Steem is the future of social media.

My point of making this statement is that previously we have no idea that just by blogging about our daily life, ranting about some topics or taking some great photos with some captions can gain us money. I remembered using Friendster during my teenage time and after that Facebook rose to dominate as the main social media platform. None of the platforms pay us for posting contents. So, this makes me think about the question: Why is Steem paying us for our content?

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First of all, we need to look into how the social media evolve. Social media in essence, is about passing the message to others.

Medium	Description
Passing of mouth	At the very start of human civilization, we pass messages, news through word of mouth. Hence, the dispersion rate is very slow and it is hardly wide spread.
Writing or drawing on papers and other mediums	Then, people learned to write and draw. They documented history, knowledge and news, passing down through generations.
Printing on papers and other mediums	This is when printing technology started when woodblock printing was introduced before the 220 A.D. Then, the technology slowly evolved into today’s printer which is more efficient and smart. Printing had led to revolution, like the widespread of Christianity when print press was made available, bringing down the cost of producing bible and the time.
Telephone	Fast forward into 1870s when telephone was first introduced by Graham Bell, this had led to a new revolution on how message can be pass among people. This had connected people cross continents and also helped the global economy to thrive further.
Television	Leaping to the late 1900s, television started to make its presence in every households worldwide. This had made message to be passed through animated visual, rather than just static words and images, or plain voice.
Computer and mobile phones	The next revolution started when computers and mobiles phones came into play. Messages are created faster and easier to transfer. The internet was introduced around the same period as computers. Thus, this had led to a quantum leap for the news media to thrive.
Social media platform	After around 5 decades of development, social media platform rose and people started to share information through blogging and making posts like on Bloggers and Friendster. Then comes Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Tumblr and others social media platform that are now giant social media companies that focus on collecting data from its users. The penetration of social media platform to the world population is around 50% whereby half of the world population access the internet.
The new form of social media	With the rise of blockchain technology, new concept had been introduced for social media. Steem related social media platform like @steemit, @utopian-io, @busy.org, @esteemapp, @steepshot, @dtube and more are gaining more users. With the impending introduction of SMT, this may impact the existing social media platform as well. However, we cannot predict what is the future but we know definitely that there will be disruption and the war between social media platform fighting for attention.

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From this chronology, we can observe from two perspectives.

The change of role

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Before the advent of the internet, content producers are very much exclusive and rare. They hold the power to feed the public whatever ‘messages’ (in this case, news) they think is appropriate. Thus, small and less impact news within the town or village will not make it into the social media. However, things change when people get to access the internet. The sharing of the message will only need a few clicks. Therefore, there is a rise of social media platform like Blogger and Friendster (which I had tried and used before). After that, there came Facebook dominating and I was stuck on that platform as well. Now, everyone can be content creators. Sometimes, even the major news media also used some contents created by the public. Moreover, we also have Influencer on every social media platform like Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and etc. They are just like the news media that features their own messages to the followers (audiences). So, from here we can see that the news media industry had been severely disrupted and opportunities are open to everyone who can gain the most attention.

The change of value chain

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People used to pay for getting information, like buying newspapers, magazines, channels subscription and others. When social media platforms were introduced, people can access different media without fees! They even can produce their own contents and share between people. Everything is free and users can also utilize the traction of attention to do advertising for business. Since then, the value chain had changed. Thus, we can see a lot of old news media industry is failing and shrinking. However, there is a catch. The social media platform gives free infrastructure for a reason, which is to form a Big Data library for all its users and utilize that for business purposes in the near future. Hence, we can say that the concept of free is not really real but we pay our future ‘freedom’ for the free access of the infrastructure. Now, we have this newly introduced Steem pegged social media platform.

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Steem is a blockchain-based rewards platform for publishers to monetize content and grow the community.

Rather than providing free platform infrastructure for the users to publish their contents, the platform also rewards the users! This is getting interesting as we can see other industries new platforms are doing this as well, giving some sort of rewards and benefits for using their platforms, like UBER, Grab, Airbnb, Alibaba, JD and more (Google, Facebook have less desire to pay its users, than just providing free services). The idea of freedom has given birth to monopolization of the industry.

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Then, I came across the writing by @anyx with the title of The Double Spending Problem on Steemit. The article discussed the reward system for any creation of content (or product).

In my opinion, the simplest form of business is the transaction, like system barter where one create products to sell and one pays with any form of value to buy. In this case, most of the time, once the specific product is sold, the seller (or the content creator) should not be able to get the second payment from other buyers. However, I would like to point out that in some other cases there may be possibilities to duplicate the product and maximize the profit like franchising and mass produce products (ranging from physical to even virtual products). Nonetheless, I do agree that some products cannot be duplicated like currency. These both products are of different nature.

So in a way, I agreed on the idea of not getting the double reward for the same thing you are rewarded before.

However, ideas are hard to quantify or judge as for whether it is a total plagiarism or it is a work that might want to refer back to what had been produced before. Here are some examples that people had worked on top of their works and continue to publish:

1. Portfolio – the design portfolio may need to be updated time to time but there are contents that stay the same as it is a proof of how the idea grows, relates or evolves.

2. Books– I would like to highlight the book by Robert Kiyosaki, I read 3 of his books and most of the time, he is repeating his idea of financial literacy and the methodology. However, he made it for different category of the audience and repackage the same idea. Still, it works and people are ok with that.

3. Design– when dealing with design, we tend to find some elements that we can relate to. For example, in architectural practice, there are times that the consultants will modify some parts of the previous design for the next client. This saves time and it fits the client brief (like residential projects, most of the time it is much or less typical). Economically, it makes sense but in terms of creativity, it may not be good.

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We are free to duplicate our works, as per the rules of copyright. Whether or not the consumers want to pay for it, it will be up to the consumers to decide. It is very easy for us to track whether a content producer is duplicating their work by simply copying their previous work and repost or they rephrase and restructure the contents. I believe that the audiences (as the content’s consumers) will be wise to make the choice, whether or not to ‘pay’ for the contents. The content creators will also bear the risk of being flagged if they are breaching the principle or rules being in the community.

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How I justify Steem is paying us for our contribution?

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All of us are the stakeholders in the community.

To me, I take Steem as a big company that is giving its equity stakes to the community. Like a startup, it started with founders and co-founders, then after a certain growth, there comes the angel investors, venture capitalists, and the investment banks. Finally, going for the IPO to welcome more stakeholders to join the community. Each stakeholder will definitely want the company to grow and hence they will contribute one way or another to make sure the company will always find places to grow (especially the higher stakes' holders).

In comparison, other platforms are differentiating the users from the service providers (the owner's of the platform). Thus, no matter how engaging the platform is with the users, eventually when there are better options, the users will definitely flee. For Steem, it is less likely to happen as the users hold part of the company!

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So this is my 2 cents on how Steem works and a continuous learning process for open source projects. Join me to discuss more.

My previous post:

1. My Steem Adventure #1: Embarking into The Unknown Sea of Open Source

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Find me at @kimzwarch