The future of Steem

I am wondering aloud about the future pathway for Steemit as I can see more and more users coming onboard trying to ride on the wave of fast paced growth. Off my mind, I was thinking of the possibility of the below scenario. 

1. Steemit growing to become as big as Facebook 
2. Steemit collapsing eventually due to mismanagement and poor handling of fast paced growth.
3. Steemit eventually replacing bitcoins as the fundamental cryptocurrency for exchange.

Let us look at the first possibility and study more in depth. The primary reason for the growth of Facebook lies with the freedom to write and post without due concerns of copyright matters since you are mostly sharing things that interest you. Meaning you can be sharing a copyrighted contents to your social circle of friends. Facebook also gives you the freedom to speak your mind freely (of course with the possibility of backfire when one offends the public). 

For Steemit to grow like Facebook I think freedom of content sharing is key and essential. Members need to feel like they are part of a community and become less corporate like. It is all about having fun and enjoying yourself while sharing contents that you think would interest others. Apart from this, it is also essential to protect members from spammers and marketers as I see a potential loop hole whereby marketers could have taken advantage of. One could come up with a mass posting bot through usage of multiple facebook accounts to post marketing messages. There is no control over mass multiple accounts usage. This is an area that Steemit will need to address. 

The next area that need to be improve upon lies with the following function. When I click on following, nothing happens. So what is the deal with following anyway? There should be a way to trace and track contents from authors that I enjoy reading from or maybe add them as friends. I suspect the reason why this friend adding function was not implemented could be due to trademark issue with Facebook. Well I maybe wrong but this could be a safe guess. 

In the second scenario, this could be a big potential case of growing too fast and too big. Times and again in history we have seen many big corporation falling because they have outgrown themselves at a pace that becomes unmanageable. The entire steemit model  lies with miner generating steem while sharing them with content producers like us. Steemit itself does not generate revenue. This is potentially a crucial area that need to be address. Currently steemit relies upon the appreciation of the steem value to create their own income. This is working as long as steem maintains its value or appreciates. But what if the value starts to depreciate. Remember the cryptocurrency supporters can be very fickle. Take a look at bitcoins and you will learn why. 

So the next question posed to the management of Steemit is how to make good use of this massive traffic on this website and monetize it so that this platform becomes self sustaining without over relying upon the appreciation of steem value. Advertisement? Hmm, people are annoy by advertisement. Too many advertisements are getting our attention nowadays. Premium service? Possible. This might be a better direction. Example, having the ability to send direct messages to other users. This function could be interesting and proven to work. Look at Linkedin who have successfully implemented this function. 

Another premium service to consider is to conduct paid verification so that specific authors will receive a badge to prove that they are genuinely expert in that field of study. This is essential as it helps to differentiate good writer against bad writers. Experts vs pretenders. 

The third possible scenario will be the most idea and why I am holding on to steem and participating on this site. Replacing the mighty bitcoins. Bitcoins are well supported by the underground market and used mainly by shady business. A fact that bitcoins owner always try to deny. I am convince that bitcoin value would be sustain as long as there is no governance by legal authorities. No doubt security issues are still much of a concern but most bulk bitcoins holders are usually holding their bitcoins in cold storage offline away from the access of the hackers. In order for bitcoins to be replace, steem will need to prove itself as a stable value that is well supported by the public. The management on steemit should refrain from getting too many big whales investor on board at the moment because these VC will affect the direction of growth. Instead the focus should be getting the public and majority users to start using steem. 

Steemit has tied up with a couple of exchanges (which is a good move) and wallet services. Their next target should be to work with service providers like web hosting, SASS providers and get them to accept steem as payment source. 

Through this setup, the next question would be the requirement of a market maker to ensure liquidity. This is the tricky part. Getting a market maker to buy and sell large quantities of steem daily with cash it very difficult. The solution for bitcoins lies with localbitcoins.I think Steem should have a platform such as localsteem to facilitate smooth market making for steem. What I have written so far, I am not sure if any of steemit management will ever read but I do hope that someone will take notice and bring this to their attention because at the end of the day we are all stakeholders in this community.