Does Steemit Inc Want to Kill Steemit?!
Lately it seems like Steem the blockchain is doing better than ever. There’s so much activity and the action is so diverse. I see different kinds of blogs, about different topics, and from new people every day.
I love it. Spending time on Steem is like walking through a young and bustling city, growing a little more mature and a little more refined with each new day.
Yet it feels like steemit.com, the website, is more stagnant than ever. There is never any momentum on this damn website. Even when something new and fun happens, like a new design, it feels as though the powers that be are giving it to us more out of obligation than anything.
Like, “the masses are getting impatient? ugh, put somebody on a website redesign this week”
It definitely does not feel like a central hub for an excited and growing community. It feels more like they’re keeping it afloat for now, but hoping it will eventually fade into the sunset.
That’s my new (loose, non-rigorous) theory: Steemit Inc Wants Steemit to Die but not until it can die without taking the blockchain down in the process. They’re looking at a 3 year time horizon, imagining a world where DTube is a true standalone website, where the New York Times and other major publications are monetizing comment sections via SMTs, where Sndbox is a major and internationally known incubator for art and business… and in that world, Steemit may not be necessary.
As it stands, with abysmal search features and inconsistent functionality overall, steemit.com is not much of a recruitment tool for the Steem blockchain.
Perhaps Steemit Inc. would rather keep small players at bay, while they focus on the biggest fish in the media sea. They’re focused 100% on the “New York Times moment,” where the first major media player adopts an SMT. Anything else is small potatoes to them, for better or worse.
I don’t know if I am right and I don’t know if I want to be right or wrong… this post is purely descriptive.
What do you think?
I think you're a bit negative. I would lower the earnings threshold to .01 but other than that steemit.com and the steem blockchain seem pretty functional to me. We might need a data center or something to get Dtube and Dlive working better though.
Ah not trying to be too negative just having some fun thoughts. In reality Steemit is one of the most popular websites in the world, at least in the top 1,300 or so, pretty awesome.
I do wish we had better leadership but maybe I can help fill in. Do you use @dustsweeper?
I don't know. But I what I do know is that Steemit the website is horrible. It is buggy, slow, lacks features that almost all other social media platforms have, has shitty search, and is so poorly designed that it looks several years out of date. Really it is no wonder that so few of the people signed up for accounts actually use the service. They sign up because they are promised money for their posts, but then they find the money isn't as easy to come by as they are led to believe... and the website doesn't work half the time, and none of their friends are here. So they go back to Facebook. It may not pay them, and Zuck may be stealing their personal information, but at least the site actually works well, looks nice, and has everyone they know.
(I dislike FB and would rather see Steemit succeed, but I think we have to be honest here about the problems)
Great insights @dbooster and I agree with you. In terms of user experience, there's a reason people gravitate towards Instagram, FB, etc -- and one is the remarkably consistent uptime, another is the speed of load times.
To be fair - both of those things are super hard on blockchain. You could argue that is the holy grail of blockchain apps right now, to have good and consistent load times. At least that's based on my limited experience so far in this space.
I’m pretty sure that’s not their plan as such, otherwise we would most likely have a
canonicalfeature already for apps, but there’s no doubt that vested as they are (with their ninja-mined amount of Steem) their main interest is in having many more interfaces/apps to the blockchain.This isn’t even such an uncommon method: Steemit is the centralized rollout platform to generate initial traction. Not, and not supposed to be, the Rolls Royce everyone shouts for. Instead... room is left for anyone to build their own vertical (minus the fact that Steemit currently benefits the mega SEO bonus).
At least... they don’t hide where their priorities are. They could say Steemit isn’t among them but that could also hurt the marketcap, which would hurt them most. Celebrating irrelevant vanity numbers is more interesting, yet nobody relevant cares about the large amount of new inactive users, especially not given that [oh so flawed] metric Alexa shows that we have dropped respectably in rank in recent months.
Lots of work ahead yet. If only we could see something happen at least.
Hopefully they are working on the right things... only time will tell.
It is not complete unfounded.
Although the Steem blockchain is built with Steemit in mind, its association with the site could be holding it back from developer interest.
I have argued early on that either the Steem blockchain or Steemit website should adopt a different name to differentiate the site from the blockchain.
But I think they are slowly moving towards that with the new logo change and with Smart Media Tokens, which I suspect it might have been name Steem Media Tokens early on.
You are right in retrospect having it be called "Steemit" might have been a bad idea. It seemed right early on, it was so easy to understand it - reddit on steem! But now it is kinda confusing.
And in their marketing material for SMT, they called a protocol that powers the Steem media token.
So they are trying to say that Steem is just one possible media token on the blockchain protocol.
Theoretically, some can launch another token that has nothing to do with the Steem media token other than that it'll be the accepted currency, to be used for staking for bandwidth etc. Another media platform with their own token, i.e Appics, could become more popular than Steem and at which point that will likely be the accepted currency.
Though from following their discussion on Github, this seems much harder to implement on a technical level because how integrated Steem tokens are.
It seems like they may have strayed away from that old idea in favor of Smart Media Tokens powering everything
Interesting idea about the New York Times - is this how news reporting/ journalism might be funded in the future? How would monetising the comments work? The same process as here? I appreciate your point about the apathy, but I would be pleased to see a new way to finance investigative reporting.
It would work exactly like Steem. The simplest way is to imagine that the New York Times opens a steem account and starts mirroring all their content here. Perhaps users on Steem upvote these because they want to support the NYT, and then the comments get upvotes too just like usual.
In a more sophisticated system, you would be able to give steem upvotes on the new york times website - literally upvoting comments there just like here! Thats the real goal.
There is allot that needs to be fixed / added or modified to make Steemit a top contender in the social media world. It already has the most valuable asset, paying its users. I am optimistic and hopeful that the issues are addressed and Steemit becomes a front runner on the social media landscape.
One of the top issues is .. .signing up should be instant. All other top media outlets allow instant sign ups. We live in an instant world. You want some food .. pick up the phone and order it ... you want to know the answer to a question .. google will tell you the answer quicker then you can ask the question. This leads to impatience and people just simply forgetting about the fact they even signed up to this place.
Yep! I agree with you. Sign ups need to be improved and improved again.
Yeah I feel this. Hoping that as more people come to join, they realize the potential in this platform.
Still unable to get a lot of normies to join due to the lack of insane simplicity. Every other site is just too damn easy that thinking at all ends up being too much for people haha.
Always good to throw ideas like this around whether we believe them or want them to happen. Discussion solves!
The normies are understandably miffed at Steem's awkward user interface, lack of search, and how signups can take weeks to be finalized. lol. I feel like we're at least holding stable (by crypto standards) so hopefully as the experience improves, the lurkers and consumers will emerge.