What about STEEM's utility value as an ATTENTION TOKEN??
I have been catching up with the recent changes and I'm excited to see how it will all play out in time. However, I wanted to point out one aspect of this platform I have heard very little about since I have been on Steem: attention value.
The value of attention
Social media companies today get their value mostly from two things: selling our attention and selling our data. Attention has value and if a way to use STEEM to gain people's attention is implemented on the front ends (communities), it will give STEEM utility value, which will be redistributed to users holding and earning STEEM.
Right now, there isn't much demand for buying STEEM, apart from it being a bandwidth allocation token, resource distribution token through voting and speculating on future value. There is potential for so much more when you factor in the core business model of incumbent social media platforms.
I believe STEEM will be able to gain and retain value if we worked on the demand side of the economic equation. Adding utility does that.
Businesses, entrepreneurs, nonprofits; anyone with a message to send to the audience of a community will be able to buy STEEM simply for the value they get in return. In the form of attention, which may lead to more sales, clients or supporters.
That's what attracted me to the Steem blockchain in the first place: the potential to monetize attention through cryptocurrency, in a transparent and verifiably fair way.
Potential implementation
I'm not sure if this is part of the communities spec (I'll check and suggest if it's not), but it would make sense to design around ideas to use STEEM or SMTs in communities as attention tokens as well. So that there are ways to spend these tokens in exchange for a slot on a community's homepage for example. There are several ways to implement these and I'll go into a few below:
Featured posts (time-based)
- Spend tokens to get your post featured for a period of time
- Could be a timeslot based system, where you bid for 1 hour slots or 1 day slots, or whatever
- Could be bid based, where people outbid each other to get into a slot.
- Part or all of the spent tokens could be distributed to community owners, admins, mods, members; or just burnt, or a combination of the two
Sponsored polls/discussions
- Spend tokens to get a poll in the sponsored section
- Bid based, sorted by amount
- Options for token economics can be decided upon by each community: burn or redistribute
Any thoughts on these ideas?
I do not understand what you mean.
Not anyone can buy steem. Those who can are not here to write, those who are here to write... a big group tries to make an income because they have nothing, the other part is trying to get richer by curating not investing (or writing).
The value of attention?
Why didn't you invest to be noticed?
Is it worth it? Has Steem any value at all or does it loose trust daily?
If I pay to be seen does that mean I am a great writer because I shop up in trending 🤔
Posted using Partiko Android
Good questions. It's not about the trending page. These ideas cannot be implemented without the hivemind/communities feature being live.
In the "communities" context, there will be trending/hot pages that reflect what the community members think is valuable. What I suggest adds limited space or time within the community space, for a fee. It doesn't take away the natural progression of good content to prominence, based on the community members' subjective voting. It simply monetizes the collective attention of that community if it agrees to show "native ads."
The people who can buy STEEM will have a reason to do so (native ads, so to speak). The people who write to get an income will earn a token that has more market value and will be incentivized to improve their work/gain more followers. The people curating will have to maintain the communities' quality and keep people involved, so that the attention value stays.
In the end, it will be about which community has people in it, exchanging ideas, and whose userbase is also attractive to people who want to buy ads.
Might sound great for the big communities but I doubt it will work for the little ones. The members are already closer and upvote eachother. The big and famous ones are not very close, to my experience, with their members. So these members might invest to be seen (since most are not, not even receive an answer) ...
Are steemians willing to click on that self promoting ad 🤔
I doubt a curator (the big ones) will ever vote on a small fish that promotes itself.
It is worth trying/testing.
Thanks for your respond I appreciate it.
I wish you a great day 💕
P.s. it would be great if a community could put great content of a member in the spotlights too. Where should sich an ad be found?
Posted using Partiko Android
Thanks for your feedback. You raised some valuable points.
To answer your last question:
I think there will probably be communities that do that, to highlight exceptional content; as part of how that particular community works. We'll see how it plays out.
👍
~Smartsteem Curation Team
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