Will porn be Steem's mass adopter?

A strange post for me? Perhaps but, maybe an important discussion for the future. I am not a big NSFW consumer here or anywhere for that matter but, I do enjoy a good fight and porn has been involved in two very large ones before.

The two 'Rumble in the Jungle' events were VHS vs Betamax and HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray. For those of you who are younger than I, VHS won and those of you who are under 12, you should not be here so go to bed but, just in case, Blu-Ray won.

A deciding factor in both fights was the porn industry, a 60 odd Billion dollar industry but, as I see it, it wasn't the money of the industry that held sway, it was the consumer of porn and more importantly, their convenience.

These battles raged among carriers of information, storage media but, those days are gone with cloud computing and the internet speeds of today. How often do you fire up the Blu-ray player to watch a movie? I have never even owned one.

In the case of VHS vs Betamax, Beta was by far the superior however, the porn industry chose VHS meaning that for consumers, they either had to own both systems to watch quality movies and porn or, lower the quality on the movies and still have access to porn. VHS won. This was the same with for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD and porn chose Sony over Microsoft. People didn't want to have to buy two units to satisfy their 'occasional' porn addictions...

These machines however are just carriers of information which are largely not required as streaming from the cloud has become ubiquitous. But, how does the porn industry help Steem?

Once or twice a month I check news.com.au for something from home and I came across this ridiculous article about Travers Benyon having his company Instagram account shut down for inappropriate content. Although I have no interest in the article itself, censorship does interest me a lot these days.. I wonder why.

Well, obviously Steemit has a principle of no censorship on this kind of content other than an auto hide function. Of course, something is going to have to happen to do more with it later though as kids start getting onboarded on various interfaces or, society changes its attitudes to such things. Which is more likely?

Anyway, the same issue is going to come up with competition as did with the two battles mentioned above. Other platforms are going to want mass adoption to attract the Facebook, Instagram crowds which means, censorship of some kind but Steemit so far cares nought for this.

But more importantly is the versatility of STEEM itself through Smart Media Tokens (SMT) which are quite frankly, maybe, potentially and possibly brilliant for this reason.

Just as a Blu-Ray player can play kid's Disney movies, Jerry McGuire or the most depraved fetish porn imaginable, STEEM has the ability to be the machine itself that plays whatever disc (SMTs) the user demands without necessarily requiring a change of machine, just a change of portal.

This versatility of STEEM makes both the platform and the SMTs very attractive for the same reason people bought a VHS instead, convenience. Owning Steem gives access to other options without too much hassle at all. Perhaps one day, it will be possible to order the groceries, pay the Netflix subscription and upvote a cam model all at the same time.

Now, with accounts considered too risque for MSM and getting shout down and demonetized, people will start looking for other alternatives, such as uncensored blockchains and with a million and one interfaces and portals possible to connect to Steem, it seems like a likely home for industries hounded by censorship.

This means that their loyal followers will be pushed into the portals to consume as they wish, uncensored, and they will prefer to do so as easily as possible without being forced to buy several machines.

SMTs can essentially build an ecosystem of content all accessible through the one backbone and if wanted, a user could potentially surf all of their content requirements and pay for it on STEEM.

The porn industry generally finds ways to make their material accessible at all times and STEEM is definitely a potential blockchain to service such a thing. Combine it with the already accepted and somewhat supported NSFW section and it becomes more attractive again considering the competition like Sola are not overly friendly to content THEY deem harmful for the community. When the advertisers start on those platforms so they can really, monetize, they are going to clamp down hard on such material.

Steem also has another massive advantage on top of most other potential platforms and that is that it rewards content directly and could incorporate a whole range of activities that offer versatility and range to the porn industry and any industry that requires online transactions of just about any kind.

The porn industry is a surprisingly shrewd business and is very good at being early adopters of technology that provide them space and options. Perhaps Steem and the blockchain will become their delivery mechanism of choice and if it does, the floodgates will really open and content providers and investors of all kinds will want access to the functionality.

I don't know much of the technical specs for SMTs and that wasn't much about porn at all but I do think that the strengths of STEEM lay in the limitless content it can support without having to bow down to advertisers as, it supports itself.

It is the versatility and scalability of Steem (not Steemit) that will make or break the blockchain, and the SMTs seem to go a long way to ensure versatility of usage. When mass adoption happens, things will move very fast indeed and we will see an enormous change in options available to use Steem and especially, Steem Power. This will be coupled with an enormous change in how people behave and should come with a very healthy bump in price.

Exciting times ahead, even if you aren't big on porn...

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]