It's Time To Put Away Childish Things
Steemit Inc has announced today that they are laying off 70% their workforce in an effort to cut costs owing to having insufficient funds thanks to the low STEEM price.
Although I'm probably not going to win over many friends or influence by saying this, I'm saying it anyway. Anyone who thinks the basic laws of economics do not hold in the cryptosphere is fooling themselves. I've been talking about this for months. Ultimately, you're going to need to generate external fiat revenue or you will have all investors rushing for the exits. What could those revenue streams be? If you've read the Steem white paper, you'd know that the value proposition of Steem was to become an advertising and paid promotion network. Steem has been running on speculative money along with the rest of the cryptocurrency market but that can't go on forever. Speculation is also known as the Game of Greater Fool where the only source of value of the vehicle of speculation is the expectation than a Greater Fool will buy at an even higher price. Such speculative bubbles have come crashing down every single time in history.
There are a lot of people here who scoff at advertising and commercial promotion on Steem. Most of these people tend to be young people irritated by ads on most websites they visit. Some of those people don't like subscription based models, either. The brave new upvote economy is supposed to supplant all that. Sorry, kids, that's not how the world works. At the end of the day, someone's got to pay real money for the tokens.
The way forward is to build projects using the Steem blockchain that stand on their own feet financially. That is accomplished by 1) creating digital assets or services people will want to pay money for like SteemMonsters or 2) by creating massive traffic and monetizing that by selling ad space or selling/renting Steem Power to businesses who want to promote their services here.
Anyone who wants to keep enjoying the financial rewards but who wants to keep paid promotion in any way, shape or form out of Steem should pull their heads out of their asses. Any significant non-monetized traffic on Steem is deadwood costing money but producing nothing.
The crypto market bottom (if we've even reached it yet -- there's probably another USD rate hike incoming) could stagnate for at least 3-6 months by some estimates. Are they over or under optimistic? There's a neat trick ("...that Doctors hate!"™) that works fairly well with traditional markets -- pay close attention to price movement through January, it portents the years trends. Will recovery be faster than expected? It's possible, all price movement tends to be exaggerated in the fast digital market with few physical interactions an regulation -- last Bitcoin bust lasted less than two years and that was when crypto infrastructure and public knowledge were barren.
But enough about price. Creating digital assets and services is a priority that even larger players are struggling with right now, Outside of pulling some sort of "clever trick", a "killer app" popping out of nowhere, we need some serious R&D and R&D needs funds.
So advertising is the only realistic path at the moment. It seems some social crypto has already moved in that direction, Is pure AD auctioning a good deal? Perhaps we'd be be better served with properly disclosed community sponsorships? (that would probably mean we'd need to have SMTs out already)
On another note, Steemit has been a very, extremely poor hub for STEEM UI/dApp introduction -- imagine if Google or Facebook's main page didn't link to most of the functionality of the platform available to the user? If Android didn't push its Play store with its recommended apps... That's what we basically have right now with Steemit and alternate blogging interfaces. Sure curating dApps is hard and promoting someone else's project on your front page you partly take responsibly for it, but we've had this situation of no responsibility for a very long time and it clearly didn't just work itself out.
(edit: oh dear I might have forgotten the point I wanted to make, which is:)
Either Steemit's frontend development has to become more open and converted into a portal for actively developed frontends or it must be shuttered completely to be replaced with a landing page with links to dApps.
P.S. I hope you'll pardon the injection of a protracted rant into this topic, but I felt it relevant.
I actually love this post. Sometimes this gets me worried when I see sudden pump or whenever I buy a crypto and wait for the price to go higher. I feel the whole cryptocurrency does thread on the Greater fools' theory. However, the underlying values of cryptocurrency and blockchain is of high utility which will drive its price and adoption. But the Greater fool theory also plays in the stock market, so I believe crypto wont be an exception.
What they could do that any other start up does is find venture capital and sell some of StInc's equity
What is interesting is that STEEM price didn't drop significantly after @ned's announcement. What that means? That STEEM currently has its real value?
The fact that steemit has been the least developed UI for a while now and there was no expectations of its improvement could have played.a role here, but the price stabilization mechanism that stopped the SBD printing press and the reticence of many holders to sell at such a low price should certainly play a role as well.
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Yeah. Good point. Also what is indicative here, when you have cryptocurrency market drop in mind, looks like there is not much speculative money in STEEM. Otherwise there would be a large price drop after ned's announcement.
Very serious! People are being laid off! Things are getting out of hand. Hoping solutions are close at hand!
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The guy plays his guitar on a live stream while everything is falling apart. Seams that he doesn't care much.
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