Quo vadis Steem?

Source: Pixabay

A lot of blocks containing comments on hard fork 20 and its aftermath have been hashed already, but still I want to add mine on this topic as well. The last couple of weeks have been very turbulent for Steem: first the blockchain halted for a couple of hours, then the popular live-streaming platform Dlive announced that it's leaving Steem and finally HF20 happend, which made some significant changes to how resources are allocated, effectively keeping out most of its users from doing anything for a couple of days. Now that some time has passed and everything is working again, I think it is a good time to take a look at everything that has happened recently and what the future might hold for Steem.

Dlive

Dlive is a live-streaming platform, similar to Twitch, but as the name suggests it is not a centralised service like Twitch, but rather a decentralised one, tied to the blockchain. Well, that heavily depends on how you define decentralised. Many people here on Steem saw that it as the poster boy of DApps on Steem since it was easy to use and quite fast and it was quite a popular "DApp". As @meno pointed out, there were some serious red flags regarding Dlive, that we Steemians missed or just ignored, because Dlive starts with a "d". The biggest one is probably when the Steem blockchain halted, Dlive still continued working! But also their centralised architecture should have raised some concerns. While video live-streaming is possible in a decentralised environment like ipfs, it is still very much a proof-of-concept and far from being used in production. Even though the number for streams on Dlive is by no means comparable with Twitch, I don't think that a truly decentralised approach could have handled its traffic and would soon get in the way of Dlive's desire to grow. Apparently Dlive tried this fully decentralised approach in the beginning, but it failed to deliver a good user experience.

One reason the CEO of Dlive mentioned for moving away from Steem is, that with Lino (their new blockchain) there is no reason for making a new post for every stream and its corresponding 7 days payout window. That's a point that I personally think is really hindering Steem's capability to be a platform for DApps. The Steem blockchain is build in such a way that it fits quite naturally for blogging or related things, but IMHO very clumsy when it comes to doing something else. This might change in the future, but for now I see this as being a major drawback and limitation of Steem. Steem Inc wrote a post about this not too long ago, where they stated the motivation behind an application specific blockchain and its advantages. While this article certainly makes some good points, I still disagree with the notion that this narrow focus is a blessing when it comes to creating DApps. I think developing a specific technology out of a general one is much easier than the other way around. Sure you can outsource things to second-layer solutions, but in my opinion that's not to right way to go, especially since a lot of those second-layer solutions will address similar things, things missing or lacking in the base platform.

Steemians were rightfully pissed when the read the news of Dlive moving away, just look at the comments of the announcement. The backlash was so bad, that Dlive's CEO had to write a second farewell post, explaining the situation, in this post he also finally disclosed his relation with the team behind Dlive's new how, Lino. Better late than never, but it still leaves a bad aftertaste, namely that Dlive on Steem was just done in order to get funding and get access to its user base. Also, the timing just before HF20 was in my opinion not a coincidence, since one of the issues, account creation of DApps, was solved with HF20. Of course Dlive is not obliged to stick with Steem and they can use any technology they deem to be the best for their application, but I think this stunt highly damaged their reputation and I'm not sure how many of the users they acquired on Steem are actually willing to follow them to Lino. As for us on Steem: @dtube has also live-streaming and @vimm seems to be a good alternative to Dlive.

HF20

After 19 successful hard forks, Steem's blockchain recently got hard forked for the 20th time, it was actually the first in over a year and also the first one I experienced as user. 19 hard forks is actually quite a lot for a blockchain, but the last one being over a year ago showed that Steem reached a certain level of maturity. I don't know how the previous hard forks went, but this one was quite chaotic. I think the biggest change for existing users was the new resource credit system, but the problem was that exactly this system caused Steem being not usable for most people after the hard fork was done. Steem Inc saw this issues coming, but I think that they were still surprised by how big their actual impact was. This updated was for sure needed, but the update process has a lot of room for improvement, locking out most of the users for a day or more isn't really the way to go. After the update we were in the ironic situation, that Steem Inc called the update a success (they changed the title of their post afterwards to "complete", but you can still see the original title in the URL) even though the blockchain was basically not useable. Again the Steemians were [not very pleased with this](After the update we were in the ironic situation, that Steem Inc called the update a success (they changed the title of their post afterwards to "complete", but you can still see the original title in the URL) even though the blockchain was basically not useable. Again the ).

I understand that doing an update on this scale is never easy and a lot of issues are popping up on the way, but for the next hard fork I hope that the transition will be much smoother. One lesson that we all learned is that Steem isn't as decentralised and especially as fault tolerant as we hoped it is and that unlike other blockchains it could be stopped easier than we might think (sure, technically the blockchain was running after the update, but a blockchain with only a very few users actually being able to use it is practically down).

One thing that I noticed now, is that IMHO there is less activity on my feed than there was before. I can't say if this is a result of HF20, because the price of Steem is rather low at the moment or simply because of the holidays are over. If it is really because of HF20 then it could mean that the new RC system makes people think twice before they are doing an action on the blockchain, which is not the worst thing that could have happened.

What will the future hold for Steem?

That's a tricky question. Soon it will be one year that I joined Steem and even though my activity on the blockchain reduced quite a bit from back then to now (mostly because I have a lot of other things to do and my free time is rather limited) I still check what's new here almost daily (something I can't really say from Facebook: if I look at Facebook once a week it's already a lot). But still Steem has a long way to go. @steemstem launched their own front end and it's a really cool project that definitely benefits Steem a lot. Science journalism needs to improve urgently and this is a big step in the right direction, I'd love to see Steem becoming one of the top outlets for science news.

One issue that isn't really addressed much (in my opinion) is that discovery of interesting content is still rather difficult. You can follow people of whom you think that they are producing good content, but discovering whom to follow isn't that easy at all. I'm thinking of a feature where you can subscribe to certain tags and get new post in that category also delivered to your feed (or probably to a different feed). Sure, right now you can directly look at the tags, but that's IMHO rather clunky. I'm a bit wondering why no front end or browser extensions has a similar feature yet.

Right now Steem has the first mover advantage, but this only works for a limited amount of time. It is quite possible that a new blockchain based social media service will launch and maybe overtake Steem sooner than we think. Steem is a great platform, but it is far from perfect. Bitcoin has already been dubbed "the MySpace of cryptocurrencies", honestly I'm afraid that also Steem could become the MySpace of blockchain based social media. @dan already dropped quite some hints that block.one is working on "Steem 2.0" respectively a social media platform on #eos. If (or at this point the question is rather when) they released it, it has the potential to be huge (in as huge as Facebook), especially if you read his recent thoughts on universal resource inheritance and think about what a combination of this with a social media platform could bring to the table.