Reducing friction for critical mass adoption of steemit

in #steem8 years ago (edited)

Promoting community discussion and a 5K STEEM development incentive

Before a user invests time and energy into a social platform, they have to know they will receive value in return. The conundrum that every social platform faces is that the greatest value is only realized when there is a critical mass of individuals on the platform.

Cost Curve - economics of social media

Cost Curve - economics of social media

The steemit core value proposition for content producers and curators is compelling - get paid, for what you currently do for free.

This provides steemit users with a unique benefit of participation, but with any new social platform that might like to attract existing communities, there is likely to be significant friction to critical mass community adoption.

“I don’t want to be one of the first on the new platform, there won’t
be anyone else there to participate and respond to or upvote my posts, plus I
don't want to have to maintain my posts in two platforms
until everyone else comes”

This is the purpose of this post, to encourage discussion of thoughts and ideas on how to potentially overcome or minimize this challenge - how to quickly achieve that tipping point of a self sustaining majority community participation, putting steemit on the path to critical mass adoption?

Here are my thoughts on a couple of ideas, related to reddit community adoption that I would like to open up for input and discussion.

What if users could estimate the SBD/SP value of their previous posts and curation?

I imagine it’s difficult for anyone to estimate the steemit value of his or her posted content and curation before investing their time to use the platform.

“If I go to all this effort to switch/learn/use this new platform, is
it going to be worth it, am I likely to be rewarded 50c or $50? Is it worth it
to change?”

Until there is a reasonable history of steemit user rewards, this lack of information that contributes to a new users decision to adopt, may be a point of friction.

If we we’re to develop a tool to simulate the expected steemit payouts for reddit’s top users or a set of popular subreddits active users over a particular time period, publishing this information could help mitigate this potential point of friction and will likely help accelerate adoption.

Top reddit karma users from karmawhores.net

Top reddit karma users from karmawhores.net

For the modeling to work, assumptions would have to made that recognize the reddit's system of curation does not necessarily map to steemit's:

  • Relative SP could be simulated using reddit karma
  • Curation would map to reddit up voting

The results of this modeling could be published and somehow targeted to the subreddit or users to highlight the value of their posts.

Probably not allowed, but a bot that posted in the thread “This post is estimated to have earned earn $1.45 on steemit” – would be a powerful message.

What if, when they visited steemit, the users content was already there?

For an active user in an existing community to adopt a new platform requires a significant leap-of-faith commitment and investment of time - but not if their content and community is already there!

“I don’t want to be the first on this new platform, there won’t be
anyone else there to respond/ upvote my posts”

By enabling a user to opt-in to cross posting, we could remove a lot of the friction and potential objections for adopting steemit:

  • The user only has to post once and it appears on both platforms.
  • They wouldn’t feel that time invested in the new platform will be wasted if they decide not to continue
  • The users potential audience is always stemmit + reddit
  • They get the best of both worlds until steemit reaches critical mass community adoption

This could be achieved using some form of cross-posting bot authorized to post on behalf of the user. Possibly on steemit signup or later as an option to link your existing reddit account.

Thread context could be kept by enabling the bot to cross-post any user content not currently on the steemit / reddit system and could also allow non-yet-steemit reddit users to claim ownership of their steemit account/posts and possibly associated SBDs/SP.

Practically, reddit has extensive API support including a comprehensive python wrapper PRAW which I imagine could be leveraged by tools developed by our own community such as @xeroc’s Piston and python-steemlib.

Although, I’ve specifically discussed ideas around attracting reddit’s userbase, I imagine the general ideas may be applied to other existing community forums.

Adoption Accelerator

If the resulting community input and discussion sees merit in developing any of these ideas or results in new ideas to remove friction and aid rapid adoption of steemit for existing communities, I'd like to help support it.

I will happily donate 5,000 STEEM to help accelerate development of a community driven initiative.

If your interested in using the accelerator to help realise any of the ideas discussed,please post your proposal in the root of this thread along with your credentials and plan to see the idea come to life.

I'll organise some sort of community vote, two weeks from now (Sun 15th May) to decide which idea / proposal should receive the funds.

Sort:  

Let me be the first one to apply.
You probably know the initiative already:
https://steemit.com/steem/@pharesim/publishing-scientific-papers-on-steem

We're still in the team-building and planning phase, and although those who work on it with me so far would be willing to wait a while until they get a reward, I would prefer being able to show them some appreciation as soon as possible.
I don't have any liquid Steem to offer them, and the witness payouts take a while to reach a significant amount.

There will also be more costs coming at us soon when we start to handle the legal stuff.

The whole project will be a non-profit, and we will start raising funds from the public as soon as we can. You could be the first donator on a long list to follow ;-)

Thanks for taking the time to put your initiative forward, I'll make sure it's in the voting list.

I'm convinced that focusing to achieve critical-mass adoption for one community at a time is the right approach - it does not have to be a large community, but with a quorum of community participants, adoption will be self-sustaining.

Have you thought yet about what strategies you might employ with Scichain to remove friction to achieve that tipping point level of adoption?

We will have to ring a lot of doorbells. Mostly universities, which will be the first choice to get support and funding anyway. Our target audience is there, and we will approach key figures personally. As soon as we have convinced some of them it should be easy to get covered by relevant media outlets.

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To Vote for Proposal 1 - Publishing scientific papers on Steem by @pharesim - Up-Vote This Post

Dan said this was a bad idea ... well at least when I did it as an example for someone. I'm sure it's a great idea now that someone else is doing it though. =b

Sheesh ... I didn't even click on the vote button :(. Apparently, I did.

yeah yeah, that's what they all say. ;)

To Vote for Proposal 2 - A Mutual Aid Society Based on Scholarships to Allow for Continuing Education by @complexring - Up-Vote This Post

To Vote for Proposal 3 - Development of the Reddit - Steemit Cross-Post Bot by @xeroc - Up-Vote This Post

@fbdan

Since you will earn more than 5k steem from this post, I think you should offer all rewards earned to the cause.

OK, sure, I'll also donate all the SBD (I'll keep the illiquid SP) that this post earns in rewards to boosting the adoption accelerator initiative. Others who contribute to this thread may like to consider contributing your SBD to further boost the initiative.

An important point in regard to the incentive is that if relevant, any code developed should be published under a suitable open source licence, allowing others in the community to contribute to and build upon any code.

STEEM POWER!

I think having dollar value for each post changes the dynamic of how people react to it. It they where called something like points, people would have different opinion of the what the value of a post is. The points could still represent a 1:! value to dollars, but having dollars signs everywhere makes the whole project look more like a casino store than a social network.

They could be "Steemits" with no monetary value and I wouldn't care. My pleasure sensors just like being stroked often by the mouse buttons of others. The problem is, I tend to just type what I really think/feel instead of appeasing the mouse buttons of others and it hinders my pleasure sensors ability to gratify itself often enough ... and that's why teh internets invented Brazzers. =b

I think all three projects are worth being realized. Can't we just share? :D

We could have a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prize. 60% 1st. 30% 2nd. 10% 3rd. Or something like that.

Seems like that'll be on the winner to decide.
I declare that 50% would be given to the other projects if I would win. I really want to see that reddit bot happening.

I will also apply with two entries. See links for more details.

  1. STEEMSCHOLARSHIPS
  2. STEEMGRANTS

These can be seen as separate entries or even a combined one.

I have the domain names and am working on finding web developers to provide a nice front end solution for these.

Thanks to everyone supporting our project, and of course to @au1nethyb1 for making this possible!

Like stated in another reply in this thread, I think that all three projects are very useful for steem, and could use some bootstrapping. Thus, I created a private channel on slack to discuss the handling of the funds with @complexring and @xeroc

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