RE: Proposed Changes to Steem Economy
I spent 400 BTC on SP a few month ago, it's worth about 20 BTC right now, i am the largest financial investor so far, the follow is what i think:
I think the design of Steem Power is flawed, it should be removed completely, a lot of investors don't want to hold SP because of the long withdraw time, and few of them want to hold STEEM because of the hyperinflation , with the new change, the Steem Power holder only have 1.425% (9.5% * 15%) interest yearly, so most of the users would hold STEEM only, few of them would hold SP in order to earn curation rewards, i think this new change would attract a lot of short term and long term investors.
I don't like the idea of rewarding bloggers with stakeholder's money, there are two kinds of bloggers on steemit, write for money, or write for pleasure, the first kind produce low quality contents, it's not worth to pay them, the second kind, usually produce high quality contents, they do care about money, and appreciate and enjoy it, but they would still write without it anyway.if Amazon.com pays for the e-books with shareholder's money and make the ebooks free for everyone, then the price of their stock would drop as shitty as STEEM. We should use stakeholder's money for promotion purpose and for developers. We should develop features like pay per view, tip, trade etc on steemit.com.
We should focus on entertainment purpose on steemit, I don't like to read those original long posts on steemit, they are boring , if i want to learn, i prefer to read books. I think most of the active users here think the same as me, because they are leaving, the bots are voting, few people read and comment the boring posts.
I agree. If steemit only aims at being a kind of medium blogging platform it will lose a lot of potential users. Steemit should aim at being the best social network with many different ways to earn money. I wrote a post about this 2 months ago https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/steemit-needs-more-way-to-earn-reward-than-posting
By only rewarding people for writting stories steemit won't appeal to the vast majority of the people.
People should be paid for doing many different things that adds value, predicting the future correctly like augur does on ethereum, or people could be paid to fill survey, or even play games,or answers Q&A
Even a daily steemit lottery could be interesting, we could allocate 500$ to the lottery and make a happy user every day. And there people have one more reason to stick around..
I think the funny part of making money is lacking on steemit, it needs more diversification
@snowflake I believe it is a happening. There is steemsports (plus all the differents accts. under it) and I have recently been seeing different types of games such as guessing numbers, or what a zoomed in picture or @virtualgrowth plays poker with the steem generated by his post and rewards the upvoters and commentators . There are many great artists that draw and paint, there now some musicians posting original music and even some making unique videos here on STEEMIT. I recently posted how a steemit user's pic was used in a news article.
I my investment in steemit pales in comparison to @laonie 's but I was not worried with the recent price. I feel that Steemit has so much potential and not enough time has passed for us to be freaking out, but I understand. I have been averaging down so this price jump does help with my investment and my attitude.
These things are great but the interface is not very organized. All I see every day in the trending page is steemsport everywhere
The gaming/lottery aspect should be seperate from the usual posts.
If I was developing the interface for steem , I would create nice profils pages like any social media and on these pages i would add a section called earn which will show all the different ways to earn ( post,bet,fill questionnaire,etc..)
The way things are displayed to us now is too confusing and it's hard to know what steemit even try to be.
The trending page has definitely changed since I first started here, and it currently does not appear to be "steemsport everywhere." I do not believe Facebook new what it was going to be or how it would look either when it first started. Steemit is the first of its kind and it still says "BETA."
Just wait until it announces itself as Live to the World.
Thank you, @laonie. You were certainly someone I had in mind when I made my comment. I don't agree with everything you've said here (I really like the concept of vested shares which represent a long-term commitment, along with the idea of purchasing influence on the social network side of the ecosystem), but I really, really appreciate your perspective. I really hope, in the long term, your investments turn around, and you are made whole here. In a very real sense, you have been funding Steemit for the past few months and Dan and Ned (IMO) owe you a rather large debt of gratitude.
I'm curious why the change would attract long term investors as you described? To me, Steem Power was a long-term investor's dream. Unfortunately, the liquid steem dumped on the market caused that dream to turn into a nightmare as the price of steem fell through the floor.
That's a really interesting way to put it. If we don't reward them with that money, who's money do we reward them with? Value can't be created from nothing. I don't know what the balance is, but if we're going to continue to have valuable payouts, the money has to come from somewhere (i.e. investors propping up the value of the rewarded token). As you said, though, if other systems did this, their share price would tank.
I agree entertainment should be the key, but I also think different people come here for different things. Some value the long posts more than any other posts anywhere else. I hope there's room for everyone's preferences.
Thanks again for your reply. It means a lot to me.
For long-term investors, if the price increased tenfold in a short time, most of them would want to sell most of the stakes, they don't want to be forced to hold. The long withdraw time is a big turn off for them.
We should treat every investor equally, it's hard to tell who is short-term holder, who is long-term holder.
If you are a reader, you like a post, you can reward the author with your own money, if you reward the author with other's money , that's called corruption or tragedy of common.
Paying users for content is a market differentiation for Steemit and is it's biggest selling feature to gain adoption. The revenue will come from the attention economy and advertising.
Bringing in ad revenues is the real solution that will add value for investors.
This is what I have been saying for a while now too. The content brings viewers, so it should be paid for by those who want exposure. The pool of rewards needs to be neutralised by income somehow, or it destroys the investment potential.
Ads are dying online.
Way better to allow for topical writing prizes, of which steem keeps some fraction. See: Rancher's article bounty system.
@laonie wrote:
Tipping will never be viable.
I understand that perspective of rewarding them with other people's money, but bitcoin rewards miners with investors' money as new bitcoin is created. I see steemit doing the same thing by rewarding those who create the content which give the social media ecosystem value. Other cryptocoins are investments only whereas this one includes author rewards. As long as the price is going up, it works well for everyone. Whenever the price just goes down and investors can't get out, it does seem fraudulent.
@lukestokes
The beauty of PoW is that there's no centralization of power, bitcoin treat every miner and every stakeholder equally , and bitcoin has the first move advantage, but STEEM doesn't , if steemit cann't grow it's user base, it would be dead.
If people don't get paid to post, what exactly is the selling point of steemit.com?
If people are leaving even they get paid to post, what exactly is the point to pay for ?
That's waste of money.
If you want to win a user's heart, money just won't work.
@snowflake Thanks for asking. An update will be released after Steemfest.
How is steemQ doing? Any progress report for the community? :)
@laonie wrote:
You are correct that users won't stay just for money and the site must be enjoyable/meaningful even without remuneration, because it is mathematically impossible to pay users enough for blogging from debasement of investors.
However if users stayed because they are investors, then they could have both their heart and mind vested in it. That was one of my key insights when I realized how to make a better Steem "clone".
Voting is the problem (because as one of my blogs pointed out, it is impossible to avoid Sybil attacks without handing that voting power to the whales which thus centralizes the ranking and reward system).
Btw, remember I responded to one of your blogs in August and warned you that you were throwing your BTC down a rat hole. Maybe next time you listen more carefully to what I have to say.
@laonie wrote:
You are correct that users won't stay just for money and the site must be enjoyable/meaningful even without remuneration, because it is mathematically impossible to pay users enough for blogging from debasement of investors.
However if users stayed because they are investors, then they could have both their heart and mind vested in it. That was one of my key insights when I realized how to make a better Steem "clone".
Voting is the problem (because as one of my blogs pointed out, it is impossible to avoid Sybil attacks without handing that voting power to the whales which thus centralizes the ranking and reward system).
Btw, remember I responded to one of your blogs in August and warned you that you were throwing your BTC down a rat hole. Maybe next time you listen more carefully to what I have to say.
Yes, you did warn me, thanks for the warning, i wasn't thinking clearly at that time, and i learned the lesson.
I invested 40btc... so I totally agree with your position!
@knozaki2015, want to make you aware of banano's insight.
I am developing a social network blockchain project somewhat similar to Steem, but different in very important ways which address all of your points and even points you have not yet thought of. It is also intended to fix all the centralization problems of Bitcoin, so it is to be a major announcement in the Bitcoin ecosystem when I get close to launch. Also the name I have is superior (the domain is already registered), on the caliber of "Twitter".
The DPOS which Steem is based on is less than ideal. I wrote down the issues at least one of which afaik no one else had enumerated. I have also been creating a new programming language to replace JavaScript and Java, and this ties into my plans for the social network. I must keep some of the details secret until I get closer to launch, otherwise other projects would possibly attempt to copy them.
I will be in Singapore in second and third week of January (for a medical trip to deal with my liver & digestive health problem) if anyone wants to meet to talk with me face-to-face. It would probably be best if there was some angel investment now to help hire another top programmer to accelerate my progress. I am a top programmer and only want to work with the very best due to the Mythical Man Month loses of productivity due ridiculous amounts of communication load (or miscommunication outcomes) incurred when working with junior programmers.
I can be contacted at my LinkedIn, which is linked in my first blog post.
I don't think it is in my best interests to apply my design and ideas to changing Steem, because I am not one of the whales who mined the stealth mining. The prior concentration of ownership disincentivizes me from being a full partner in the ecosystem. I had thought about contacting @ned, but then changed my mind when I became aware of how most of the tokens had been minded for Steemit, Inc.
I have appreciated that they did this experiment and demonstrated the potential value of a Steem-like concept and I participated sincerely to see what would come of it (which is a concept I was working on before they launched and before I had heard of Steem). I presume they have profited commensurately. And they can make changes now and see how much they can salvage from the existing design and inertia. I am not claiming they can't make some design improvements. I will be watching intently to see what they do.
@laonie, want to make you aware of banano's insight.
What's the URL of your blog?
https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed
Bloggers aren't being rewarded with stakeholders money. Stakeholders have something worth >$0 because some of us are trying like hell to bring people to the platform and build out infrastructure and ecosystem, and the financial incentives ARE A HUGE PART OF THAT DECISION.
@lanie " I don't like to read those original long posts on steemit, they are boring , if i want to learn, i prefer to read books. " Why didn't you buy Amazon stock then? You knew you were buying a hard to explain - cryptocurrency hedged - "pay for blog" platform and now you don't like it because you think the users are stealing your money.
If you had taken that money and put it into Amazon - you would have received a quarterly prospectus, you could vote for the board of directors AND you would still have most of your money.
But you probably wouldnt understand them either - you see they take shareholder money and buy up ebooks so they can offer them for free. The part you would understand is they also don't turn a profit because of all their "investments" in "entertainment".
Some sites add value with content - some with savings or a reward. Steemit provides both.
I don't think the users are stealing my money, but i do think this platform is like a charity organization , i still remember that we paid a make-up post for $40k , that's insane. That's how a tragedy of common works.
The platform still works that way, everybody is milking the cow, the cow is nearly dead.
Steem needs to implement posting reward max limits
So because your investment is not worth what it was the business model makes no sense? What makes no sense to me is why you didnt do a private deal and make sure you had a say before parting with so much money.. In your analogy you want to kill the dying cow - the currency depends on the platform which depends on the people which depends on the.. Am I the only person who read the white paper?
I want to save the cow, stop milking it or at least be tender, i believe money cann't buy the loyalty of users, maybe i am wrong, time can tell.
@laonie
Understand that point number three is an entirely subjective opinion and irrelevant.
As to the idea that you should begin to capitalize off my work, without offering to pay me, fuck you. My stuff is stuck here, for better or for worse, from now on. Without the writers, what is this site? You're witnessing it. That's why you must pay. Otherwise, you end up with the same crap other blogging social sites have.
I am sorry my personal opinion might hurted your feelings, but you are acting like a mad dog.
I tend to get like that when someone thinks their simple cash investment is worth more than my art. I'm not acting like a mad dog, I'm acting like someone defending their work. It's an "opinion" not an "option" for the record. but, you go ahead and invest in a platform where only people like you write the content and see what the fuck happens. You think Facebook is huge because of written posts? No, it's huge because it became an avenue for sharing huge amounts of quality content. You don't understand anything about social media, obviously, but because you put in a little cash (not even that much, by the way) you're voice is bigger than mine. Now, you want to steal what I worked hard to share here. So, yeah, fuck you.
It's "your voice" not "you're voice" for the record, i understand why you act like that, you have 8 kids and 3 dogs and a fat wife to raise ( BTW, your kids are cute, but i hope your 3 dogs are not as mad as you ), but the sales of your gabage e-books on amazon is pathetic , if you want to defend your work, barking like a mad dog is useless.
Maybe it's time Steemit embrace XXX content and let people purchase Steem Power for greater access. That could create demand for Steem Power without these parameter tweaks to appeal to crypto gamblers.
I really like you comment @laonie and although I don't agree with everything said, finally someone who understand how this all thing can really work long-term from investment PoV. There are some things: