Steem vs. Yours vs. Synereo
During the last couple of days, there has been lots of movement in the market. Synereo has skyrocket, while Steem has lost 3/4 of its value.
This has also caused some movement and discussion here on Steemit itself. For instance @stellabelle who has the highest rep on here (or at least she used to) has posted about synereo and how it has solved some issues that steem has not. Has it though? It's not even live yet.
It is true, steem has issues: Retention! Retention! Retention!
Having been on the steem for about one month, I also see some issues with the site. Most importantly looking at the data, the biggest issue is that we have a big retention problem. Users sign on well but then seem to not stay active. This is bad. I don't know if this is normal and how this looks for other social media platform, but the chart from @atomrigs does not look good.
Consequently it makes sense that the price of steem has crashed a bit, because with this user behavior a lot of the potential of steem is diminished. Again credit goes to @atomrigs.
chart
I think we do not have enough data to draw correlation conclusions, however it is clear that investors are a bit timid right now. But I am less worried about the price, but the chart of new accounts vs account activity is a real problem and shows an issue that needs to be addressed. One thing that @atomrigs has missed in his post that in my mind is the most important indicator on steem are votes. The trend with votes looks exactly the same, so the chart of @atomrigs is good enough actually. But to be sure here are the votes.
I have talked about what I think are the key problems that lead to these retention issues here:
- Activity has been stagnant according to the stats (even though it feels like more and better content is popping up all the time). While user growth can be seen every day, the amount of votes and post have not been going up since I joined even though the amount of users has roughly tripled in one month.
- I think the voting does not work as well as expected. I find myself voting like a robot for things that i think will go viral, vs things that I like. My curation reward is usually between 0.01SP and 7SP. A huge difference. Of course I try to hunt the big rewards, instead of rewarding who and what I like. In fact I have voted for many post I thought were bad and things I did not like, just because I thought it was profitable.
- The curve between highest paying post and low paying post as well as the ones in the middle is way to high in my opinion. I think there are many good posts that do not get rewarded, and others that are not that amazing that get way overrated.
So I see the issues with steem, but I am not too worried. I think they can be fixed and overall Steem has amazing design architecture and solves real problems that cannot be solved without its blockchain and business model. In particular I am talking about how content can be attracted and rewarded in a new financial model. So lets look at how steem compares with others.
Synereo: can someone explains how it works please?
I've been trying to understand how Synereo works. I started to read the white paper and pretty much gave up 1/2 way thru. It was a lot of fluff on the one hand and math formula on the other hand, both of which are useless when trying to analyze a project for investment purposes. I have also read some articles and watched video about it, but somehow nobody can just explain how it works in a few sentences or pages. This is always a red flag to me.
However I see a few things that I find very fascinating about Synereo.
- They are trying to create an economic model that reflects a social network. If this actually works it will be amazing. They are using a currency called REO that basically is supposed to reflect how important one is directly towards a particular network member and as a whole. This sounds very interesting, however the formulas with which they were trying to explain how this worked went a little over my head when I was trying to read it before going to bed.
- The ability to pay for attention of certain people and likewise get rewarded for giving attention. This is where AMP comes in the currency one can buy right now on the market. Again how this works exactly I have not been able to grasp just yet.
There are however some red flags:
- I don't understand the economic model yet, like how money comes in and out and how this thing can grow and take over the world and make its members rich and powerful.
- The GUI I have seen by signing up for the beta looks horrendous and just as confusing as the white paper. This is another red flag. Its very early and the beta has not launched yet, so I am not judging quite yet.
- While the coin has launched already I just received an email for another funding round, asking me to buy some shares of some company or buy more AMP. Again all this is confusing me. Why is there another round at this stage.
- I have heard how there has been long development without much progress. So I am wondering if all the confusion I have seen is representative of an overall confusing culture.
As a result I will need to study this more, however I wonder if I can't understand this with some serious effort, what will regular people think. I will judge Synereo more when the real version comes out, but so far I am hesitant and have only invested a small sort of test amount and will re-evaluate once I have been able to test and understand it.
Interestingly @Ned has made a similar comment about how he had trouble understanding the economic model in @stellabelle post. At least I am not alone here.
Yours network: I think its just a pretty name
When it comes to Yours I have heard about it a few times and tried to research it, but so far did not find much content. Today there was a youtube video with the creator on epicenter bitcoin:
I was not impressed with the video. There was lots of fluff and only a few minutes of the interview actually covered how yours works, the rest was general stuff like how facebook sucks and people on youtube do not make much money for generation content. Thank you Mr. Caption Obvious.
From my understanding of the video Yours works like this:
- It's a company running a website that works like youtube on a centralized server. It's a copy of reddit.
- There is a payment layer that works in top of the website using bitcoin micro-transactions.
- The micro-transactions are executed via lightning networks, which is still in development.
- The site will take a cut from each transaction, that will be lower than what youtube takes, which is 40%
The economic model was not really explained, other than that site will simply take a cut from each transaction and it will be cheaper than youtube. Key question: how are prices determined?
From the interview I think the developer is very focused in the technical side of things and a true business model is missing. I think is not very innovative, its simply laying a payment layer on top of existing platform that can very easy be copied by reddit, Facebook and youtube. And this can be done with paypal just as well.
At this point I don't think Yours has a real shot at being successful and I would not invest into it. I hope I am wrong and I wish the Yours team good luck.
I am happy I have recently poweredUp ever more
As I pointed out in this post I have constantly poweredUp since I joined steem and invested quite a few bitcoins into my Steem account.
So far it looks really bad, since I probably have lost 2/3 of my investment on paper. However I am confident in my decision because looking at Synereo and Yours I think Steem is looking good:
- the business model is pretty clear, even if complex.
- we have a working product that has attracted value, creating amazing content that would otherwise not exist
- we have a fantastic team that is constantly adding new features to the blockchain and the website
- @dan has shown in the past that he is capable of understanding problems both from a technical and business perspective and come up with a solution that covers both. He has done this over several years, the end result of which is graphene and this blockchain.
- I think synereo has amazing potential but a very different business model and I think the two may co-exist, like twitter and facebook etc.
- one of the biggest issues I saw, which was the attraction of outside money without diluting investors was solved today. I think it could have been done better, but the point is that the @steemit team is constantly improving and finding amazing new innovations that will bring steem forward
In this space we need to be able to handle swings and unfortunately losing 70% of value from its investment in a few weeks is normal in this new blockchain and crypto space. It's important to look at the fundamentals and trust in making the right decisions. Having reviewed steem and other upcoming solutions makes me confident that this for now is the best place to be part of and I am happy that I have diversified a portion of my crypto assets into the steem platform.
I can't wait to see what new surprise the team will bring to steem next week and I am also looking forward to what other projects will have to offer.
A very informative post even though you are unsure about a lot many people are and this helps start a discussion that brings more clarity and knowledge to the community as a whole.
I think Steemit still has the most potential for success out of any of the other similar platforms but I do hope it gets a lot better.
I think maybe the thing that needs to be changed the MOST is the curation reward factor because as you said a HUGE percent of people are simply voting on things they think will do well and all this does it perpetuate a hand full of people making a LOT of money regardless of if the posts are really great or not. This IS happening a LOT and won't stop until its changed. I am not going to make a suggestion as to exactly how it could be changed but one option is just changing the reward for voting on things so that the voter is not getting money or maybe hiding the profit of the post so that people are not constantly seeing a poster make thousands then just immediately upvoting their post whenever they see it. I am sure there are other options as well and the dev's could come up something to fix it.
I would also say that it is very likely this was designed like this on purpose because the whales in it from the beginning can make $500 for one UPvote when played right and its EASY money.
Anyways thanks for the post. Hope to see more thought provoking content to come!
Yes, for instance, if you like this post right now it would not be a good idea to vote one it. Unless you want to be generous. Instead one should find a post that is 30-90min old and shows some momentum and good quality content.
EXACTLY!
But that is a HORRIBLE way to structure a platform that is trying to create QUALITY content. It totally obscures that and is over ridden by wanting to profit.
So it sucks really because come on ever people who want to make money would prefer to Upvote things they ACTUALLY agree with.
I mean like you said you UPvote shit just because you think you will profit and I do too, as does almost EVERYONE. Yet I would MUCH prefer to UPvote AND profit on a post I really cared about.
This of course COULD be designed into the platform. I think that the MAINE reason it is NOT is because the whales set it up this way so they can make easy $500 per Upvote.
So this will HAVE to change in order to have quality content, because quality content requires QUALITY authors and quality authors will ONLY contribute to a platform that honors their contributions!
I agree with you. It needs to change. I vote on what I think will be good and profitable content. Then I'll read it later. Example Dantheman wrote a big article that is nr
That said it still works better than anything else that has existed until steem. There is amazing content here and great content get rewarded often. We must also understand that a first version of any tech is usually not optimal.
1 right now. As soon as I saw it I voted for it. I still have not read it. I will read it, but I voted on it because of the profit that my vote will generate.
However, I know that this content is great and so do many others and probably vote the same way I do. It still kinda works, because the content is actually good. Dan has build trust that now gets auto rewarded.
On the flip side I do not upvote content that I like but know won't make it, such as photo post I like, because I know I will get only 1 cent for it and that is a waste of my voting power.
Yes that is very sad though. I don't agree with you and know that most people do the same. But if it is the rules which make the game then the rules should be changed to create a more holistic game. The game is obviously to structured to money and money is to much of a pull on people. So until the rules are changed it will keep going like it is.
Is Steemit the best we have seen? For sure. That doesn't mean it couldn't get better. It can get way better. I hope more and more people speak out about it and that the change comes quickly. Otherwise it will be very hard for new people that don't have the pull to make any money because EVERYONE is using their vote on people that make money!
OH GOD SAVE US!
hahaha
I agree with your assessments so far. I think Synereo is a great idea, but as you and others are pointing out they are keeping the economic engine kind of hush-hush. Seems they have some legit developers involved though.
Yes, and truly I don't understand it at this point, which for me is a red flag, since I have tried to learn about it.
The power of steem imho is a comprehensive model and strategy that was developed over the years and lots of feedback from failures.
Thanks for a great article and shedding light on the potential competition.
Thank you for reading and the comments!
We need to remove the vote button from the feed pages. You should only be able to vote on a post IF you actually read it. Bots can still do it because of the api, but perhaps there could be a lag on how many upvotes things have being available? So that when people upvote it takes 30s to actually be public knowledge. It would make it less easy to track. Which would be a good thing.
I've stopped caring about curation rewards. I just vote on what I like. Otherwise well have neverending wannabe softcore porn and wankery about crypto currency instead of real value.
Absolutely. This will reduce cherry picking
Nailed it!
I think it is more structural than that.
The votes chart is giving us the middle finger
Nice read. I totally agree about that author reward curve. Why not expiriment with taking Steem Power to the 1.5 power or 1.75. I think it would improve the distribution. Squaring is so arbitrary. The fundamantal idea is sound, just needs to be tweaked.
This is my feeling as well. I'm sure the team will figure this out and tweak accordingly
that's because accounts are being created continuously by account farms / click farms who already control tens of thousands of social media account. If these spam accounts were removed from the count, you'd probably see the curve of new account creations follow more closely that of posts. A good way to emulate that is to filter out all accounts that do not have at least one positive increase of reputation from the default reputation rank.
Well that is good to know and makes sense.
I have had a sense of content becoming more diverse over time for sure.
Instead of voting for things that will make you money vote for things you like. You complain about the voting then say you vote for things that you don't like. That's the problem no amount of regulation will help.
I can see where you are coming from. And I do vote for things that I like. However I am also voting in a way that is profitable. I make about 20 SP a week. Not huge, but something fun to chase.
I think when we have a tragedy of the comments issue the individual will use GTO optimal strategies and one must create a system where the tragedy is resolved.
The more I think about it. It's not so bad to vote for what's going to make money. It may make things a bit trashy but that's all part of the game. I don't know, a lot of this stuff is going way over my head.
Agree! - @alaqrab @rampant - I had a comment exchange =here= yesterday about exactly the same. I choose to be optimistic, but I think the focus on Steemit is wrong - and skewed, too.
Also: Although I got a sub-answer, there is not much response. I'm a newbie.
I've predicted that long ago and explained why: https://steemit.com/steemit/@herzmeister/is-steemit-bound-to-stagnate-and-stifle-its-own-user-adoption
You mention Synereo will have
But, Steem is planning this functionality too. The ability to buy/sell voting power is in the plan. The result is the same.
Was not aware. That will be interesting.