Steemit Introduction Playbook
What is your playbook for introducing Steemit?
Feel free to respond as your own post and link in reply.
Here is mine:
I casually bring up blogging as a topic, and that natural leads me to share my blog with others. I don't say anything else.
Naturally, they see a dollar sign and get curious.
You get paid for these posts?
Yes, paid in terms of digital tokens, which can be sold on an exchange.
Common questions leading out from here.
Where does the money come from?
Stage 1 explanation: It's essentially funded by the cryptocurrency.
Stage 2 explanation: Digital tokens are minted into existence, and then paid out to the witnesses (miners) and to the participants based on community votes. You can get paid for writing blog posts, commenting on other posts, and even a little from upvoting content.
Why does it have value?
Consider this post about drivers of demand. Essentially it boils down to social media advertising and hinges on adoption.
Does it cost money?
No, it is free to sign up and free to use.
Ponzi?
See above about it being free.
Do you actually get money, or is it this play money?
Cashing out involves sending your earned tokens to an exchange and selling for your local currency. In the US, one can directly go to Bittrex. I use Bittrex to convert Steem to either BTC/ETH, send to coinbase and use GDAX to sell for USD. Many variations of this. But remember the point about future growth.
Motivating Participation
The next set of questions concern a more troublesome topic, which is how to motivate participation. I don't really have a good answer to this.
For bloggers or content creators
If they already like to blog, then this should be a no brainer: Wouldn't you like to be rewarded for your work? As it’s early, it's not difficult to get exposure. And on top of that, in the event that we reach critical mass, the token value will explode.
Can I post content I own that have been published to other sites before?
Yes, in fact as long as you aren't plagiarizing this is accepted practice. There's a plagiarism bot that comments on suspected plagiarists, but you can take steps to prove you own the content.
What are the common barriers you see when trying to convince a blogger to try Steemit out?
For social media participants
What about for general social media participants?
The platform has value even for those that are not bloggers. Comments are also rewarded, and upvoting is as well. And simple short microblogged posts can have their place too, though don't expect those to get as much attention / rewards. The community rewards effort for the most part (breaks down in the whale regime).
Spend a little time discovering more about the platform and the community, and you can be rewarded also, and maybe even join!
This doesn't seem so effective. Possibly it's just the network effect missing.
Why should I bother? Nobody is there!
Just be patient. Now that Bitcoin is in the mainstream eye, it will start to turn to others. Steemit is a first mover in the social media space, and that will naturally be getting attention.
For cryptocurrency enthusiasts
For people like me that are just cryptocurrency enthusiasts?
Go the route of “come for the money, stay for the community”. Or "just throw money at it" (less desirable for adoption).
What are the properties of the cryptocurrency?
Distributed proof of stake. Users vote on witnesses to mine blocks, and they are rewarded for securing the network. You'll hear the words proof of brain bring thrown around but that has less to do with the mechanism of achieving consensus for the blockchain, and more to do about influencing how the rewards are distributed.
Also user issued Smart Media Tokens are coming, allowing others to issue tokens behaving in a similar way (community upvote driven) and bootstrapped with Steem, similar to ERC20 tokens of ethereum. This will be a big deal, many applications are already planning to make use of these when launched (think variants of YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc).
Not really sure what other questions people ask here.
Anyway, what barriers do you all see when convincing someone to join?
I usually focus on the fact that there are virtually zero trolls and almost everyone is very kind and respectful because you want people to upvote your posts! Even when people disagree they are generally respectful about it and it is much more refreshing than the usual hatred shown on most of the internet. Plus the posts/comments are usually very high quality.
That's actually a good point. Bad quality comments are quite swiftly dealt with. I seem to have left out this as a reason to bring people in, so thank you for reminding me about that.
This should be required reading for the main stream news media.
I've definitely had a lot of trouble talking about it with people- it's just got such a higher learning curve than most social media networks. This seems like a pretty decent method, though.
Good post for all those Steem newbies mate. You should make a tutorial on how to Cash out Steem to Paypal. I never did that so far and I would like to see how that is done by a person that I trust.
Yes, I am stealing your explanations next time I get asked about Steemit! In the new year, I'm sure people will be interested to hear, I made x amount for just the hour it took or writing a 20-minute poem, I'm sure it will raise a few questions then BAM I will use your killer explanation. :)
I find any are kind of adverse to the idea of steemit because they fear its some kind of scam
I Have talked about it and had a few friends join recently but this post gives some greta ideas on how to lead the conversation and how to respond to some of the common questions so thanks kindly for that
This is excellent advice / guidelines / starting ideas for those wanting to do get involved and not knowing where to start.
Thanks for it!
What I've found most difficult is getting people once joined, to get to the point of understanding much of what you cover in the post, I mean i remember the feeling.
One thing is reading about it, other is making the first posts, see them go mostly ignored, try different things.
Most people joins and acts like they were twitter stars. Dropping content and expecting to get the promised 400 $ votes ;)
If more people joined informed the way you do, steemit growth and adoption would explode.
Ah yes, getting discouraged by low payout. That is also tricky because we also want to emphasize that this is not a get rich quick thing and still requires effort.
One interesting thing is that if a group of people had a bunch of money they wanted to test out they could probably start their own circle jerk. Wouldn't be worth much unless they were willing to put a lot of money in but I guess would still help adoption. I know we don't like that behavior but I guess it will diversify the existing circle jerking behavior haha....
It really depends on the person I'm trying to convince. Most people I've told so far are either techies or creative types. I usually alude to the amount of white noise on some of the major social networks and try to explain the creating value/equity by providing quality content and feedback thang. Also that you can learn about a lot of exciting technologies that are coming and take in your "News" in a fresh way.
The point about white noise here being that steemit has the potential to filter that out?
Getting news in a fresh way is not because of the platform itself but the people right? Also means when the white noise comes things might get a bit interesting.
Yeah it has the potential to filter it out but it's also by benefit of having far less people around at the moment so it's still pretty easy to find the good stuff and set bars as to what level of content is adequate.
I've definitely learned a lot from what people post here and talking to them in the various discord chats and what not. At the moment at least it seems like most people are still trying to work together. Let's only take the best parts of the old internet and commit them to the blockchain!
@eonwarped payed 0.71 SBD to @minnowbooster to buy a stealth upvote.
transaction-id 959cf55ca7a6d86cc2b97ce7ac738581091777a5
@stealthgoat