by anyone on the web. As far as I can tell this is not the case with Akasha. This is a huge disadvantage when it comes to both promoting the platform to the public (they can easily see what content is available on Steemit, but they would have to download and install Akasha to find out) and aiding content creators, who might gain some additional followers when people find their articles on google or through other social media.
Ok, next problem. Every time you open Akasha you have to 'synchronize'. The first time I tried this on my laptop, it took several hours.
Subsequent synchronizations were significantly faster, but still took a while. In the end I had to give up and install it on my desktop, My laptop is old and apparently just too slow for the Akasha software. On my desktop things were much smoother. But still, this synchronization business is a pain in the ass.
Problem number three: the Ethereum blockchain. Every transaction takes too long, as the blockchain just doesn't have the kind of blazing fast speeds that the Steem blockchain has.
Problem number four: upvoting costs. When you upvote a post or comment on Akasha, you send Aether from your own account. You do get curation rewards, but so far I haven't had the chance to play around enough to see how the rewards compare to the amount spent.
Problem number five: Ethereum itself. I think it's a disadvantage to be based on an external coin, especially one that has already such a large market cap. However, this might be a moot point, as the developers are still considering whether to create their own currency.
Currently I find the beta to be an extremely frustrating experience.
Most features don't work properly. Much of the content remains inaccessible to me due to an error message that I think is due to the lack of users. I can't even access my own introduction post! Tags cannot be changed after submission, so if you post something and forget to add more than 1 tag (as I did) you are out of luck.There's no convenient list of tags, so the only way to find topics is by searching for them. Etc, etc etc. But I imagine that these types of errors will be ironed out during the beta phase.
There are a couple of nice ideas I saw on Akasha that I wouldn't mind to see implemented on Steemit. For one thing, they give you control over licensing your content. You get to choose every time you write an article whether to use 'all rights reserved' or various types of licenses, such as allowing only non-commercial use along with a mention.
Also, upvoting is by a slider that goes from 1 to 10. From what I can tell, this is static across the system, meaning whales don't get a bigger vote than minnows. But I am not certain about that one yet. If so, it would increase fairness and encourage minnows, but also decrease investment incentive. As long as they decide to keep Akasha based on Etherium, this won't matter as Etherium has no shortage of investment interest. But if they decide to create their own coin, it could make quite a difference.
So far Akasha is using a fake test currency for transactions, so it's easy to sign up for an account and start posting. I encourage you to do this and check it out for yourself. Maybe you will have some insights that passed me by.
I will be keeping an eye on it to see it how progresses, and probably even posting there once in a while. This is a ground floor opportunity, so if it does take off I want to be involved. But I will keep putting the majority of my efforts into Steemit, because Steemit is IMO far and away the better platform and has a brighter future.
That's all for now. Please comment if you have anything to add!