A look back at what I've learned so far, and the future of Steemit
One year ago today, I registered this Steemit account, although I didn't start posting here until about a month ago. I'm going to take this opportunity to share some of my observations over the past year that kept me from being active, and what I've learned since becoming active. Hopefully this can then serve as both an introduction to Steemit for those who aren't yet registered, and also potential advice on how to grow the number of users on this platform as well as user participation.
From the start, I thought Steemit was a brilliant idea. As automation grows, and we create more and more big data to train our machine replacements in the labor force, we need to figure out different ways of distributing our growing prosperity aside from classic employment. The atomized work we do on social networks that's so small we don't even think of it as work is one of those ways we can and arguably should look at. I strongly believe in the need for social networks to compensate those creating the value within the networks, and contrary to the existence of those getting ridiculously wealthy off of networks like Facebook, it's not the creators of networks that create the bulk of the value. It's the users themselves.
Facebook is worth what it is, because of the network effect. All the same infrastructure could exist as it does now, but without anyone actually registering accounts on Facebook, or using them, it would be worth nothing more than the cost of the infrastructure. Because it has a good percentage of the world using it, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. None of that value goes to users. Their only reward is the existence of Facebook, and owners of Facebook stock are perfectly happy with two billion people who aren't them, thinking that's a fair deal. It's not.
The idea behind Steemit is to decentralize ownership of a platform, such that instead of stock ownership, there's something called Steem Power (SP), and everyone who posts here earns it. The more upvotes a post gets, the more SP you can earn. The more SP you earn, the more your upvotes are worth. You can think of SP as kind of like imaginary stock certificates, but there's also something called Steem Dollars.
Steem Dollars are pegged to the US dollar, such that 1 SD equals around $1 USD. If you're on something like Coinbase, these Steem dollars can be exchanged for more popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Litecoin or Ethereum, and then kept or sold for US dollars. Every time you post here, you can choose to be rewarded by only Steem Power, or a 50/50 combo of Steem Power and Steem Dollars. Each post has one week to earn votes, and at the end of those seven days, the author is rewarded with 75% of the SP or SP/SD combo (or nothing if chosen), and those who upvoted the post split the remaining 25%. In this way, it's not just content creators whose value is recognized, but also content curators.
So if you're not yet registered on here,I highly recommend you rectify that. Create an account. Start blogging here just like you would anywhere. Upvote and comment on posts just like you would anywhere. The big difference is that you as a user will be seen as having inherent value, instead of being seen purely as a commodity to mine or sell.
With that said, Steemit doesn't recognize all value, and what it does recognize is not calculated accurately. Just like in the real world, there's great content here that's the result of a lot of hard work, that ends up earning nothing to very little. And just like in the real world, there's shit content that's the result of hardly any work at all, that ends up earning quite a lot. There's also valuable work not even being measured, like resteems. I don't understand the logic at all behind that one. If a piece of content is good enough to be reshared, it's good enough to earn more reward. Reshares are counted on Facebook. They're counted on Twitter. They're counted on Tumblr. But they aren't counted here. I find that very odd.
Resteems aren't the only unrecognized value added work. Because Steemit is built on a public blockchain, the value we are all creating here collectively is open and free for anyone to mine. Just like on Facebook, there is a great deal of value to be found in data mining, but unlike Facebook where that data is owned and sold by them, here that data is owned by no one and available for free. This is like leaving the door open on a gold mine which I think is counter to the idea behind Steemit. The gold belongs to everyone collectively, not to whoever calls dibs on it.
The most obvious of all though is the 7-day time limit on post compensation. I'm a writer and I can tell you it's not uncommon at all for something to be written that takes more than 7 days to be discovered as valuable. Think about that. What if you write a post that gets 100 views in 7 days, and then goes viral after that, getting 1 million views? Those 999,900 views will not be compensated with Steem, and yet you will have added a great deal of value to the platform by introducing hundreds of thousands of people to Steemit for the first time.
For the above reasons and more, I think everyone on Steemit should receive a Steemit dividend. I don't know the best way of going about that, but I think changing the post payout structure for all posts, such that say 5-10% was divided equally between all active accounts, would be one possible way of going about it. I hope that at some point in the future, Witnesses (Steemit's equivalent to Bitcoin miners) might start discussing this or something like it. This platform is still in beta, so I expect and hope for continual improvements as time goes on.
I want to reiterate though again just how important the size of the network is. The value of Steem coins will always exist within the number of people using Steemit, and how they use it. So it's important that more and more people become active here as their social network of choice. With that said, I think it's important to mention why I didn't start posting here until recently.
Did you ever see that episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia where the bar became all about freedom, and they eventually concluded perhaps there was too much freedom? I kind of get that impression here. Yeah, it's great that people have the freedom to talk about how the Earth is flat and all, but wow, that really makes this place look bad to passers-by. Reddit gets around this issue by allowing people to organize into subreddits to help control what they see and don't see, but that doesn't exist here yet, so it's entirely possible for someone to check this place out and see nothing but what they perceive as crazy shit. That was my first impression at least.
Steemit is not going to take on platforms like Facebook if the first impression people get from checking it out is that it's full of flat-earthers, snake oil salesmen, and post after post that only exists in the hope of earning money. It's not welcoming, and it's an obstacle to overcome. Actual downvoting instead of flagging as downvoting could be helpful to test out. It also seems problematic that people can perceive upvoting as "expensive". If upvoting is expensive, a lot of okay stuff won't get upvoted, which doesn't lift it above the noise as a clear signal for further upvotes. I'm sure there are many other ideas out there.
I'm excited about this platform. I really am. I think Steemit could be the Bitcoin of social media platforms. But it's going to need continued experimenting to figure out what works and what doesn't, and it's going to need to become a lot more user friendly. It took me weeks to get a handle on things here, and that's a pretty steep learning curve. We've got a long way to go, but that's also the exciting part.
Here's to what happens between now and next August 14th!
