Steem Biggest Challenge in 2019: Are we ready to see applications like @partiko leave here?
I want everyone to think back to what it felt like when Dlive posted that it was leaving the Steem blockchain. It certainly felt like a kick in the gut. Of course, after a bit of investigation, it was realized that team never had any desire to remain on Steem. They were funded by another blockchain and basically used Steem to garner support.
@partiko is one of the more impressive applications on the Steem blockchain. They really have a plan that is capturing some attention and their ideas can lead to growth. Their latest was rescuing 50K NSFW blogs that Tumblr banned due to a change in policy. According to a press release. that was 40 TB of data that Partiko saved.
The reason I bring all this up is because it points to a much larger question that I feel is going to be the biggest challenge for the Steem blockchain in 2019. Technical problems can be overcome. Throw enough coders at it and there is a good chance a solution will be found. The difficulty I am referring to deals with the most immovable object on planet Earth: the mindset of people.
Partiko's decisions to save those blogs was warmly met by the Steem community. That is a potential of 50K people joining Steem. Naturally, there are a large number of those blogs which are probably dead. Even if it is 10%, 5K active people joining the Steem blockchain would be a nice boost.
This team made a business decision. They are laying out money to house all this data. I am sure they feel there is an opportunity to make their application more popular. However, it also can benefit Steem.
Here is where the difficulty comes in.
Our happy adult content lover is thrilled his/her blog was saved. Partiko provides an outlet to keep producing it. As a bonus, one can earn this thing called Steem which has some value. While not the main reason for posting, it is an added bonus. So, the blog posting starts to take place.
Suddenly, our newbie is met with this.
or this:
Welcome to Steem, we are glad you are here you damn plagarist. Then for good measure, the account is on the blacklist, one that many applications will use to blacklist from their applications.
How many complaints do you think Partiko is going to get before they get frustrated with it? Would this cause them to think about moving their operations elsewhere?
Bear in mind, I am not saying they would leave. In fact, Partiko stated they have the ability to direct those posts elsewhere. They simply could do that. But is that not counter to what we want on here? Do we not want applications like this directing their traffic to Steem?
For most application developers, this is a business. They are spending time and money to bring their creations to fruition. After that, they are going to spend additional resources trying to make it popular.
A few weeks ago I wrote an article for which I took some heat. It centered around the idea that we need to drop this idea about "quality". There were a number of people who felt I was completely off base. My main point is that Steem is not a blogging blockchain. Yet, I had one person write that Steem was formed to be a blogging blockchain only.
When I was on @aggroed's show a couple weeks ago, he summed it up best. Steem is a blockchain who's first application centered around blogging. That does not mean the blockchain remained that way.
The entire "quality" debate is ironic since Steemit was supposed to be modeled after Reddit. In fact, in the White Paper, that is the site mentioned. Reddit is nothing more than a linking site with a bit of original content sprinkled in. That enterprise is presently worth about $1.8 billion.
There are a couples area that have received attention of late. The first is the fact that the Steem user base is not growing at an astronomical rate. We are adding a few hundred accounts a day. Obviously, there are a number of reasons for this but the bottom line is most on here want this blockchain to go mainstream.
The second is the discussion of how Steem needs a lot more developers. We simply do not have enough on this blockchain. People are programming on Ehtereum and EOS yet are not being drawn to Steem.
I used Partiko as an example because it fits both these discussions. They are looking to bring users to Steem and are developing on here. They are laying out money to do things that will help grow the Steem ecosystem.
And we risk the potential of driving their users and the developers away.
My view is Steem is going to have a real issue if it promotes the idea to developers to build whatever you want and then their users start getting hit because they do not attain a certain criteria. Word will spread quickly throughout the industry.
As an aside, if you think this is off base, I can tell you I talked with a couple of developers who expressed their frustration at this. One even mentioned that he knows a couple of developers who chose not to come to Steem for this reason.
Naturally, the idea of having a blockchain that is spammed full of ads is equally unappealing. So we are confronted with another challenge that we need to balance.
Steemians are need to decide what they want. If mainstream adoption is the goal, then we better look at how we operate and the message we are promoting. In my view, we are doing a good job of shooting ourselves in the foot. Wanting the number of users and developers to grow is not going to happen if they are attacked and excluded.
If, on the other hand, we want Steem to be a niche blockchain, then we best get comfortable with a drop in the rankings. Niche markets can be very successful. We only need to look at MySpace to realize that. It is nowhere near the size of Facebook yet it is still going strong. Blogging is a successful aspect of Google's business although it only occupies a miniscule part of the whole.
In my mind, this is going to be the biggest challenge of 2019 on the Steem blockchain. And yes I am aware that communities would solve a great many of these problems but it is obvious we are not getting that anytime soon. Hence, this is what is in front of us.
What are your thoughts?
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Two bad things about porn:
Most business'es that care about there reputation will never use Steem if it becomes tied to porn. The market for porn is much smaller than the market and exposure even one large business would bring.
Huge legal risks for anyone not 100% anonymous due to child porn and human trafficking. Forcing steem to become more like dash = less people and most importantly less business'es operating on the block chain.
They should do away with NSFW in my OP. Let some other coin have those headaches.
There are nsfw content on the blockchain.
This post makes it sound like @partiko salvaged some gold mine. They are correct on principle, but not necessarily what will drive the traffic.
In fact, it sounds like Basic Attention Token holding donations on your behave without telling you.
You raise very good questions. It seems like the direction of this Blockchain is undecided at the moment.
Do we welcome and accept apps like DLike or Share2Steem... Or do we reject them and smack every post coming from them as being Plagiarism?
This can't only be a blogging platform. We need meme's, porn, video and apps.
Posted using Partiko Android
The attacks should indeed stop. "Quality post" is so difficult to define and I believe less and less people care. Let us have fun and forget about the adult content, 1 photo posts and what have you.
Don’t care what they post as long as they don’t pretend it’s theirs and bid the hell out of it.
I also agree, that quality contents is vague and it acts a barrier for mass adoption, devs in their, steem dapps can find a way to exclude what they think as “unquality” content tru AI, and tags, and others, but the mainstream content in the condenser, should be free from “quality filters” and bots that act quality controller to me, seems already annoying.
The devs can tame this bots, find some “win-win” solution for both parties.
There could be content segregation or something but not banning or blocking directly.
Again, there should be a free flow of content, no censorship, just be a “medium” of content streaming.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Quality is important. If new users immediately get flagged for plagiarism there are two possible reasons:
a) they are plagiators. Then they should just f** off and not come to steem
b) the filters/classifiers are wrong and should (will be if users report that) be fixed
If i know correctly then partiko developer have left airbnb job to spend full time on Steem and showxase his talent.
No doubt, too much fame and name and getting proper support may push him to lookout for other platform.
Posted using Partiko Android
Thank you for this needed REALITY CHECK @taskmaster4450. FFS, seeing those 'blacklist' comments makes me really angry!
What the fuck is that shit. Cheetah and SteemCleaners need to get their act together.
Oh bugger, I didn't even think about cheetah and steemcleaners registering the rescued Tumblr blogs as copied. I wonder if they can specifically call off the dogs, as it were, for any Tumblr repeats when Partiko is scheduled to get all those blogs online here? Can they NOT scan a certain site, for a certain time period? I don't really know how their systems work.