The Community Lingers On

After I wrote about my Steem experience so far last night, we've been joined by my good friend and collaborator Phil Campbell with the handle @teamhumble - go follow him, upvote his stuff, talk to him, he's a good man.

Phil's not in the above picture (I am - I'm the one without a beard) but he was part of the Seesmic community that did a lot of creative work in late 2008 and into 2009 and which reminds me a lot of what I see happening here.

Seesmic started out as a simple micro-video-blogging service - a sort of video twitter - it was all flash and came as an Adobe Air package. You recorded a shortish video clip (usually on webcam) and it was published to a scrolling time line. In time, threaded discussions were introduced and many many collaborations happened, friendships and love affairs blossomed and good stuff happened in the real world. It was a strong part of my drive to create Tuttle as a decentralised way of getting these people together offline as well as on-. When I came to travel coast-to-coast in 2010 and 2011 my Seesmic friends (even though the service was now dead) were the ones who pulled out all stops to help me. And although I'd met Phil lots of times in the five years before, we really got to know each other better at SXSWi 2010, we talked and he said something like "oh I get you now" and that was that.

Anyway Seesmic. As you can imagine it was a really expensive service to run. Serving up lots and lots of little bits of video to a global community 24/7 and while any 90% of the community was watching everything the other 10% were probably recording something. And there was no revenue stream except from investors. It eventually followed the pattern that has become familiar on all sorts of what we then called Web 2.0 sites - the founders pivoted in response to pressure from their investors to make money and the thing that was building community was lost, the community was hurt and upset, content was lost, relationships broke down.... And yet some relationships just morphed and moved on. Because we also had twitter and facebook and our blogs and youtube, we all kind of kept in touch - it wasn't as intense and we were disappointed but it was there, it couldn't be killed by the economic pragmatism. And what I was trying to do with Tuttle was to have a meatspace place for those communities to keep meeting up and talking to each other regardless of some startup team and their investors. No matter what happens to the platforms, the community is real and persistent.

How does this match to Steemit? (apart from the spooky spelling similarity?) Well the community is here. It's forming quickly and it's forming stronger bonds than we are aware of. Creative collaborations like the ones we saw around @everlove getting sent to Amsterdam are just like what happened on and around Seesmic. The difference is that this network really is just about the network. The blockchain stuff and decentralization means that it really is ours, it's much harder to pull the plug and sell us out (doesn't mean no-one will try but it is much harder). Loic and his team weren't bad people (quite the opposite) but there came a time when the choice was between the money for the suits and the service for the community and the suits won. Here everything is open-source and the risks and ownership are much more widely spread. If a pivot of the Seesmic kind happened then someone/some people could relatively easily fork in order resurrect this platform and keep the chain going.

I see lots of people hopefully comparing us to FB or Twitter in terms of market cap and/or share price. That's good for morale, but there's a fundamental difference - on FB and Twitter we are the product, our attention is bought and sold - here we are the network, the stronger it gets, the better the content we have here, the richer we get (for all definitions of "rich" you can come up with).

Steem on!