STEEM: The Ultimate Paywall Destroyer
A future without paywalls.
Ever get frustrated looking at paywalls? You want something on the Internet, but you'd have to go through a relatively tedious process of filling out forms and typing out credit card details. Paypal makes it easy, it's almost a form of solution that stands between STEEM and those messy paywalls with multiple forms to fill-in.
Paywalls suck. Period.
Meet STEEM, it's the next evolution of Paypal. Paypal is just like a good old buddy. It doesn't really stand in your way as much as a paywall does. But it still stands in the way. STEEM will skip paywalls, giving you direct access to instantly share or send STEEM, and acquire access instead of paying a paywall. No fuss. Just VOTE.
Paywalls may have enduring markets of their own that won't go away anytime soon. But I think most industries will tend to zero paywalls and opt for low-friction microtransactions in the future.
Just VOTE to share / send STEEM as a way of PAYING for access to voting functionalities.
What compelling business cases can be made for such a playing field? Depending on account stakes and voting activities that go around here, per vote payout amounts are dynamic and ranges wildly from user-to-user. Alright so first of all, what can we conceivably use our vote on STEEM for? Let's frame this based on our many different voting operations.
Vote-as-Charity
Are activities on blockchains like STEEM philosophically philanthropic in nature? It all depends on what you think about the concept of charity. I know I'll be stretching it, but I'll go the mile to say that everyone of us actually have different degrees of disorders. It's just the human condition. In that sense, maybe votes can be thought of as continuous micro-charity, sharing STEEM through voting on posts / comments / account wallets. This actually borderlines Voting-as-Support.
But that aside, truly charitable voting besides "accidental" charities like all of us are entirely in the realm of what Steemit does as well, on occasion. Philanthropic organisations may even improve the effectiveness of their funds by tapping into the open, public, and consensus-based qualities of certain blockchains. Vote-as-Charity may also end up being philosophically accurate.
If that happens, companies, sports events, celebrities, etc would start promoting charitable-like blockchains without even asking for sponsorship fees. Don't these guys love being associated with the act of giving back anyway? Better to do it using the transparency of blockchains rather than through opaque transactions. But of course there will be legal problems of anonymity of not knowing where the fund comes from, and not knowing where the funds are going to. In any case, most blockchains may be vehicles for charity in all its forms, depending on how you view it.
Anyway, check out this page out for the philanthropic qualities in blockchain technology: https://www.slideshare.net/cafonline/giving-unchained-could-the-blockchain-transform-charity
Vote-as-Support
We're entrepreneurial creatures and we do all sorts of funny stuff to provide value to others. So in this sense, I like voting for whatever or whoever I think imparted value to me. Value can be found in anything - entertainment, friendship, knowledge, differences-in-opinion, whatever. It's not rocket science.
Support your favourite contents and creators without paywalls! Just vote.
Vote-as-Purchase
There are plenty of innovative possibilities within the realm of this operation. Votes should enable both micro and macro payments, while at the same time payment through voting could be done through the usual mechanism of sharing the reward pool, or some trigger to automatically pay from the wallet just by voting. Purchase can be goods, services, covering both one-off and subscription based payment models. For example:-
Vote to purchase digital goods. System will automatically calculate the voting power required to reward sufficient STEEM for user to acquire said digital goods. They can be any types of files. Anybody can sell content just by receiving votes. So I wonder if STEEM will evolve beyond voting just on posts and comments? Will there ever be account folders (or pinnable posts) which contain links to files that are only accessible to people that vote on it? What about having a way to dynamically adjust voting power to fulfill minimum payment in exchanging of maybe an MP3 file? What about voting and receiving other blockchain tokens? This would then require some swiss-knife wallet that supports many types of tokens.
Vote to purchase ICO tokens. Not sure what would be a low-barrier mechanism to receive STEEM from votes, sending it to a kind of smart contract that participates in ICOs and receive ICO tokens conveniently. In this case, it would be useful to have very high powered votes that share more STEEM from the reward pool just to buy more into the ICOs. But of course, at the cost of sapping an account's voting power by huge amounts. Similarly, usual STEEM voting behaviour enabling participation in ICOs is an extremely great, seamless way to do so. ICO "paywalls" are relatively more complex for the user experience. Voting to purchase ICO tokens is quite out of this world. Thanks to @wingz for this neat idea.
Vote to subscribe to service. To rent smart cars? To subscribe to hedge funds? Many possibilities. I'd imagine programmable smart-contracts to be able to leverage on Steem voting to subscribe to services. This can mean a lot of things from actually buying into services provided by autonomous smart contracts (like trader bots / index fund managers). Autonomous smart contracts can actually be in the form of usual STEEM accounts. For example an account like @cryptofundmanager being actual autonomous smart contracts programmed to track a matrix of its service subscribers by distributing earnings to accounts according to the percentages of STEEM acquired from them during a time-period. Accounts as decentralised smart contract should inspire plenty of useful services.
Vote-as-Polling
@good-karma is working on this voting operation in a variety of ways, including stake-based variants. Such a feature could power many different useful community functions such as crowdfund / vc indexes, general opinion polling, and others.
Express your opinion without paywalls! Just vote.
Vote-for-Consensus
This is voting to affect parametric / code changes on both apps and the STEEM blockchain. Consensus for blockchain changes are by witness-voting DPOS. Consensus for app changes can be in any flavour including prediction markets and such. Sorry if I seem to be confused by both the meaning and possibilities of Voting-as-Consensus.
Make changes without paywalls! Just vote.
Vote-as-Tipping
Such a vote actually sends minimal voting weight and triggers a transfer with a set amount of STEEM from their wallet into target wallet.
Tip like a boss. Just vote!
And more..
Are all of the possibilities in fulfilling voting operations actually a space for developers to start innovating and leveraging on the concept of STEEM voting? Low-friction voting for micro to optionally-macro payments (for stuff with higher price tag) and other voting operations. Some circles call it the pay-will mechanism, which is a step ahead of paywalls. It's somewhat an emphasis on access, not ownership. Maybe a simpler way to frame all of these is Vote-as-Access / Vote-for-Access into products and services.
What do you think about playing to STEEM's strength of low-friction voting / transactions? For one, I think many ventures will evolve beyond paywalls once the paywall model starts to fail massively.
Excellent article - what a wonderful change this technology will bring into the society.
This article has just made 1000s of lightbulbs go up in my head.
I had an inkling about selling digital products, but this platform could be used for kickstarting new projects, charities, and governing any aspect and removing the third party involvement in any transaction and bringing transparency and accountability.
Great Article - thank you so much - keep writing.
Thanks :)
When it comes to kickstarting new projects, i think it's just immediately good to start off with writing out ideas in the open before becoming a proper project. The Kickstarter model is a good way to gauge interest and develop based on community inputs, the steem model of kickstarting ideas since day 1 of dreaming up of the idea and see where it goes based on interest and input is a much better way of doing it.. i think.
I would love to see a "pay with" Steemit Icon beside the paypal icon on every website selling something, anything.
Will resteem in a couple days for maximum exposure. ^^
That'll be cool indeed. Pay with Steem, then the voting button to buy - the system should calculate the strength of vote to meet price tag. If one vote isn't enough, the system will re-vote (or subscribe vote?) for when voting power is sufficiently replenished, voting until there's enough to meet price tag. Or the vote could just be a trigger to send currency from wallet, instead of the usual "payment" from the reward pool. Easy peasy, i wonder if it'll work that way in the future.
hmm. this makes me think of Steem Auctions where the most votes for something gets the item, and the crowd kind of buys it for you. .
Keeps me thinking.
I do wonder how this actually could be implemented. In the backend, website would create post to steem which your account would automatically vote as you click vote while on their website? We already have trails which do part of this job, but how hard would it be to do the rest?
Had to resteem... totally amazing and very complete post.
Thanks a lot @mallorcaman - cook up more Vote-as-(Function) ideas would be awesome!
WoW .. thanks for posting this link in comments !! - ))
GREAT POST !! - ))
The first impression idea that jumps from this, is 'lay-away' .. as in high ticket items .. being purchased incrementally ( say a daily auto-vote) .. for something like a plane ticket .. 3 months in advance ?? - ))
ha ha - )))
i LIKE YOUr VISION !! - ))
STEEM'n'ON !!! - )))
LOVELOVELOVE )))
greb'Z )
ps .. does this ALL FEEL MORE REAL !!! - )))
YOU have made some of this REAL .. in trade ALREADY !!! - )))
.. well D'ONE !!! - )))
CreatinG the FUTURE .. YOU want to LIVE !! - ))
This is interesting. I read in a different article last week that under consideration in the next hard fork would be the ability for a user to pile on more value on a single vote and as a result vote less. So, the current system gives you 200 votes in five days. But a small minnow could add more value to each vote by only voting 40 times (at 500% once every five days). I think that for something like what you propose to work, we should get the option to (if we want) put all our part of the reward pool into one supervote (that would totally deplete our voting strength until it fully replenished over the following five days. Along with that, we should see more info with our vote than just a slider. For example, we should be able to view exactly how much of the reward pool we have available to bestow through votes, and when we move our slider, it should show a monetary amount which that vote will give along with how much it would deplete our voting power (or share of reward pool). Anyway, all those metrics that you kind of have to dig deep for on sites like steemd.com should become readily available to look at in determining the strength of our vote. I hope I'm making sense. But anyway, even if voting just stays the way it is now, I'd like to have more metrics to look at when I cast my vote. I like the idea of thinking of it as a transaction where I get to transact a certain amount of the resources, and in the case of buying something, I'd then have the option to supplement with actual currency that I hold in my wallet.
Thanks for the comprehensive response! Indeed there needs to be the following:-
Yeah this will work great for purchases!
I'm a firm believer that a "vote as payment" system could be huge and work wonderfully. Months ago I remember a developer creating a tool/site which calculated your top supporters based on how much payout their votes had given to your posts. I've been unable to find it recently, but that kind of functionality to track vote value will be at the base of a payment system.
I envision people running 30 or 60 day KickStarter type campaigns, posting regular updates, thereby giving backers multiple voting opportunities. The software would keep track of the value individual backers have brought to the project, determining their rewards level like in a KickStarter campaign now. The same system could be used in an ongoing Patreon type manner as well, or for one off product ordering.
This would drive demand to hold Steem Power. Growing or investing in your account would allow users to effectively participate in these types of activities. It could pretty much be the worlds largest loyalty rewards program!
There is an old gambling saying which states "Whoever invented gambling was smart, whoever invented chips was a genius." Chips divorce the gambler from the concept that they're actually betting real money. Likewise, voting is Steemit's version of chips. It is much more frictionless and mentally easier than making micro payments that actually deduct from your Steem balance.
I've always wondered about this. Gambling is illegal anywhere except for casinos where I come from. I wonder what about this platform? Lol.
This account is barely a month old and is already doing donation campaigns to increase the number of users. It's hard for people to understand why they would get paid over doing stuff that they already are doing for free.
When I try to get people to use Steemit they tend to briefly look at it and decide that their contributions would be out of place, they think their stuff wouldn't be appreciated. To show them wrong I tell them I'm going to borrow their work and post it myself, I let the users know what I am doing, what the purpose is, and so far they haven't disappointed me, I've always managed to gather a little something.
Once my friends see that I've posted their content and I'm getting paid for it they want to claim the rewards and the way to do that is create an account so I can transfer the funds ;)
Borderline genius!
I have so many friends who are writers that are meh about Steemit when I tell them about it. I'm going to follow that idea to the T with works they'll let me post.
Awesome. It's definitely hard to tell what people think about Steemit / Steem in general.. sometimes i speak to new users and it can be confusing lol. I guess we all just need to take a while to get used to what's happening around here..
Would you upload content to steemfiles.com with that model? On the testing version you can pay and in three seconds it confirms the transaction and your download starts. If you want, upload dummy content and download my fake apricot book for one penny's worth of steem backed dollars. Or senf me a contact message. It's all in the name of finding bugs. The test site is at test.steemfiles.com.
As soon I can confirm a number of tests done without failure, I will put this on www.steemfiles.com and work on a new feature on test. Maybe vote for download.
I don't have any good idea about the tech stacks.. tbh i think i'm beginning to get out of touch with the best tech practices..
Pethaps you were trying to reply to another comment. Is that right?
Woops, indeed! I just checked out your site, seems perfect! how long did it take you to cook that up? I think some UI changes and it'll be awesome.. I think there are plenty of us who wouldn't enter passwords or fill in forms on sites they're not familiar with.
I think you're onto something here.. is it possible for steemit posts to embed steemfile links? instead of a link to jump into another website. And also, a zero email solution possible? (In a way i think i half answered you earlier, about not being too sure about tech stacks and how steem apps can be embedded in steemit posts etc, making stuff more seamless.
I had something working months ago and it took me several weeks. Someone said it looked rather old fashioned. I believe he said that because it was. So I listened and modernized the look because it was old fashioned. I had a problem with one of the components and had to create a fall back mechanism in case certain nodes fail.
If it makes people feel uncomfortable I can get rid of email submission or make it optional. Do you think as a content creator people mind?
The login is optional for uploading and downloading but I shouldnt trust it is from you if whoever uploaded it wasnt logged in.
Logins are done via Steem Connect. I dont and cant store your password or keys. Steem Connect tells me your username on steemit and whether you are logged in. I like it that way.
Steem Connect only needs your posting key for authentication and all of its functions.
Yes, user interfaces is always evolving, I think they just hit the right spots for user experience and fluidity.
Check the way they do webpages here - https://www.squarespace.com/
And perhaps something like https://swarm.city/
Somehow someone figured out nice UIs of the future.. http://etherdesign.io/
Perhaps old-fashioned, but I think what you've made has it own charm :)
Yes, SteemConnect is maybe the only way to do it.. not sure on the technicalities. Yea so even effective UI now may be an integral part to user experience. It'll be up to research about emerging designs, i guess..
Resteemed and upvoted due to the great post! I was browsing through your account Kevin and I'm still rather new to the community here, it seems like you're someone experienced with a lot of the ideas and engines behind Steemit. What do you think is going on with the community and what do you predict the future might be? Do you think it's growing as fast as it was 8-9 months ago, or do you think we'll explode pretty soon as more marketing happens?
Thanks for dropping by.. @avilsd. I really have no idea, I've long since hit the mental limit of knowing what's really going on around here. But I see it as a good thing there's really no overarching narrative around here. Keep making content, interact, and build tools and communities.. of course, take your time. It's possible to get burned out because there's just quite a lot going on. I haven't really been checking the numbers as well, but I think the platform has good fundamentals, being a social currency.
Do you ever get worried Kevin? It seems like you have embraced the environment presented here currently. I'm very curious as to see where Steemit will be in a year or two.
Not worried, I subscribe to antifragility and think the platform has this fundamental quality. Trust in self-regulation - everybody has the ability to both post and vote. That's about it.. :)
Also, don't buy into fomo and put too much money. It should always only be about disposable cash. Then there's nothing to worry about.
Thought provoking and informative. Thanky you for the great article. resteemed
Thanks @bilbop - that is much appreciated :)
You are most welcome @kevinwong Vast and comprehensive, your idea begs for traction.
Ergo, resteemed.
Responding to the meme "I thought Mexico was paying for it.. They surely will if precious metals take off in value. Since Mexico has an immense supply still in the ground, they will want to keep non Mexicans out :D