RE: What I had to say on MSP-Waves
Attracting investors and attracting users are VERY different tasks, and possibly at odds.
I could not stay in the chat room, I do NOT like bots being able to vote. I think curation is what will attract users here. If the content is not well curated, no one can find good content and no one feels it is worth the effort to generate good content. So I went to the chat to speak my mind... and people will defend those damn bots to their death. The tech-minded community did adopt steemit early, but MOST of America wants to be able to just go to a site and use it. They do not want to have to learn about bots, how to program, how to code... They want to watch videos, read stories, laugh at memes. If the only way to get established here is to buy votes, get bots, and (as my husband calls it) blow whales, this platform is doomed. It MUST be fairly intuitive to use, or people will not stick around.
The whales who can make or break individual users need dethroned. Sorry, but as you noted, the minnows get beat to shit by getting caught in the middle of a whale fight. The whales have largely delegated their curation to bots, but they cling to the power to destroy and wield it a bit capriciously, from what I have seen. Just a few whales, I should note. But ANY whales that CAN destroy accounts just for lulz.... that is going nowhere good. Having that type of power available to BUY, not earn through producing and curating quality content, will lead to minnows who are afraid to speak out.
And with that, I am swimming back into my hiding hole and hoping no bot-loving whales see what I said to you...
Attracting users and investors are different tasks but not necessarily at odds imo. Users come first, and it is when there are so many users that investors become interested. Although I think I know what you mean. Once these investors become large stakeholders, they may be interested to promote their own products which appears as an ad to the users. When I had first joined I was under the impression that advertising would be downvoted. But only minnows get downvoted here. Investors could deny payouts if they want to use their SP for exposure. But nobody holds investors accountable. Too many people believe that preventing large stake holders from doing whatever they want will discourage investment. What they don't realise is that the ability to prevent other stake holders doing whatever they want is actually steems greatest functionality and is what attracts investors. @dan gave us the tools for this reason, and people refuse to use them, even rejecting other tools he had offered to make this easier such as vote negation.
And this appears to me, with my limited experience, where steemit is failing, or at least stumbling, as evidenced by the very topic you are discussing. Add to that the fact that Steemit is not simple to use, and you eliminate a large sector of users simply because it's too much for them. I know a lot of people who use the heck out of Facebook because it's simple for them, they are not techy AT ALL. They could not use Steemit if they wanted to in the current environment.
I've seen a lot of discouraged users recently too, largely as a result of this same topic. For everyone that speaks up how many are silent?
It appears to me this whole topic is a discussion on how investors are currently making a return on their investment, but it seems like it could be short sighted.
I hope your voice is heard by enough people who are in a position to make a difference.
I truly appreciate your insight. As a newbie, I have a very "short" view, and as a non-tech person my view will never be as clear as some... I did not know tools were offered and refused. I had the (apparently wrong) impression that dan and ned just don't give a shit any more.
I wouldn't say they don't give a shit anymore. They had a baby and got a divorce. At least that's the impression I get from their comments.
My speculation though I could be completely wrong is that @ned and @dan had a similar vision for steem but not the same philosophy. @dan believes in decentralised governance. @ned seems to believe in taking an objective stance and not interfering, despite his huge incentive to steer us in a positive direction.
"They had a baby and got a divorce."
GREAT description...
That is a very good analogy. Perhaps some came to steemit thinking that they could make mega bucks without putting the work. A lot depends on our attitude. I hope this all works out in the end and we can go back to doing what we were doing before all this jealousy crap started.
I used to feel we should try to attract and retain new users, but with the concept morphing into SMTs and communities I am having difficulty picturing advertisers or any other form of large investors coming in and trying to advertise on several platforms across multiple front ends. Just as you can't really advertise on ETH and reach the end users.
So, I really have no idea other than selling SMTs, why the traffic and end-users matter at this point. Let each community try to create an audience. As far as retaining end users to attract Investors, I have given up on that idea. As bad as it sounds with the business model I heard about from SteemFest I see NO reason to try to retain end-users or promote SteemIt.
I am not saying it isn't there... So, if you still see a reason let me in on it.
There is no guarantee that SMT's will take off passed the steem community. From what I hear, there are plans by big media outlets to adopt an SMT, buy what happens when these well known sites decide that all the bots, vote buying and trolling over who got paid what causes them to abandon the reward token?
There are solutions proposed that could prevent these, but they haven't even been experimented with yet. So I'm very skeptical that we're ready for SMT's. In my opinion steem is not yet a good example of a sustainable decentralised social network, which means any SMT could be just as unsustainable.
Aside from that, steem still gains value from all of these 3rd party applications. Personally I think they bring more value than any SMT will. They have the ability to hit specific internet markets, which means steem is no longer "not for everyone". But development costs blood, sweat, tears, time & money. Promotion & marketing basically has to come from investors and users, and as long as people are unsatisfied, they're on strike from promoting the network and those platforms.
Besides, everybody keeps making the assumption that investors are some multi millionaire or advertiser. Some day they might be, but that is probably 5 years down the road like most other social networks. Our investors are US. We're the ones buying steem when we're satisfied that this is sustainable and going to grow. There are far more of us than there is millionaire's with nothing better to do with their money. While we lose users, we lose potential investors. Not indirectly because they attract investors, but directly because all our investors started out as users.
Currently the reward pool is at 700k ish of new Steem generated. I can't see where people who are fighting over a few buck on this platform can sustain that.
Oh, I fear I am being to blunt. Please feel free to add this comment to my newest post if you wish. Reading your post and making my comments inspired a post about it, I am hoping for community discussion on where our focus should be at this point.
Thank you for alerting me to it. ☺️
"and people will defend those damn bots to their death. "
This is a pointless distinction. Unless you have a practical way to stop bots (hint: there is none), then arguing about whether they should exist is a pointless waste of time.