Diversity of thought and use

One of the things that I really like about Steem but hardly use is that it is actually a multimedia delivery system that rolls many platforms into one. Yeah, it doesn't do most of it well but that will hopefully change in time as more users come into the space to support the diversity of content available.

I think that one of the major factors that will attract and keep users of digital media here in the future is that no one is constrained to a certain medium at either the contributor or consumer level. While social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube have their purposes and often leverage each other, a contributor has to be able to manage all of them simultaneously, as does a consumer.

On a platform like YouTube a follower list is dependent, so a user must build new following groups across applications and every new one, needs to be leveraged to keep up. Eventually, this becomes untenable. On Steem however, a follower list follows across applications and can potentially be exported automatically for SMTs too, which would be a wise move from the applications to build a potential user base quickly.

This is the same for consumers too as on Steem, ones wallet is not application dependent either and travels to all Steem applications. With SMTs, this will supposedly still be possible as Steem Power gives access to some SMT uses too, but that is currently hearsay until they are created for realsies.

But regardless, it is quite cool that there are so many ways to interact with the Steem blockchain and they just keep growing. It is also cool that one's community and friends are able to interact also without having to put too much effort into it. This makes future distribution and population of applications much easier as for the most part, not much extra needs to be done except to sign in with a posting key and get using it. This is more powerful than a Facebook or Google sign-in because not only does it gain application use access, it gives various economic access also.

This ease of sign-in will eventually mean that applications can enjoy a faster ramping up of usage if they are able to develop a decent use case and compelling enough experience for the user base. We can see how hungry people are for entertainment content already as every new game release is met with a a lot of hype, no matter how poor the game actually is )Anyone still playing Drugwars?). But eventually, there will be decent games created on the blockchain (at least leveraging the economic token layer) that hold people's attention with more attraction than a chance of Steem.

But, there is more to it than gaming, there is the blog, vlog, image, travel, gambling, bank, education... well, this is a content delivery blockchain which means, it really doesn't give a crap what goes on it and hardly cares what form it takes. I think this is going to be where the imaginative and creative types are really going to be empowered as it will be a place where they are much less bound by the interface design or incentive to stay restricted to one medium.

This is something that I have to learn to do too because I tend to get stuck in the writing framework as that is where I am the most comfortable but, I am pretty sure that given the time, I could do a little more. Time is something I don't have much of at the moment however so learning how to vlog will have to wait.

What I am looking forward to in the future is to have a Steem-powered internet where there are so many places we are able to take our audiences as well as our distributive wallets to spread uptake even further. We are not there yet, but to us it is kind of like being in the car while travelling fast, the sense of speed and distance traveled is hard to gauge. If we were all on the outside watching it go past however, we would understand just how fast things are moving.

Things are always changing. On Steem too.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]