Showcase Sunday: Patrons and the many niches to come

I was reminded of a couple of posts on patrons that I have written in the past, and chose this one from 8 months ago for #showcase-sunday as it looks at content creation, suport, SMTs and communities. The reason the idea of patrons came up is because of the conversation of auto-voters on my posts being blind supporters. While I can't speak for all, I am quite sure that most of the larger supporters have indeed read, or read my work and the reason they support is that they believe that there is value to do so.

One of the massive advantages of Steem over centralized platforms is that consumers can earn on their consumption, rather than have that same value extracted by middlemen platform owners like YouTube and Facebook. Some people don't seem to like the idea of the readers getting paid for their work, but don't seem to mind Facebook getting paid for their work and giving nothing back.

I see it as a win-win scenario for me and the reader and voter, and I hope that I add value to holders of Steem who have chosen to support me, to be my patrons. Part of investing into a business requires protection and advancement of the investment and I believe that some of the auto voters have an understanding of this and based on track record, I have attracted support. And, for those who believe it is blind support, this is the blockchain and you can likely find that most of them have actually commented on my work or mentioned me in theirs over the years.

A future of commuities and SMTs can mean that rather than people who have stake investment in Steem, people can have stake investment in content itself, and use that as the driver of value. What I found interesting on the Tribe tokens is that many people who have talked about content support, didn't actually invest into the areas they like and instead just used them as another place to earn. But, this is the way of the world and it doesn't change on Steem.

Most people aren't investors, but everyone wants them gains.

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Patrons and the many niches to come

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At lunch today I think I started to get through to one of my colleagues about the potential of Blockchain and cryptocurrencies in a way that he understood. He is a bit of a hipster of kind and we were talking about gaming and then he was talking about how there is some kind of renaissance taking place with the likes of Patreon, where people sponsor the content they like. He noted that unlike the past where there was one or two large patrons of an artist, now there can be thousands. Finally.

What he is talking about is one of the potentials of Steem and blockchains in general, as I believe we are moving quickly toward a growing economy of paid hobbies from thousands of micro-niche areas as people's tastes splinter. I was watching a standup routine by Chris Rock the other night and he made a joke about how he got addicted to porn and his tastes quickly narrowed to wanting an Asian girl, with a big butt that speaks Spanish in order to satisfy him.

This is what happens when there is a great deal of choice and availability to choose, extreme refinement. "Refined tastes" is often used as a broadcast of quality, but it is actually based on narrow preferences. Filters. At the moment, this is what we are doing with digital media as there is such a volume that we filter (let algorithms filter) so that we exclude what we aren't interested in, and include what we are.

The more refined our preferences become the more scarce the availability, and this means that we assign them a higher value as it better suits our mold. It is a type of "fetishism" where we search to satisfy our desires. This means that we are willing to pay to have our preferences met and while there might not be a mainstream audience for it, the narrow set of fetishists can be very active, engaged and willing to part with their hard-earned value, or tokens as the case may be.

What this means is that communities can develop with very narrow interests and can create economies of their own where they reward the best among them. The best as judged by a group of enthusiasts. This means that those who are considered good contributors by the community will be rewarded as such.

One of the problems on Steem is that for the most part, those doing the judging are not enthusiasts of what they are actually judging. Even if we look at the idea of, "content valuable to Steem", there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what actually adds value to Steem, even among those who live and breathe Steem and crypto. At the the moment, there is far too much interest variation and contribution range to really get a good picture of the environment as it all comes down to preference and, most people's preferences aren't well refined for all content.

This also sets up a problem where content that is rewarded by some who recognize it as valuable and may have some skills in their evaluation, might not be considered valuable at all by another set of users who have no interest in that genre and would rather filter it out. They can't though for the most part because this is Steem and instead all they see is "over-rewarded" content with value that would be better utilized on what they themselves consider valuable.

This is a stake-based system however and the stake takes precedence. If someone bought 10 million Steem and decided to exclusively reward poetry about death written in soliloquy, there is nothing to stop them. What this would do however is create a massive drive of posts of poetry about death written in soliloquy. We see this behavior on dApps all of the time where once a monetary incentive is available for a narrow preference, people will flood to it.

This is always the way, but even more so now as people fight for rewards out of a limited pool that is allocated by much less than those who want it. However, once SMTs enter into the attention race, there is a chance that the communities start to niche-up and becomes much more dedicated to their core genre and sensitive enough to reward what they consider supporting of it. The niche group becomes the pool of patrons who support some content over others based on what the group considers quality or valuable.

This is Proof-of-Brain and Wisdom-of-the-Crowd as participants of the group are experienced and knowledgeable enough to be discerning of what is considered valuable. A heavy metal enthusiast might not be the best ear to judge the quality of an orchestra playing Brahms, and vice versa. This means that the niche communities become sub-cultures with their own set of rules and SMTs the currency they use as indicators of value of participation within the community.

Going back to my colleague at lunch, the only way to have these niche groups congregate at a great enough volume is through online communities where potentially thousands of like-preferenced minds can gather. And, the only way for them to be able to reward each other significantly is through tokenization. These communities already exist in forms like Reddit where they allocate up and down votes to each other, but once value is introduced, they become more discerning again and start to self-regulate with knowledge-backed sensitivity.

One of the massive benefits of Steem in this arena is that the transactions on the Steem blockchain are kept free by the allocation of the value pool to witnesses. This means that no matter how large or small a community is, they are going to be able to distribute their tokens across the network to empower the best of their niche users to keep creating, keep innovating, keep inspiring.

The world is fast changing and the competition is going to get very intense as the centralized and organized players like Facebook come into the arena to convince the masses that they are the market leader. They are not, we are. We the consumers, we the contributors, we the people who demand the supply. There should be no way that in the long-run, the top-heavy middlemen takers can offer more value to the community than the community can itself because, they extract from the community for value and have a large number of people and investors to support. Lowering their earnings by providing value to users will cost them investors and force structural change in their business models.

As my colleague noted today though, the winners will be the ones who are able to simplify the process for the masses and that is something that requires all of the details to be taken care of, to be robust and scalable - no matter how many users. Once there are a large number of people on a platform, change is near impossible without blowback.

As I see it, we are entering into a renaissance where individual skills will again be valuable - the era of the contributor and the consumer who earns according to their preferences. The skills themselves don't have to be mainstream, they just need to be connected to people who value them enough to be part of a community of consumers. We have a long way to go on Steem, in the industry and across all the economies of the world. Don't narrow your preferences too much yet.

Stay broad, stay agile, stay active.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]