WritCoin SMT - Building Bridges Between Steem & Mainstream
I believe steemit has reached a crossroads, a point of no return. It is essential that the direction/culture/behaviors on steemit evolve into something fairer, more considered and less driven by the greed of crowd mentality.
The extremely complex user experience, especially for beginners, lets steem down as a platform. Is it a blogging platform? A social network? A video sharing site? A showcase for creative writing? Or an amalgamation of all of these functions? From the outside looking in, it seems it is attempting to be all of the above. I sincerely hope that it succeeds in this multimedia model, but history shows that focus is one of the keys to a successful enterprise.
This is why I am focusing on what I know! As a creative writer with a lot of writing experience and previously published works, I was very confused/disheartened with steemit in my first three months of use. I honestly think I would have left if it hadn't have been for @curie votes on some of my posts, as creative writing is seriously undervalued on steemit. This raises one of the most important ongoing issues with the platform, how do we mitigate against professional level content creators leaving within weeks of signing up. I have personally witnessed (in my work as a curie curator) many extremely talented people leave due to low payouts, while suspect material from early adopters (whales) continues to garner $300+/post. Is this really a platform that rewards talent? Or one that rewards months/years of grind or large wallets full of steem power. I know which it needs to be to bring people to the platform and more importantly, get them to stay. The only way I can see for steemit to succeed, is to build relationships with mainstream entities and ensure that talent is truly rewarded for its own sake. This is important because the content is the face of Steemit.
The proportionally low payouts that creative writers (fiction & poetry) receive on this platform.
The issue of losing first publishing rights on stories and poems.
The idea of WritCoin is to create a dedicated (SMT) currency to reward only quality creative writing on steemit, while marketing both the token and idea to traditional publishing houses as an opportunity to invest in a growing concern as well as sourcing new talent for anthologies.
How could a Writcoin SMT Achieve these Goals?
First, lets take a brief look at SMT's and what they can do.
Steem’s Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) give anyone the power to launch and sell Proof-ofBrain [1] tokens, which are tokens distributed by “upvote” and “like”-based algorithms and can be integrated with websites to align incentives and spur growth, while websites are empowered to adopt sustainable, currency-centric revenue models.
Page 1 SMT Whitepaper
In @ned's YouTube presentation (at 2.55 minutes) he describes the difference between a centralized and decentralized distribution of awards. SMT's will run off the back of the steem blockchain, ensuring the decentralized model, whereby the creator of the token can't dictate the price or efficacy of said token after it is launched. On page 12-17 of the white paper there are a clearly defined set of options for setting up an SMT. As I'm not very technically minded I found the minutia of detail a little intimidating but it seemed to state that there was a set of parameters such as, soft cap, unit ratio (price of token in steem e.g. 0.1 steem/1 writcoin) and total supply.
As I understand it, this means SMT's are similar to Ethereum ER20 tokens, but based on proof-ofbrain and running on the steem blockchain. This brings all of the benefits of steems lightening fast transaction times and vote/reward functionality.
So how could this work in the WritCoin scenario? One way I envision this working is to run it like an ICO where people buy the coin as a stake in a dedicated community of creative writers and a proportion of the steem raised in the token sale is held as a mechanism for upvoting quality content. The rest could be used for marketing toward mainstream publishers, held for burning and for projects such as self published anthologies.
To an extent this mechanism would be self regulating as plagiarists/spammers would be unlikely to want to buy a token with their ill gotten steem if content creators are going to be under review before being accepted into the writers community. In this scenario, community candidates would have to be vetted based on past content and reputation on steemit. This idea would take a lot of administration but would be the most effective way to ensure a dedicated community of talented writers are rewarded based on the quality of their work rather than just their networking ability.
Pitching this idea to mainstream publishers would be the biggest hurdle but I feel that if the token could be presented to them in the right way, showing how it is nurturing excellence through crypto currency mechanisms, they could be convinced. This could go a long way to redressing the balance of talented writers losing first publishing rights. If we could convince publishing houses to buy and hold the tokens, with the understanding that the upvote reward from the SMT's steemit account is considered recompense for the writers who are selected for anthology, then everyone would be a winner. The publishing house would get a source for new anthology content, as well as free new-media exposure on a platform in an emerging market. The writers would get a place in a paper anthology from an established publishing house, a must for any serious writers CV.
To make this idea fair the WritCoin SMT vote functionality would have to be used as a community metric, possibly a way for the whole community to vote the most exceptional content into a shortlist for editors at the publishing house to review for publication. Also, it could be used as way to measure the (%) level of votes from the SMT's steemit account to particular content based on consensus.
All of this is just an idea at the moment, born of a desire that new writers on steemit don't have to go through the confusion and disenchantment that I did. I hope that my theoretical SMT has made you think and I am very keen to hear any of your thoughts about this in the comments section.
© Rowan Joyce all rights reserved.
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