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RE: MARKETING STEEM # 1 : Do we need a Steem PR service?
Steem needs marketing. No one disputes that.
I think I do. If people show up here and have a bad experience then whatever brought them here did more harm than good. Right now my expectation is that the typical new person will have a negative experience with the chain, so I think addressing the problems in the ecosystem should be a higher priority than marketing.
Unfortunately that risk of the initial bad experience has been the case on Steem for as long as I can remember.
Improving the onboarding and initial experience can definitely be improved but if we have to wait for it to be perfect we may never get to do any marketing of Steem.
I think we have to work with what we have, rather than what we would like to have.
Personally I think this isn't a "not perfect" situation, it's an "actually bad" situation. And I'm not focused especially on the onboarding and initial experience but thinking about the overall experience, I think most people trying to use the chain in the current environment will conclude that the value proposition isn't there. If a restaurant couldn't get food out of the kitchen you'd tell them that it would be counterproductive to try to bring more people to sit at the tables.
What would you say are the most important changes needed at the moment to make Steem more attractive to users and investors?
Reduce the influence of bot voting, move toward trying to realize the original value proposition of the chain (rewarding good content) and away from being a de facto high-APR DeFi chain where the returns have no relationship to any real value. Work against spam and other exploitative uses of the chain. In the long run, all cryptos are probably a dead end if they stay disconnected from actual goods and services and are primarily just for financial speculation, so getting more goods and services that can be traded for Steem/SBDs would be good, but that's really hard to do.
All very good aims. The only problem is how do we achieve them ?!
Managing the transition from where we are to where we might want to be would be very challenging.
The biggest challenge would be maintaining the value of STEEM.
I'm not sure. Part of the problem is that some of the biggest stakeholders have a vested interest in continuing the bot-voting status quo since that's their business model. Unless and until some big players agree that it's a problem it's hard to see how the ecosystem as a whole can change course.
From a different direction, maybe one idea would be to have another active SPS/DAO proposal that pays out to some trustworthy person who then uses those funds to bankroll not-yet-established developers to do some smaller, contained projects to help build developer capacity. That's using the coin to pay for services (software development) and potentially seeds some content (progress reports, developers talking shop with each other on-chain, etc.). IMO right now what limited development is happening is too duplicative (how many frontends do we need?) and big-project-focused (so there are fewer discrete "new things" for people to talk about or be excited about).