What I Learned When I Introduced A Few 19 Year Olds To STEEM...
As my trip out east comes to a close, I had a chance to sit down with one of my best friends, his son and his girlfriend last night and guess what came up...
STEEM!
I asked them about Instagram and YouTube and then of course.... @Appics and @Dtube became the focal part of the conversation...
I was quite surprised with the responses I got from them when it came to;
- Decentralization
- Ease of use
- Crypto currency in general
In today's brief video, I go over what I learned and some hurdles I believe STEEM needs to get over before we see this age group begin to embrace our blockchain.
It was a fantastic learning experience :)
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS
I think it is all about the herd mentality that we have experienced as society has shifted its focus on the intangible over time as they have been driven to the ease of things rather the the reason of doing so. If communities would start to move towards decentralization solutions, the herd mentality will move as well but it takes influence and action to achieve that.
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i’d love to see it personally. but attracting the herd is gonna be a challenge.
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I agree!(I assume your "herd" interpretation is supposed to picture the hard job of acquiring interest here to Steemit.com for new possible users?)
I attempted to acquire some interest and possible new users to the overall population here on steemit.com, by writing an update inside a public group consisting of 80.000 members on facebook here yesterday,
but have seemingly only gained some interest from 2 people at this point!!!
The herd mentality is what we're seeing here.
I think when they are that young privacy does not seem to be a concern for them yet! This maybe due to the fact they do not think they have any thing to loose.
Teenagers have always want to hang out with each other.
When it comes to teenagers you have to get some of the incrowd then the others will follow.
SteemSavvy is a great place for them to start to learn what Steem is all about.
Have a safe trip home.
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thanks man. ya i sent them a link lol
but that raises a good point. people at that age wanna hang out where their friends are.
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This is why I think it might be fruitful to transplant entire communities over to Steem.
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My experiences haven't been much different. The amount of trust the public has in these centralized services is astounding. But we shouldn't forget that when you're one Steem under your own name, ALL your data is open to the whole world.
Anyway, what brought me here was the money. A friend of mine told me about Steem almost a couple of years ago. I did some posting in 2017, but I really got active in early 2018 and haven't missed a beat since then. I love it here! I get to do what I want and get paid cryptocurrrency for it. I'm not overly concerned about the external price of STEEM, though, because, eventually, it will be figured out how to market this thing to the masses because the blockchain has genuine uses cases. It's most likely gaming and gambling that are going to be the first killer apps. Those are the use cases where decentralization and an open and public ecosystem is actually a decisive advantage.
When you're using the traditional centralized content delivery platforms, you're basically getting raw deal compared to using Steem-powered apps. I've been active on the Internet since 1992 and I can remember the pre-web era quite well. I was active on Usenet news almost the entire 1990's, and, enter Web 2.0, I started blogging. I've written probably thousands, if not tens of thousands blogposts, newsgroup posts, blog comments, Facebook comments and whatnot put together, and I shudder to think about the money I could've made had Steem existed for me to post all that content on. When I talk about Steem to the kind of crowd I usually hang out with who are active on traditional platforms and see the blank looks on their faces, I'm dumbfounded by their lack of grokking it. Seriously, my view of humanity has been altered by my experiences in trying to get people onboard. I mean, I haven't been able to onboard a single individual. I hang out with intelligent and mostly well-informed people, some of whom I have opinions and views that are non-mainstream. For example, one friend of mine I talked to last March, is a bit of an anarchist and always on about copyrights and electronic freedom. Being told about Steem left pretty much a blank stare on his face. I could only wonder what the fuck was going on. Am I in the only thinking person inside the Matrix or something? What the actual fuck? I mean, this guy has been an extremely active content producer online (mainly text) for well over 20 years just like myself. It should be a complete fucking no-brainer for someone like him, a computer scientist, get a Steem account and do his debating and discussing there while earning money.Nothing else changes. Only cryptocurrency, worth real money, starts rolling in. (This guy can code and I think there is no reason to think he could not actually become somebody on Steem in short order.)
Educating people about crypto and blockchain is not such an easy thing to do, I mean in general. I'm finding the account transparency thing is an issue with some people, while transparency is a good thing, some are saying they don't want others to know how much they have in thier account. Which is understandable, there are always pro's and con's.
I get the whole movement about on-boarding and whatnot, but honestly, I don’t see it as a huge problem. When I first heard about Steemit, I went to Google, searched for Steemit, clicked on Steemit.com, and then signed up for an account. Yes, I waited around a week, but for me, the sign up process was really easy. Pick a username, give your email, and that was pretty much it.
I’d say the main difference is that you have to keep track of your keys.
Yes, it does need to get to the point where anyone at any reasonable age can sign up, but this is blockchain and decentralization. It’s a new concept that requires new knowledge. Ww don’t want to be like FB or Twitter so I don’t feel like we need to necessarily copy their ease of onboarding. Oh well, theres always room for improvement though I suppose.
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ya. the issue that i discovered is that the younger people didn’t seem to care about decentralization. so telling someone yeah this is decentralized so you have to wait a week for your account , will get them to not even bother.
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@jongolson, my deepest condolences to you and your family, once again.
Thank you for bringing new people to STEEM Blockchain. I also always try to evangelize STEEM when I meet friends and new people. Yeah, STEEM ecosystem needs some improvements. The process of registration is a bit clumsy. In most cases I do the registration process for my friends. Sometimes I pay for it (by STEEM) in order to register new Steemian immediately...
For me decentralization is very important. I had some issues with banks and financial intermediaries ... So, now I understand how important decentralization is.ost of the young people still haven't encountered any serious problems ... that's why they still don't care about decentralization. But, once something happend to them (and it will happen, it is just a matter of time), they will move to decentralizated ecosystem, apps, services, etc. I also didn't care about decentralization 10-15 years ago...
That's my point of view.
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oh absolutely. i personally am a huge fan of decentralization. after my drama with paypal last year i know how important it is.
thanks man.
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Interesting and eye opening. Thanks for sharing this. So good to see people spreading the word of Steem.
But Yes, it is confusing to get started ,and it took me awhile to understand the mechanics of Steem. Just hard to grasp.
And I can see that stumbling block of not caring if a Company takes their info. and abuses it. Not if that company provides a service like Instagram and FB. People rationalize this as just part of the sacrifice you take on to be able to utilize those services and connect with friends in that manner.
Again, great vlog post Jon :)
right. and when you sign up and agree to their terms you are inviting that kind of practice.
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That's actually correct most of the young generation they are not feeling unsafe in centralised system they don't even care about it they just want to go with their friends so we have to do such kind of things which helps to pull attention of all the teenagers group. So if one will start ither will automatically join it.
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exactly. we need to find out how the masses would be attracted. and once their friends start talking about it they will show up.
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I think we really need a different approach to attract people to Steemit. Banging on about decentralisation means nothing to many, protecting your content is a bit of a double edge sword when we promote uncensorship as an advantage on the blockchain (different things I know, but related), and finally earning on Steemit is pointless when Steem is worth so little.
Kids want to be cool on social media. Steemit and Steem just ain't there yet.
Btw, did you try Steem monsters on them?
yeah. steem monsters is a fantastic option to onboard. caters to a gaming culture for sure. they didn’t seem too interested though, appics was much more intriguing to them.
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