Steem isn't great at rewarding content, but it could be...
So this post is touching on something I've written about before. And it's something I was thinking about a bit today. Currently while the price of Steem is low, the amount of money that it would take to support someone whose content you appreciate is pretty ridiculously out of proportion.
Currently I have a little over 7,000 Steem powered up, which if everything was at 100% that would give me about a 15 cent upvote. If I didn't own any Steem, to get to where I'm at would cost around $2,300 USD. As a new user this is not very compelling if I wanted to come to Steem to curate my favorite content creators. I think that a very simple detail that just about every Steem frontend is missing is an easy to use and an easy to see UX for donations. Now I understand that you can always just send any user some Steem. It's not at all a difficult thing to do technically, but it's the UX. People want to be able to donate and have it be visible to the world, it's not an accident that every platform that allows for content consumers to donate to creators has the donations visible, public, and clearly in context. ie I'm donating to you because I like THIS thing.
I feel like this wouldn't be a huge feature just to allow donations to be visible in the same context as author rewards for a post. This also wouldn't need a 7 day expiration date, it could go on forever which I also think would be extremely powerful.
So this isn't actually the crux of the idea I've had, more of a minimum viable product. The real idea is an expansion of what @fundition is already doing. That is accepting donations of numerous cryptocurrencies on Steem as well as fiat currencies. So this is a huge feature/product, but I think it would add a ton of value to Steem.
Imagine a Steem frontend where along with normal upvote author rewards you could also receive donations in every major crypto and fiat. The frontend would also have it's own one way exchange where it would take all these donations and buy Steem with them behind the scenes, but as the end user you'd just donate some TRON, or Litcoin, or ETH, or Bitcoin etc. Visually the payout would say how much moneys worth of each crypto you received and also a total, so for each post you could see which community supported it the most.
Another layer to this is that, this frontend could take say a 10% beneficiary reward, power up a considerable amount of that Steem and use it to incentivise people to donate. For example, it could have it's own token, similar to @partiko's points, and let people exchange those points for upvotes. The end result is that it would incentivise people to at the core convert their other cryptos to Steem. It would also progressively earn them a stake that they could then use to be more involved in the Steem community.
I think right now there's a lot of people hodl'ing cryptos that they can't actually do anything with. If they could use them here to donate, and it doesn't have to be much, .25 cent worth, $1, etc. When I write those amounts, it's really nothing, but to have a $1 upvote right now on Steem would take 47,500 Steem! Basically you'd need to be an Orca. The current cost of that is $15.6k. I've got a dollar I could give someone, but I don't have 15k to get a $1 upvote. The other positive of this is it doesn't depend on the markets. Right now when prices are low, Steem is a bit dead, because(let's just be real) a lot of people come here for the rewards, but with a system like this it wouldn't matter, you could still be rewarded regardless of what's happening with the prices, and all of this would be constantly adding value to Steem.
This would make Steem THE social network of crypto enthusiasts especially, but also add a lot of value to Steem since all the donations would actually be buying Steem. This would be especially powerful once communities roll out as each crypto community could donate with their favorite crypto and earn some Steem for doing it.
What do you all think? If I had the knowhow to build this I'd just do it and I wouldn't be publicly giving away the idea, but alas, I'm not a coder or rich enough to hire engineers to build it for me. But if anyone has holes to poke in this I'd love to hear them, also if you'd like to shower me with praise for my genius idea, I'll take that too. If you read all this, thanks for hanging in there, now leave a long comment! :D
Thanks for looking peeps!
*Edit
Since @jarvie of Steempeak actually showed interest I just wanted to further visualize what what I'm suggesting could look like.
Again the main difference here, being that it is VISIBLE who, and how much people donated, as well as a total. If this is something you'd be interested in seeing implemented, head over to the Steampeak discord and let them know.
Strong arguments for your point! I would love to see the implecations of a donation button plus visibility for those who donated. We than could have ranking lists of posts and users who donated the most. The automatic exchange from other cryptos into Steem is also a great idea but probably needs a lot of coding.
I would suggest you take your idea to @steempeak, @steeve and @busy since they are the most innovative front-ends here.
It could also be a great worker proposal.
Up&Re
I would love this too and have desires that https://steempeak.com eventually have stuff like that... just a matter of getting some other things out first i suppose.
There are some pretty cool things we could do along that lines right on steempeak. I invite anyone really interested in this to come to our discord and ask for it so the rest of the team can see there is interest.
Maybe an automated donation (patreon) is a bit harder but a post per post manual donation thing wouldn't be terribly difficult and we could add some really nice easy UI for it... AND make sure that it is front-end agnostic (decentralized solution) that way other front ends could have matching data but with their choice of design.
That sounds awesome @jarvie its great to hear that you guys are eager to implement such a feature.
I think the potential benefits are quite obvious so I hope that your Team mates are convinced as well without everybody hopping over to discord.
Community involvement is always great, but to wait for it probably not always the best decision if you already have good ideas and features to implement.
But look at it from their perspective why would they work on a feature that no one asks for?
Thanks for showing interest and commenting @jarvie, but I’d have to agree with @masterthematrix in that it’s not like this is a new, untested idea where there’s no insight on whether or not it would be useful. It’s extremely common and there are whole (popular) platforms built on this simple concept. Waiting for people to come to discord to specifically ask for it introduces quite a few variables that have nothing to do with whether or not people would want or use this like:
How many people will see this post?
How many will take the call to action?
How many know about Steampeak already?
Etc.
You probably get what I’m saying.
Perhaps a better metric would be someone with a larger following doing a poll or something? I really don’t think much traffic is going to flow through this post to be honest. Anyway, again, thanks for showing interest and I’d really love to see something like this integrated on Steempeak! (obviously)
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I agree, if the team is not convinced about a certain feature to implement than the support of the community is very useful. But the donation or tip button is pretty popular on all other social media sites, so its really worth trying, and I think you don't have to convince users to use it.
Sometimes users don't know either what works or what they desire :-)
Well then I'm just saying... say exactly what you said above so that I don't have to do all the work convincing them. haha
It's not like they need a poll... just some good arguments like you've laid out.
Haha good one, what can I say go for it and good luck!
I would be very happy to see it on Steempeak first since its my favorite front-end for Steem :-)
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I totally get you. It's an awesome idea. It brings two reward options. Upvote and donate. I hope to see it happen.
Thanks @mistakili, yea I think it would be really cool because your voting power is free but it's a limited resource, if I had the option I think I'd use both in conjunction a lot.
The bigger picture behind this is the exchange, I love it, that could be really awesome for steem
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Thanks @paulag! I know that aspect of this idea is quite a big feature, but yes, I think it would be huge for Steem.
Love this idea. It covers one of the two major blocking points that I see for STEEM to gain mass adoption. The other being able to spend STEEM in the real world and take out the barriers for people to convert it to fiat which is tricky and has too many steps at the moment as we all know.
The other one i see is the 7 day payout window. the problem being that you can create the best post or video in the world and after 7 days i disappears never to be seen again. Most content on youtube or reddit, whatever site you use can take months or even years to gain views and value. We expect it to happen in just days. What is the point in creating good content if it has no lasting power.
If we had millions of users most of my content would disappear in seconds rather than days. I had thought that with SMT's one of the front ends would provide a token which would give a weekly payout on your post every week giving content long term value and you could trade it for STEEM on your own time. Also with a system that rewards over a long period we could implent proper trending content and searches for all time content then people would create more content with the intention of having it seen for years to come.
While you have a different solution to the same problem i like where you are coming form. Having a good interface that allows you to search content properly and allowing us to add value to it at any stage would give youtube/ blogging/ authors a lot more incentive to move to the blockchain as we all know it takes a long time to build up a following and grow your rewards. Some people with large followings have come here and left after a few weeks when they were only seeing cents on their posts every time. If good content had time to rise to the top and kept giving them rewards then i guarantee that we would have a lot more people staying around. If they saw that every week they were getting a few more tips or payouts it would surely make them log in again and put more content on their profile.
This idea or something similar has my vote for whatever it's worth.
Thanks for the reply @niallon11, your support does mean something since the people that are in a position to actually make these changes are going to be further incentivised to develop them if there is a strong outcry from the community to add them.
I really like the approach you mentioned as well with a token that is rewarded indefinitely that can then be traded for Steem. I actually still don't know and have never heard a strong justification for the 7 day expiration date on posts. I agree with you that this is a HUGE disincentive for content creators to produce valuable content on Steem.
And I think that's actually probably the crux of the problem here on Steem is misaligned incentives. If you're a very large stakeholder, the design of the system incentivises you to delegate to bidbots or sell votes.
If you're a content creator, the design of the system incentivises low quality, but regular(daily) content. Since it only has 7 days to earn rewards, basically no discovery system, and the UX is only made for upvotes and not donations which equals overall low return especially when crypto prices are down.
The silver lining here is that all of these things are fixable. People like you taking the time to comment and spread these ideas is exactly what's needed, so thanks again! :)
I think that you are right one that. I've been here for a while and the blockchain is a totally different beast than when I started. People have realised that we need progress to keep going and have started to work on projects and ideas thay will help long term value. It would be great if one of the front ends did the same with this idea and pushed for better content and lasting rewards. Who knows? I've seen a few familiar names in this post that have the skills to do it. I would create my own interface and eternity token if I had any idea what to do. Match it with the steem token and use it as the currency for the site. Unfortunatly I can't do any of this but I will still keep posting and watching this space.
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Eternity token. ETYT? ETT, ETY, I think you’re on to something with that!
I was typing my reply and it was just in my head. Sounds decent though. Might have to set one up fast on steem engine before it gets taken.......😢😢 ETY for sure. The others don't fit as well.
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Yes something like this is sorely missed, especially for all the unappreciated post way passed their payout.
One of the main issues I could see are the transaction fees involved with other currencies. Maybe limiting it to Eos, whaleshares etc could help.
Resteemed because I would like to see this coversation develop.
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thought about steempeak while reading, nice to see they are interested. also think it would be an interestin option to have
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I think it would be great and add a layer of engagement for additional content creation. I think this is also what they had in mind with the development of SMTs as it could add to the attention economy and even create subscription type trends. Interoperability is an issue but I am sure @blocktrades could figure something out.
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I think so too, I think the interoperability could be addressed by in the end just having everything sold for STEEM. Best case scenario, whoever creates it would just have the liquid STEEM on hand and just sell and buy at regular intervals.
I can see the problem too, and I like this idea a lot man
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Thanks @ashtv! I think it would really go a long way to benefit Steem.
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