RE: Do the People that get in early on "Steemit" have an advantage and if so is that fair?
Early adopters of all platforms make "easy" money if you consider sifting through the 1000's of opportunities to find the gems "easy". @steemit owns 50% of all STEEM as of this writing and to get that STEEM they had to speculatively build an entirely new blockchain, then rent miners from Amazon. All told over 25 man-months were put into creating Steem and steemit.com. Is that easy? Is it an advantage?
Once Steem and Steemit mature a bit more, Steemit, Inc will be offering all kinds of incentives for new users. Even today new users get "$3.00 of Steem Power" just for signing up.
Everything in life comes down to a risk / reward ratio. Those who get in early have taken the greatest risks and will earn the greatest rewards. Those who get in later take less risk and get less rewards.
Unlike Bitcoin, anyone and everyone will be able to mine STEEM simply by posting and commenting. No one has any advantage over anyone else. Furthermore, the rate at which new STEEM is distributed to content creators and curators remains 10% of market cap each and every year. So even 10 years from now people will be able to get in on Steem simply for producing content that is valued by Steemians.
Like all great profit opportunities, competition drives down margins. Right now there is relatively low competition so very high margins. Eventually the difficulty will rise.
Is it 'fair'? It is as fair as everything else in the free market.
Good points; Thank you!
I have a somewhat related question... I see some posts with 2 votes and no replies with like $50 whereas other posts like this one have actual conversations and are still at $0.00. Why is that? Are early-adopters given more weight in their posts or something? I feel like that would be a little unfair, where people who are early-adopters with more steem-power are able to make exponentially more going forward, while everyone else is making practically nothing for similar/better quality posts. I like Steem so hopefully I'm just missing the point here. Am I?
The initial poster put little thought into his post and he is contributing no new understanding or information or any new viewpoint to me. I therefore replied to his post, but did not vote for him. I did vote for dantheman's reply because it was thoughtful and informative.
I agree that the original post is lousy -- it's not well written or proofread. We should demand better for upvotes. However, if it had been a better looking post, I would certainly have upvoted it because @joelinux's question is a very good one. Many people coming here and seeing Steemit for the first time are asking something similar in their own minds.
Even if you are upvoting Dan, I believe the original poster shares in that; even a careless post can trigger a robust conversation!
Huh, still very confused over here but at least I know that I enjoy using it, even if I have no idea how it works.
I like your attitude!
That $ is determined by the users who vote for the post and how much steem power those voters have. The user that created the post shouldn't make any difference.
Just saw this. Okay that makes a lot more sense then. Thanks!
Ok, to try to understand how this works better, I opened the Rich List and compared those voting for some of the posts on this page to their Vests balance. The two highest $ value posts each only had 3 votes, but were both voted on by an individual with over 3000 million vests. Whereas the original post had more votes (11) but the total Vests of all who voted was less than 600 million Vests. My vote by the way doesn't add any value to a post since I have less than 0.2 million Vests. I checked.
Still, not sure why one of the two highest $ posts is about 50% higher than the other since there is no significant difference in the total Vests held by those voting . Nor is the higher value post significantly older than the lower value reply. Unless replies to posts are counted as less valuable even though they have the same amount of Vests voting for them.
Check out these posts and conversations on how voting works, rewards are calculated and how to maximize your income:
To complete that statement, you can look at the posts I have created and how a few hours of work have yield results for me. Yes, low competition means bigger reward. But these are not guaranteed earning.
I really like the concept, just wish it was a little more user friendly, so I can be more excited to advocate it to my Network of people.