I've been pondering lately on how social media evolved in past years, where it is now and how Steemit is a game changer.
People tend to think that social media started with Facebook, Twitter and the like, but the truth is that it started way back.
If we accept Social Media to be "websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking." then we have to think about social media starting at some point in the 70s. These are the early days of newsgroups, listservs and early chat rooms, where individuals would share and discuss information and/or ideas, thus opening the "social era". In the 70s we saw usenet where users would post news to newsgroups, which appeared more or less at the same time as Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) where we saw the first login option for interaction. The 70s were the stone age of social media.
The 70s were followed suit by the 80s, when we saw the creation of Compuserve in 1980 and the first chat it introduced. In 1984, a company called Prodigy Communications Corporations offered an online service to its subscribers in order to access a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features. These subscribers would initially use PCs to access the Prodigy service by means of copper wire telephone "POTS" service or X.25 dialup. With time it morphed into an ISP, and even went public. Today its nowhere to be found, except for some pockets of regional activity such as Mexico, where the company is the leading ISP with 92% of market share.
As of the middle of the 80s, social media evolved into what we can label as its middle ages. 1998 saw the introduction to internet relay chat, file sharing, link sharing and "keeping in touch". Things looked relatively quiet at that time, until a minor explosion happened around the second half of the 90s. At this time, the world witnessed the introduction to ICQ in 1996, which came with multi user messaging, multiplayer games, emoticons and abbreviations, LOL, ROTFL, BRB, etc... (some of these became really popular). In 1997 we started seeing what could be called the embryo of what we understand as social media today, whereby the Six Degree analysis was the result of and applied to profile creation, adding friends and the like. In 1999 Livejournal was created in San Francisco by Brad Fitzpatrick. Livejournal was founded as a way to keep in touch with high school friends and acquaintances and have them updated on activities. As of today its owned by a Russian company, SUP media, who acquired it in 2007, and its still used today by many heavyweight Russian politicians for political commentary and the like.
With the beginning of the new millenia came the blossoming of Social Media, and what we could call its Golden Age. This Golden age can be divided into two, its early days (2001-2003) when Wikipedia was founded (2001), Friendster (2002), and Hi5 and Myspace (2003). Then in 2004 Social Media was totally disrupted by the coming of Facebook when it first opened for Harvard University Students. It was followed suit by Orkut, owned and operated by Google, who was responding to the threat that a positive evolution of Facebook would imply to its core business. Orkut was Google's first attempt at "cracking" social. It was finally shutdown 30th September 2014. 2005 brought the extension of the social concept to photos and video with the creation of Flickr and Youtube as well as the creation of Reddit for social news aggregation, web content rating and discussion, founded by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, bought by the Condé Nast publishing group in 2006.
By the time 2006 came, Facebook had already gone through the roof becoming the best performing social media platform till date with more than 1.4 billion active users. 2006 also saw the creation of Twitter, the famous ever-decaying-never-dying microblogging platform, and Tumblr, which was introduced in 2007.
As of 2009 we witnessed the appearance of Whatsapp for personal and group chats, Snapchat in 2012 for chatting posting pictures and videos, Tinder for social discovery, Vine in 2013 for multi-platform video sharing and so and so forth until our present day.
The present day for me "starts" in spring of 2016, when Steemit was introduced.
If we take a step back and look at the evolution that I briefly outlined above (of which there are many companies and milestones missing) I see two distinct phases or drivers. 1) First we saw the introduction of underlying technology, which set the basis for the evolution of products upon it, notwithstanding the fact that the Personal Computer became a must have mainstream "toy", later to evolve with the democratization of the means of production, first text and numeric based to then adopt video and photo formats, and the universalization of mobile phones and internet access, and 2) the putting in context or mimicking of real world relations online, which would later evolve into almost "pure-play" digital ways of relating to and socializing with other people.
The growth of such technologies and the spill over into social relations was mainly fueled by advertising, which at the end of the day was the ever present primordial revenue stream for digital operations/companies. This advertising driven internet, later crooked and biassed towards digging deeper into people's data in order to generate higher ROIs for advertisers, and the digital world, became an arms race between Facebook and Google to provide deeper insights, which provoked the violation or blurring of people's privacy boundaries. This fact was also catalyzed by the 9/11 tragedy and the war on terror, which politically justified the use of any means in favor of the "greater good", something which has always given me Goosebumps and reminds me of Communism, the Cold-war and dictatorships.
At the same time all this was happening Bitcoin was created, and it addressed two major concerns, privacy/transparency/anonymity, which I briefly wrote about above, and the ill/decaying monetary systems swiftly moving away from the dollar and the US based economy, being threatened by the Euro and the BRICS' (Brazil, Russia, India and China to be later joined by South Africa) political/economic alliance in search for a counterweight against the dollar and the US. We've seen this alliance bear its fruit in the formation of the G20 as opposed to the former G7. In essence, the world, "the people" of the world were looking for higher degrees of freedom and independence, away from politicians and centralized power. Long were the days in which Rousseaus's social contract was still valid.
The creation of Steemit has paved the way to a future social media landscape where users are no longer "tooled" by the platforms they use in order to exchange their personal data whilst generating content for free to be profited by a third party (the technology provider in this case). Once the end user realizes that his work/data are worth a lot of money, and that their "pouring" of it in favor of their friends, acquaintances or audiences shouldn't go unremunerated as it happens today, then there'll be no use in the Facebooks or Twitters of this world. These users should adopt self-fulfilling rewarding/remunerating advertising-free platforms such as Steemit.
This revenue generation in favor of users (now publishers by their own right) has been preceded by Youtube and is now blossoming through the use of Influencer Marketing, which at the end of the day is natural way of by-passing the traditional stronghold of technology providers/platforms over the sources of revenue. I wait to see what the FTC's future regulation for this type or activity will look like, but I can anticipate its going to be a nasty battle, its like trying to gate the sea or talk a rock into moving.
So, the rise and rapid success of Steemit has fostered the presentation of platforms such as Synereo (I'm impatient to see what they present this fall) and a host of other companies working on this front which will sooner or later tackle all incumbent social media platforms in favor of user driven/remunerated ones in a decentralized manner, thus very difficult if not impossible to regulate.
As of today Steemit is challenging the Reddits of this world, while I think Synereo is trying to tackle an evolution of Facebook, although after having read their whitepaper its maybe going to be too complex for the average user to understand its dynamics. But you know what? it doesn't really matter! The truth is that, in spite of whether its Steemit or Synereo or whomever comes up with right way to monetize social behavior/interaction/content production and sharing, what's really important is that the new era of social media has dawned on us almost like a thief at night, without previous warning, like Bitcoin did with regards to FIAT currency, and its here to stay, and decentralization is the the 21st Century in its essence; open, transparent, free, unregulated, diluting power and giving people otpions to craft a better live out of their own effort.