THIS is how we save Steem.
What's up Steem! How's it going? Well, here we are again. Down in the dumps. Everybody scrambling with their two satoshis on what's wrong with Steem, what Steem is, what we need to do, what we want, what we should have, who's fault it is that we don't have nice things...you know the drill by now. You've been here long enough. You've seen this before. Everyone who hasn't is gone already.
But don't worry, old Midlet's got the answer, but before I tell you my super secret awesome solution lets ask ourselves a few questions. Not how do we attract investors, not how do we attract users, not how do we make the price go up, not how do we improve curation, not how do we improve rewards. I think there are questions that need to be asked before any of these things. Questions that, without an answer, make the rest of those questions meaningless.
What problem does Steem solve?
What value does Steem create?
Whose life can Steem improve and how?
Who NEEDS Steem and why?
What can Steem do better than anything else? Anything?
Before you read the rest of this post I really want you to think about those questions. What are your answers? If you don't have answers to those questions, but you're talking about any of the things I mentioned above, you're putting the cart before the horse. It doesn't matter how amazing the tech is if nobody wants to use it. Nobody gives a shit how the sausage is made. Nobody cares about our transaction time, or how many transactions we can process in a day. Nobody cares about ANY of the technical details. If they did, we'd be in the top 5 already because the tech IS badass.
So what's the answer?
EEENT! Wrong question! The right question is...What's YOUR answer? Steem is not a monolith. It's the wrong direction to try to come to some consensus on what it is or what it should be used for. I'm convinced that the path forward will be forged by individuals pushing THEIR vision of what Steem is and what it should be used for and the rest of this post is dedicated to laying out MY vision for Steem, and my answers to the questions posed above.
Steem currently has the best technology in the world for allowing people to financially support one another.
So how can one person support another on Steem?
- Upvotes
- Direct Transfers(Tips/Donations)
- Beneficiary System
- Delegation
Of these four methods, just about ALL of the UX and UI is focused on upvotes across all frontends, and of these four, upvotes are NOT the most effective. There are less than 2000 people in the entirety of the Steem platform that are capable of upvoting over $.25 USD. The top 50, the whales, are almost all are passive. As far as I know, about seven actively vote on authors.
This means that while Steem has THE BEST technology IN THE WORLD for one person financially supporting another, it's not reflected in any of the applications and this technological superiority is not utilized.
This way of thinking and designing is Steem V1.0. It's time to upgrade to Steem 2.0. Steem 2.0 should have donations at the head, then every other method made EASY and INTUITIVE, but seen as secondary to donations. So then we ask...
What problem does Steem solve?
For every person in the world creating content online, and looking for support via donations, or payments for a service, Steem offers a direct connection to your supporters. Steem cuts out the middle man that takes a huge percentage of the support your followers want to give you.
Also Steem is borderless allowing anyone in the world with an internet connection to support anyone else as easy as sending an instant message. No conversions, no banks, peer to peer.
Steem also provides novel methods for your followers to support you including giving you a percentage of their earnings on the Steem blockchain(beneficiaries) as well as transferring to you the power of their stake in the platform(delegation), which will increase the value of your upvote, and further empower you to develop your community.
What value does Steem create?
Attention is valuable. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a host of other social media platforms are generating billions of dollars annually by harnessing the value of their users attention. Unfortunately, even though the users are creating the bulk of the value, in most cases none of that value is transferred back to them. Steem decentralizes this current power structure and puts the value users generate where it belongs...with the users!
Whose life can Steem improve and how?
By leveraging this superior technology, that allows for value to be transferred fast, easy, and freely across the globe, Steem has the potential to completely revolutionize the world. Whether you're sending one thousandth of a Steem, or one million these transactions cost nothing and happen instantly across the world.
This breaks new ground for charities, crowdfunding, content creation support, e-commerce, the list goes on.
Who NEEDS Steem and why?
If you have a business that relies heavily on donations and support from third parties, you need Steem.
If you created content that people find valuable, but you have trouble selling directly, you need Steem.
If you'd like to reach out to the WORLD for aid for a charity or cause, you need Steem.
If you want to invest in the future, you need Steem.
What can Steem do better than anything else? Anything?
Currently there is NO SYSTEM OR PLATFORM IN THE WORLD, that offers as many, or as effective means of people supporting one another than Steem.
Through donations, upvotes, delegations, and the beneficiaries system, Steem is poised to be the worlds leader in servicing this market.
So what do we have to do?
First we need to design our interfaces and frontends with our strengths in mind. The things we should be racking our brains about is how to take these four things and make them RIDICULOUSLY easy, RIDICULOUSLY intuitive, how can we make it to where your grandma could understand it? What will it take? What does the UX need to be? What does the UI need to be?
This is a screenshot of a Youtube live chat. The arrow is pointing to the superchat button, which is the donation button basically. It doesn't need to be rocket science. A button with a money symbol, the end. Then when someone makes a donation, it shows who made the donation and for how much. I feel like this stuff should be obvious, but I'm the only one talking about it.
So to recap
Steem is not a monolith. Come up with YOUR vision and go for it. I'm currently researching and exlporing options, but if it comes down to it, I'm looking at launching a crowdfunding campaign to fund the development of the features I want. This is something I have experience with.
Don't put the cart before the horse. Create something that people want to use and that solves a problem/makes peoples lives better first then think about attracting investors, users, monetization etc.
We need to play to our strenghts, not try to reinvent the wheel of what Steem is. We already have a narritive out there, lets work with it and become great at it.(Rewarding content creators)
If you read through all this, thanks for hearing me out. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
People don't donate. People upvote because it doesn't cost them directly. You can easily see that in most Fundition Campaigns. The people don't want to give up their hard earned steem, and I don't know what kind of cultural shock will it cause to new users being "convinced" to give away their money to support creators. The main thing here is that as long as you stake you can give away without giving up on your own money. I mean, new users would need to come already with an heavy altruistic mindset as content consumers... otherwise, I don't know how could this happen.
This is pretty objectively untrue. If it were, Patreon, Youtube live, Twitch, DLive, Kickstarter, Gofundme, etc to name a few wouldn't be a thing. These are billion dollar industries. You're basing this idea on Fundition?
Fundition has 280 daily active user. That's nothing, as in statistically insignificant. Insted check Kickstarter if you're not convinced. I've run a successful Kickstarter campaign so I can tell you for certain, if you offer people something they want, they will support you.
But the draw of Steem - at least for an impoverished person like me - is that I can contribute even though I have no wealth. All the donation-based things are for wealthy (to me) people to support content creators. As you say, most of the whales are pretty passive - most of us here on Steem are probably not wealthy. Most of us cannot afford to buy in with fiat. I haven't been able to do so once, but I HAVE bought groceries and paid my electric bill with SBD earnings, and powered up as much as I can. The user base, I'd wager, is far more folks in my shoes than in the this-is-a-fun-hobby-and-let's-throw-a-little-fiat-at-it people. My upvote is only worth a few cents now, but at the ATH I was almost dropping quarters even though I was a total noob plankton at the time. I'm happy to build my SP and throw my pennies into people's jars, and would be ecstatic if I was dropping quarters (or more, now, if the price was the same as the ATH) again; I will do @treeplanter votes (it makes my donated Steem go further and contributes both to tree planting and giving an even bigger upvote to the recipient, in small increments I can afford), etc. But if the whole premise was "contribute money to all the creators you like," I wouldn't be able to afford it. The bonus of Steem is that everyone can contribute and build, even if you start with nothing. That it's different than the Patreon model. At least, that's from my view. We don't need another Patreon, we need a way for poor folks to support each other no matter what the rich folks decide is "worthy."
I think of this far more as a way for us to build a real universal basic income for people. And that's another wonderful thing on Steem - @steembasicincome - you build your income and other people's incomes, because you automatically are buying shares for yourself and someone else. My poor self does a contest pretty much every week giving away SBI, and it helps the winners and me - it's an investment in both our futures. It's mutual aid in a whole new way.
The poor folks are the ones who need Steem. So that's my partial answer to your question. :)
@phoenixwren, Nothing I'm proposing would change any of that. I'm not talking about removing the functionality of upvotes or changing that system at all. I'm talking about adding features. You'd have nothing to lose and everything to gain from what I'm suggesting.
Also, you're not correct when it comes to demographics here on Steem. The majority of users are from wealthy countries where people can definitely afford to donate a few cents, but that's actually a bit irrelevant.
You could participate or not participate and regardless of how poor you are, one of the great things about Steem is it can be broken down to the thousanth .001 Steem. So even if all you could afford to give someone is .001 Steem, that could be really helpful to someone, and if you can't afford that, you'd still have your upvote.
Main point is, I'm talking about adding features, not changing what we already have. Thanks for commenting :)
I come from a wealthy country - but I live way, way below poverty level - I'm disabled without a disability check. Coming from a wealthy country whilst being super poor can in some ways be harder, because it costs so much more to live, so location isn't indicative of wealth level. There have been homeless Steemians, and would-be-homeless-if-not-for-help-I've-gotten-from-so-many-people Steemians (me), here in "the wealthiest nation on Earth" (the States). Maybe you're right and it's not the majority between us and the Steemians in very poor countries who are also struggling, but there are a lot of us.
I didn't interpret your idea as taking away upvoting, but as shifting the focus to donations, whereas I think upvoting should be the focus. Because as we slowly build our accounts, us poor Steemians could potentially support each other, regardless of donations, and without feeling like charity cases.
I don't think the system is perfect as it stands, but I think it has potential.
Understood, but the point I made still stands. I think a visual aid would probably help in this case, but to keep it simple, upvotes would look and work exactly the way they do now, there would just be the addition of visual feedback connected to posts and comments that shows who and how much people donated. It just increased people’s options on how they want to support people. I’ve done a mock up I. A previous post that shows how it would look, but in terms of the user experience, it wouldn’t change that much.
When I talk about shifting the focus, that mostly has to do with marketing. So when we say STEEM is a platform for supporting (insert whatever you want to support), we back that up by having a wealth of options and different mechanisms for people to support one another. The upvote system here is amazing and a huge innovation for sure, but by itself it doesn’t work for the majority of users and it probably never will.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Ah, I see. I wonder if such a thing could be integrated with tipu, since that's kinda what tipu does, there just isn't a special spot for it aside from a comment?
It would dramatically expand the functionality of anything having to do with rewards or payments, as it would also be something that could trigger actions on the blockchain ie "If x does y donate z steem" I guess the downside of that is it would require peoples active keys, but lots of people use their active keys for stuff anyway. It's less secure though.
I am talking about the behaviour that is found on this blockchain.
Posted using Partiko Android
Again, all of Steem has less than 5k daily active users. This is about attracting the mainstream and taking Steem mainstream by solving problems that affect lots of people. If we can provide a better service than the platforms that are doing this, the people that are creating content and donating on those platforms will want to move to this platform.
Although your point is that the size of the sample is too small to truly measure user behaviour, I respect it, but I believe it should be enough to have an idea of the outcome. Hopefully the attitude I refer to won't see itself replicated in the masses of new adopters once it happens.
I agree on everything else with you @midlet.
Have a good day
Posted using Partiko Android
You too, thanks for commenting 😊
I think if people stopped coming here with their hands out expecting to be rewarded for at best mediocre content made with money in mind not the content itself the platform would grow much faster. The biggest problem with steem is it’s full of blood sucking parasites (but has many great creators too) bottom line money makes people behave badly
Posted using Partiko iOS
People's behavior can just about always be linked to an incentive structure. The incentive on Steem is to produce regular(daily) content, not high quality content when it comes to authors. For curators, the incentive is primarily to delegate to a bid bot. If you change the incentive structure you change the behavior.
I read a post by a Steemian once that said, if there was a law that paid people $1k to shit on the street, it would be a waste of time to tell people to stop shitting on the streets, you'd need to change the law. This is the situation with Steem as well. The system needs tweaking to align incentives with the behavior we want to see.
Yeah I agree 100%, tweaking the incentives would by far be the best way to change things here.
Posted using Partiko iOS
This is by far the best thing I have read all week! I will be doing some soul searching and perhaps a reply on the same. Great Job @midlet!
Thanks @elsiekjay! I'll be looking out for that reply :)
I love that think about things and talk about them in such a logical and relatable way. Nobody seems to be doing that, or at least in language that literally anyone can understand.
With what you’ve said in mind, is the next step then using some marketing and incentives to attract the right developers to perhaps create something new as you describe?
I’ve no idea how far apps would go to change their UI/front ends or what it would take to convince them.
Great work!
Posted using Partiko iOS
Thanks @ashtv! So there are a few options.
Right now 1 and 3 seem the most promising to me. I think launching a kickstarter could have the dual effect of funding the development of these features, but also acting as a marketing tool, because Kickstarters that gain traction get a lot of exposure.
Interesting. For me I feel number 2 would seem like a good choice for the proposal system, if it works as it’s designed!
Kickstarter sounds good for exposure.
Great stuff man. I’d fully back that proposal if it got going.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Right?
This is very easy to understand, even for the Steem Noobs! And completely makes sense.
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvoting this reply.
Thanks for using eSteem!
Your post has been voted as a part of eSteem encouragement program. Keep up the good work! Install Android, iOS Mobile app or Windows, Mac, Linux Surfer app, if you haven't already!
Learn more: https://esteem.app
Join our discord: https://discord.gg/8eHupPq
Thank you so much for participating in the Partiko Delegation Plan Round 1! We really appreciate your support! As part of the delegation benefits, we just gave you a 3.00% upvote! Together, let’s change the world!
Hi @midlet!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 4.006 which ranks you at #3622 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has improved 26 places in the last three days (old rank 3648).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 237 contributions, your post is ranked at #25.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
Congratulations @midlet! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPVote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!