Over the last few weeks I've been reading a lot of input and commentary about the current state of Steem. Being caught in my own little filter bubble on Steem based on who I follow it maybe is a little biased, but I'm trying to summarize my own thoughts here. It kinda ended up being part of "my vision" for Steem as introduced by @justineh. Another part is a summary of my throughts related to posts by @whatsup, @theycallmedan, @trafalgar, @taskmaster4450, @tarazkp, @jongolson, @meno and many others who I don't read regularly so I wouldn't necessarily be able to quote them for what they've written.

Steem is still great

There's so much complaint about how much Steem is failing and that MEOS (or whatever its name will be, more on that below) will crush Steem so hard, that we should be leaving the sinking ship and that Steemit, Inc. sucks and whatever else. I'm trying to stay realistic, but there's a few fundamental aspects we should keep in mind:

1. Communities matter more than money
2. Existing and working products matter more than marketing
3. Focus matters more than a large workforce

Steem has all of the above. The community is really dedicated and if some of the veterans stay here and keep engaging, this will be an important advantage over anything new that's coming.

Blockchains have inherent first-mover disadvantages, though:
The underlying protocols are difficult to upgrade because that requires consensus by a lot of stakeholders. Obviously, it's hard to make decisions that everybody can agree with; but somehow the network needs to be changed and iterated over. I strongly advocate for making decisions quickly and be prepared to revert them if they prove not to work. This of course doesn't apply to very big, hard-to-revert changes that would strongly affect stakes or token distribution or security-related stuff. But anything else we could be changing at a rapid pace while there aren't any huge businesses depending on certain aspects.

An example:
I myself am not a huge fan of the EIP, but hey, if the community wants it, let's give it a try. Only be prepared to revert to 75/25 if it doesn't prove a substantial improval within 3 months. (It won't)

In any case, Steem still is the best blockchain when it comes to publishing and rewarding content and providing censorship resistance for written content. This could be such a huge thing if only we would focus on building actual, targeted content platforms. (Again, more on that below)

This is even more of an inherent advantage as Steemians have the ideal place to talk about Steem: It's Steem! The ecosystem feeds itself! No other underlying blockchain principle has that much of a "eat your own dogfood" effect. Let's take a moment to appreciate that.

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appreciating for a moment

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Ok, let's move on.

Rewards structures matter less than we believe

IMO the discussions about reward structures are necessary, but they generally overestimate the impact of a change to the average user. I'm specifically talking about "average user" because these are the people we need to open Steem up for if we want it to succeed in the long run.

Let's break it down:
Users who create content in the traditional web can (mostly) monetize it by displaying ads. Content that isn't very successful won't be able to make any money because there are some thresholds for the minimum number of views. Still, millions of people produce heaps of content every day, hour, minute, be it videos, posts, tweets, pics, podcasts or whatever. With no expectation of rewards! Crazy it is.

So why are people still doing this? Because it's mostly enough to get seen, and to get recognized by the community. This is typically done using votes, shares / retweets and comments. Over more than a decade, these have been the mechanics powering Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube or Reddit.

Now, how does that change if we add a financial component to that? If users can support content creators monetarily? It started off with abovementioned ads, but nowadays there is bigger number of successful models like donations (as in Patreon or Twitch) or affiliate stuff that's being used by a lot of influencers.

So, the more visible people on the web already have ways of monetizing their content. Now the big question:

Does Steem want to compete with those or focus on something else?

Right now, Steem isn't focusing on anything (except "rewarding content" very broadly). Everybody can make some money based on how well they are able to exploit the system, but content is rarely seen outside of its own ecosystem and - even worse - also inside of it. Steemit was built as a combination of Medium and Reddit, but with the focus on short-term rewards and the lack of proper frontends, it can't be successful as any one of them. Most other frontends for Steem have been more or less resembling Steemit. The only noticeable exception here is @steemhunt, which is the best example for a Steem-based dApp I've seen so far.

Why am I bringing this up? Because in the entire discussion about the future of Steem, the EIP, and many other proposals we're emphasizing the changes on the rewards structure too much and the products that are necessary to have a successful network too little.

Curation is hard

I think we've been making it a bit too easy for ourselves to believe that curation can be solved by offering rewards for votes of stuff that will turn out to be popular in hindsight. All of the big social platforms are basically aiming at solving that and, guess what, are still struggling. All of Google is a huge curation machine. This stuff is hard, and bluntly displaying pieces of content, no matter what kind of content it is, sorted by their rewards, is probably one of the worst ideas. That way not only do people get a lot of rewards, they also get seen more. The entire curation "industry" on Steem has only been trying to mitigate that, be it through manual or automated curation. Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate all the curation initiatives like @steem-ua, @curie, @archdruid, PAL and everyone else who puts in a lot of work to try and discover good content. But it's still hard, and hardly anything can make it to trending because of manual curation. Instead, bid bots have made it impossible to make it to trending without using them; and making some extra money on top.

Bid bots, however, are not the actual problem. They will always be there. Bots are inherent to blockchain, they are part of the Steem ecosystem. We need to accept this. But wouldn't it be easy to filter bid bot votes out when calcuating the trending section? Wouldn't it be super easy to just use a different metric? Why doesn't every frontend for Steem have its own trending or feed mechanics? This could be a distuingishing factor. Nobody needs to use that API.

This is why I think any changes to the curation rewards won't matter. People should be upvoting stuff they like and downvote stuff they don't. If they like a piece of content, they will typically be motivated to upvote and share it. We could actually get rid of curation rewards altogether - I know, that's probably a pretty unpopular opinion. Will that be exploitable? Sure, every system is. We can't build a system that cannot be gamed. It's more a matter of how easy it is to game it, and what the potential rewards are for doing so. If we as a community keep promoting shit content that is being produced just to make some money, the network will not be interesting to new users. As a result, STEEM price will crash even further and all of our stakes (and the stakes of the people producing respective content) will be devalued. Who is interested in that? Nobody.

So what should be the principles upon which reward structures are constructed?

We should specifically incentivize behavior that is beneficial long-term.

Humans have a lot of energy doing short-term stuff, but it's hard for them to focus on the long-term. I won't dig deeper into that, everybody knows what I'm talking about when it comes to sports, alcohol, drugs or anything else that may not have a visible short-term effect.

In that regard, it would probably make sense to widen the reward period again. It could be as much as a year, where users would get the rewards (or parts of them) for what they have produced only much later, thereby having to focus on the value of their content because it affects their own rewards. Yes, this is too easy, but we can discuss more elaborated options some other time.

What we actually need

In any case, the reward structures are just one part of the whole picture. The other is, as mentioned, the number of products we can use. Even though I appreciate @partiko and @steempeak, we need more specific content platforms. @dtube or @vimm are a good start, but video is difficult because it's hard to make immutable (and therefore censorship-resistant) and it's rather expensive to host and therefore make a viable (meaning sustainable) business. I would go as far a claiming that any Steem-based business can only be sustainable if their business model doesn't depend on getting a share of the reward pool. Taking shares of rewards however can be used to bridge the gap between bootstrapping the business and finally becoming profitable based on other mechanics.

We need more of these businesses. @steemba may be a nice try, but this needs a more professional and more structured approach. It's easy to start with text-based media, so how about having

• Stitter, a Steem-based Twitter
• Steedium (you see where this is going)
• Steddit

and the like, all utilizing the fact that users can't be banned or silenced on-chain. How cool would it be if I could just choose to post stuff on Medium (ehem, Steedium) and get some rewards if people liked it? (again, I don't think the actual amount matters so much to most people, but it's a form of appreciation)

Onboarding has to be super-easy (I hear there's something in the making for this) and keeping keys and interacting with dApps needs to be seamless. Once we've got that and many people have received some rewards (even if they're small), they may be inclined to spend some of their liquid rewards on the games accepting Steem / SBD as currency, like @drugwars or @nextcolony. That way, users don't need to actually cash out their rewards but they can just get some in-game stuff in exchange for tokens they've received "for free". Once they see what they can do using STEEM, they might want to purchase some more (who knows?), and finally the price of STEEM might go up again.

Until then, all of us need to stop worrying about the price. Price is a function of utility, so if there's enough stuff you can do with STEEM, price will be just fine outside of speculative bubbles.

The (M)EOS announcement and SPUD2

Following a post by @streetstyle (here) I've also prepared for SPUD2:

I've never bought as much STEEM at once, but the timing coincided with the significant dip, so I dedicated a bit more fiat to the crypto market than I had planned (also bought other tokens). Also, I for my part want to show my appreciation and support for Steem (the blockchain, not so much STEEM, the currency) by more than doubling my SP.

It's not a coincidence that SPUD2 is happening on the same day Block.one are making their big show and unvealing "something big" regarding EOS. Block.one spent ~25m USD to buy EOS RAM, so we should expect something really big. Most observers think it's finally gonna be the release of MEOS (though probably under a different name), a social network built on EOS. However, we have to take a few things into consideration:

• Based on the structure of their ICO, Block.one are restricted when it comes to running infrastructure or building actual products on top of EOS
• Whatever it is they'll present (probably multiple things), these products won't have millions of users from day one (no product does)
• However that's built (maybe it's not even a product, but more of a 2nd layer version of Steem on top of EOS), it will still have its flaws and biases

Also, it's very likely that multiple similar solutions can happily coexist, even if one is much bigger than the other. I'm not at all scared for the future of Steem just because of MEOS. If we're lucky it could even mean that more users get on blockchain-based services, so there will be some space left for Steem. After all, even EOS as a whole hasn't managed to "kill" Ethereum as had been postulated. It's still a matter of communities and the products..

I'll be watching the Block.one announcement tomorrow closely, but at the same time I'll be powering up a bunch of STEEM and basically betting on a bright future of both EOS and our beloved Steem.

So:

Stop complaining, start building, and power up!