What is Steemit?
One of the things Steemians love doing most is to define what Steemit is. As the Steem blockchain keeps evolving, often that also results in people poorly understanding the role of Steemit in the current Steem ecosystem.
Generally most Steemians will attempt to define Steemit as “social media” or “social network”, which makes sense, especially when looking at the Steem(it) FAQ:
What is steemit.com?
Steemit has redefined social media by building a living, breathing, and growing social economy - a community where users are rewarded for sharing their voice. It's a new kind of attention economy.
Above is the first point in the Steem(it) FAQ, but the FAQ quickly goes on and elaborates more:
How does Steemit work?
Steemit.com is one of the many websites (including Busy.org, DTube, and Utopian.io) that are powered by the Steem blockchain and STEEM cryptocurrency. ...
Steemit’s Role in the Steem Ecosystem
It is important to understand where Steemit belongs in the Steem story. Currently being the largest site, and also benefitting all SEO bonus, Steemit is not the end goal nor the main goal of Steem.
Steemit is the centralized initial roll-out platform to bring traction to the Steem blockchain, and to inspire the creation of more apps interfacing with the Steem blockchain.
While the latter may seem weird to many - why would any site want there to be competition - it is a normal thing in a decentralized world. There should not be one site only, definitely not a centralized one, operating on the blockchain.
Additionally, with SMTs coming there will be ever more interfaces and the vast amount of interfaces (apps, SMTs) on the Steem blockchain may eventually result in STEEM becoming a limited supply token and thus increasing (hopefully) in token value.
Steemit Inc., the company building and operating the Steemit.com website, as well as the main blockchain architects and developers currently, are rather clear in this.
If steemit.com stays the only gateway to the steem blockchain, we failed at our job.
—@sneak, CTO Steemit Inc. at SteemFest².
The main focus of Steemit Inc. Is to develop a protocol, not one site.
We disencourage [our] people to use it, we are building a protocol, a decentralized platform. We need to make sure that the Steem blockchain is powering thousands of websites, not just 5.
— @sneak, CTO Steemit Inc. at SteemFest².
Steemit is the Everything Bucket
At the time of writing, the Steem blockchain is still in an early stage and much new development will be released over the next few months. First of all there is HF20, and in the first half of next year the SMT platform will be released. Additionally, the release of HiveMind and later also Communities is still expected too.
Busy.org homepage
Until then Steemit is, and will continue to be, the “everything bucket” interface/gateway to the Steem blockchain. This means that Steemit displays every post, also posts submitted to the Steem blockchain via other SteemApps like Busy.org and SteemPeak. Both are also apps displaying every post submitted to the Steem blockchain.
Steemit itself has no (obvious) intention to be anything else currently. Steemit definitely doesn’t aspire to be the kitchen sink feature bucket, complete with both fridges and also the microwave thrown in. That is also backed by the words of @sneak.
People who want the site to function better or have more features or anything will have to build their own interface to the Steem blockchain. Steemit is not supposed to be like other sites and that’s a good thing.
The Steem blockchain already hosts several “content verticals”, SteemApps which display only content submitted through their interface. Currently most of those interfaces have a specific content - or media type - focus.
The most known are:
- DLive: live streaming platform
- dTube: decentralized video hosting
- dsound: decentralized sound platform
- Steemhunt: product enthusiasts
- Musing: decentralized Q&A
- Steepshot: Instagram alike photo sharing platform
- Tasteem: Restaurant review platform
With Communities and SMTs still coming, the proliferation of specific content types, especially like Steemhunt and Tasteem already do, will continue. It is also expected that media organizations may join the Steem blockchain. Many bloggers may also bring their blog to the Steem blockchain, thanks to SteemPress, the WordPress plugin to post to the Steem blockchain.
In a rather near future many people will actively contribute to the Steem blockchain yet even not visit the Steemit website because they came for a SMT and the SMT may have its own signup and even Steem wallet. Others may use only mobile apps, apps not released by Steemit Inc.
This post was initially published on theSteemobserver and cross-posted with SteemPress.
Steemit will gather dust at some point in the future. Like MySpace there will be some users left who are keeping the connection with their old-skool communities. But many of us will move to other dApps. As a photographer Steemit doesn't work for me, and Steepshot is okay, but a really great photo dApp will be developed. As a writer Steemit is okay, but Steempeak is way more awesome, but what about a real essay platform that lets you create magazine style presentations? Where you can drop blocks in a wysiwyg editor that either display text or images?
All those dApps will attract users and the whole Steemit vibe of 'we only appreciate high-quality long form content' will be forgotten, since there will be whales on 'image only' dApps and maybe even on Pinterest dApps. It will make no sense to downvote content that is being rewarded in other dApps and only coincidentally showing on Steemit.
Anyway, just some thoughts that wandered through my mind after reading your post.
(I'm still not sure what Steemit is :P)
Excellent observations. I hope my two next (not Steemhunt) posts will provide your “thoughts” further ammunition.
I think it is a great evolution btw. And exactly confirms what I said in one of my earliest comments. But that’s another post again.
Thanks for your comment, much appreciated @soyrosa.
Thanks for your reply,
I agree, it's a great revolution, and I hope people start to see that. Every individual having 'success' on this blockchain is another supporter and ambassador for all of us. Every dApp built on the blockchain can extrapolate that effect. I'm excited for the future and believe with time a lot of negativity (and 'meta writing' ;-)) will vanish.
Looking forward to my ammunition ;-)
Meta echo cambers, one of my favorite terms.Oh wait... you didn’t actually say that. :|
:') LOL, I'm not a native speaker, so I love the input and might use it from now on when writing about this topic :D
FIrst thing to do is to write off-Steem about Steem.
I’ve actually had that plan for a while. But there wasn’t much happening then. Now it seems we may reach volume level to have sufficient for at least weekly content, content geared towards tech news readers rather than just another internal kitchen.
This post is actually a rewrite for that audience. The original post is linked in the article too.
It's an extremely positive thing for Steem that other services are growing on the platform, as far too many see Steem blockchain only as something to run Steemit. With good luck, we'll have plenty of Steem users who have no contact to Steemit and will live their lives happily.
Not that we would be unhappy on Steemit either. We can be though. Steemit hasn't been improving much though and quite many other services have gone far beyond in terms of pleasure to use.
Looking forward for SMTs though. They can be a real gamechanger OR a complete flop which goes mostly unnoticed.
“Steemit will soon become intolerable”, working title for an upcoming post.
There will be a lot of $hit Media Tokens but already right now there’s some teams who may actually have a model which can contribute to $TEEM looking forward. Let’s hope that will cascade to more because the reward pool alone will not be sufficient if SMTs succeed.
Great post - I think it's important that folk appreciate that steemit is a test bed or proof of concept as you point out. This is not 'it'!
As you say, I suspect that many will be using the steem blockchain without even knowing it once smt's are in full flow. And this seems right, as most don't think about how the Internet 'works' - it just does its thing in the background. That will be a sign of success.
This.
I recall that several years ago (maybe even a decade ago) a European poll showed that a majority of people thought that Google was an app.
That was around the time that Chrome started to gather traction, and Android wasnt thing yet, so that answer was still invalid. Google was still a search engine and had only just started its acquisition and expansion drive to behemoth size.
More recently, especially in development nations, many people think of Facebook as the internet. That helped by cooperations with telcos offering free mobile Facebook (but no outgoing link opens).
This is an exceptionally well written, clarifying post. I completely concur with everything you said. It is accurate to say better days lie ahead. I hope everyone gets it!
Things are only going to get worse. At least ‘on Steemit’. :D
Hehe...depends on where one is looking, my days seem brighter :D