From my perspective, I feel both strangely gratified and disquieted.
For the first, I feel gratified that my focus was on my work (in the sense of "my writing" and "my creation") before my interest in the Steem blockchain. Putting the work first means that this kind of situation doesn't actually affect the process of working – after all, my work is completely uninvolved with anything about governance or operation except for the presence of a platform and UI to interface with the work. The Steem blockchain acted/acts as a distribution platform for me first and foremost and the underlying token transfer/market mechanisms are purely gravy insofar as I get anything useful out of. As such, from the perspective of my creations, this really doesn't have much of an effect. I am not expecting to extract particular value from the operation of the blockchain.
The disquiet sets in when I consider how this is likely to affect the underlying interface with what is effectively just a database of my work over the last few years. It's not the only place my work has appeared, but I think that some of my best work has been published via this mechanism and it would be a shame for all of those links which have been distributed across the world to go dead or be unreachable – ironically the possibility of which (and avoiding it) is/was one of the greatest selling points of blockchain technology in general and not just Steem). It disquiet's me to think that some of the people whose work I respect will have to potentially find other platforms to invest their passion into, even if I disagree with the positions that they took personally as regards that platform.
In general, the key question is "what does Justin Sun expect to get out of the acquisition of the Steem blockchain?" After all, he has access to a perfectly functional token exchange blockchain which seems to be very successful among a certain type of digital application, online gambling. Dropping money for @ned 's stake in the Steem blockchain doesn't seem to actually buy him anything useful. There are a handful of digital applications with more socially acceptable uses here, there is a very lightly active social media platform, but that's it. What did he actually buy? The Steem blockchain doesn't even stand as a reasonable competitor to TRON in the marketplace, so that's not much of a reason to pick it up either. That is the question that we need to answer before we can make sense out of this whole thing and bring reason to bear on trying to figure out where it's going next. Until we can do that, until we know that, everything else is just made up.
Note that we can't actually take the word of the major players involved as to what their motivations are because we know that complete direct truthfulness has never been on the table with them, perhaps reasonably, perhaps less so. There should be no expectation of getting straightforward answers which reflect reality from either of the major players.
At this point, the big question is Justin Sun's motivation and we really have no way to know what that is.
I think it's interesting that the price of both STEEM and SBD had a momentary spike and now has dropped back into pretty much exactly where it was before the announcement. It could drop further if the overall uncertainty from holders starts breaking toward divestment but I suspect that HODL is going to be the order of the day for at least a few more days until some sort of direction gets really defined.
In the meantime, what people who really have businesses which are in any degree entwined with the idea of the Steem blockchain should do is consider whether the the business itself is primary or the Steem interactions are primary, and if the business interactions are the real business – think about how you can change your messaging to convey that. I'm not saying completely disentangle but I am suggesting that it's a good opportunity to reconsider how your messaging comes across to your audience and what you are actually promoting with that relationship. The Steem blockchain should be promoting you (abstractly), that is it should be providing your business value, and not the other way around.
"think about how you can change your messaging to convey that. I'm not saying completely disentangle but I am suggesting that it's a good opportunity to reconsider how your messaging comes across to your audience and what you are actually promoting with that relationship"
^^^^ this......
and
"The Steem blockchain should be promoting you (abstractly), that is it should be providing your business value, and not the other way around."
But even taking off my business hat and looking at my personal account here on steem ( this account) I still feel uncompforable saying come to steem when steem might not be steem in a few months. Steem is complicated enought without trying to explain that oh in a few months you will have to do a token swap .....
Sure look, it is what it is and I guess we will have to see what tide the sun brings in (it would be way better if his name was moon)
Steem was too complicated to pitch to other people at a personal level even without bringing up the possible future of the Steem token. SBD versus STEEM versus SP versus "voting manna"/RC – that whole side of things was both way too prominent in the social culture and way too prominent as a pitch from Steemit Inc. That is one of the many problems that we had in actually getting people on board even at the height of the value of the token.
What I said applies even to us from a personal perspective – we should not be looking to provide the platform value, we should be talking about and looking at how the platform provides us value. In a real sense, the Steem blockchain has fallen down on that outside of the value of the token over the last two years (and one could as sensibly and reasonably argue that they've fallen down on that as regards the value of the token over the last two years).
As much as a lot of people don't want to hear this – and that number may include you but this isn't judgment – the obsession with HODL and never moving token value off of the platform in order to exchange it for something that you could have got, by selling it for something you wanted, doesn't actually increase the inherent value of it in that sense of what it has brought to you in exchange for your work. I at least say "well, I sold some for Amazon cards when it had some real value and it paid for this new monitor in this really nice keyboard and my sous vide machine". I literally put my finger on what value it has provided me and I'm good with that. But if you haven't actually extracted value from the platform and you have invested your own money from outside of the platform, it might be time to seriously sit down and evaluate which direction the value is flowing for you personally.
When we invite people to join us on most social media platforms, it's because we know that they will be able to find our content, our work, our creations, more easily, more comfortably, or more conveniently via that mechanism. The work is first, our creations are first, and the mechanism of delivery exists to facilitate us. That is one of the things that both Twitter and Facebook got right at the beginning, they recognized that their job was to be useful to you and then get out of the way. The way people approach the Steem blockchain and the digital applications attached to it have that exactly the wrong way around for the most part and put us in this position where we either have to sell the platform in order to get people to see our content or accept that it provides a really small tool in terms of value for sharing our content.
(I wouldn't expect a token swap. I could be wrong but TRON has enough of a market And enough market liquidity that it doesn't look like there would be a whole lot to be gained by just adding STEEM to its mix. Unless Justin Sun was just obsessed with the idea of merging their governance architectures, a token swap would just be burning value in the overhead to reduce replication and redundancy of storage nodes. I'm not saying someone couldn't make that bad decision but I am saying it would be a bad decision.)
Judging from the number of grumpy people around here, I'd say the moon tide has been in for at least six months. We could make a real killing selling ice cream and chocolate bars.)