[ATTN] Steem Content Creation/Curation Guilds! Could Beyond Bitcoin's New Tool Help Change the SteemGuild Paradigm?
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://s11.postimg.org/g7rs9q51v/Whale.jpg)
Forward
For those who don't know me, I have been around in the BitShares ecosystem for a long time. I am @officialfuzzy and @fuzzyvest on Steemit.com. On bitsharestalk.org I am fuzzy. In those many months leading to the birth of the Steem Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (DAC), I held hangouts like I do today where I would talk about the similarities between Guilds in gaming and cryptocommunities as we see them today, and others would talk about topics based in their own unique experiences. Our hangouts were, in fact, much like having "raid night" on a specific day of the week, only instead of slaying virtual monsters with Epic Swords of Doombringing we would talk about how we can use blockchain technology to slay the inefficiencies and opaqueness of the current financial system while at the same time helping empower others. I only work for STEEMPOWER because I am here for BitShares and Steem for a long time to come, so please consider helping me oversee this project's growth and evolution by upvoting @officialfuzzy content with 100% voting power and consider creating and curating beyondbitcoin content to help ensure the site is covering quality content.
Two Faces of "The Whale Problem"
In Steemit there is something many newbies call "the Whale Problem". While they see this problem through a tinted lens of little experience--which is the experience people most often have, they only see one side of the problem. Minnows (aka newbies) see it as nearly impossible to get noticed and so spend a large majority of their time asking for upvotes via pms to whales everywhere they can find them. To these minnows the whale problem is getting the attention of whales in a space where it is difficult to get noticed while competing against hundreds and even thousands of other newbies along with an entrenched "evil" cabal of whales who does nothing but "circle jerk" votes in eachother's direction.
Though this is a somewhat valid perspective, there is another face to this problem--one that only whales and those who watch them from up close can fully appreciate. While minnows are searching for whales to notice and upvote them, whales are receiving numerous url links asking for upvotes on a daily, hourly and sometimes even by-the-minute basis. Many of whom are from complete strangers who may be writing in a topic about which the whale has no idea! If the whale doesnt' upvote at all, they risk perpetuating the negative stigma of "bad whales", but if they upvote content that is not high quality they risk perpetuating the belief that whales do not care about quality when they upvote.
Looking for a Common Denominator
Though we just looked at the two faces of the whale problem, to find a solution to both of them it is a good idea to try to find the common denominator between both. In this way we can find a solution that kills two birds with one stone so-to-speak. So what is the shared problem between these two faces?
A Lack of infrastructure that lends itself to building a community of individuals who will do the following:
A) Invest money and/or sweat equity into steempower
B) Have similar interests/expertise
C) Leverage one-another's expertise and steempower to reward and incentivize quality content creation in their sphere of influence/expertise
Proposed Solution--OPEN SOURCE Content Creation/Curation Guild websites!
As stated in the forward, for quite some time before Steem even existed, the concept of guilds was long a part of the cryptocommunity without which steem would have never existed. So suffice it to say, we at beyondbitcoin have been thinking intensely about how we can enable groups of people with similar interests to form guilds that help create and upvote content in their own specific niches of expertise. After many weeks of conversing, designing and building this solution with @faddat and @baabeetaa. After paying nearly 14k SBD earned from my @officialfuzzy account's posts from the past 6 months. After numerous set backs and oddities that had to be worked around, we finally think the 1st phase of the solution is nearing completion. The Beyond Bitcoin Guild Website is LIVE and Features content the community upvotes highest!
The first stage of this website will be to test it and help build a following of individuals who will be part of the guild for later phases (some of which that will have interesting rewards in the form of beyondbitcoin tokens if @officialfuzzy gets what he wants in future phases).
How does this fix anything?
This alone will not fix everything, but future plans I have (if I receive enough funding through my posts) will add additional features to this site that will enable many new and cool things that will further help.
However, what it does do at present is enable a community of individuals to be able to send content consumers to a site that is owned, run and curated by that very community.
What are some initial benefits of such sites?
- People who frequently create content or curate it for a specific tag will be more incentivized to do so if the top quality content under that tag is displayed in an easy way to find.
- Sending people links to steem-based community websites no longer will automatically flag steem users in other channels. Don't be called a spammer anymore for linking to steem-based content! The URL can now be from the site of your choosing!
- Sites will be able to earn advertising revenue for Communities of content creators/curators. This ad revenue can be used for many things--including paying out to community participants or building more tools to help add to the steemit space.
- Whales and minnows align based on shared passions on specific subject matter.
- Minnows with large followings outside of steem can redo their current pages to have a steembased backend---can then open up a new revenue stream through upvotes of their content by fans!
- Communities decide the rules for listing/delisting content----not steemit.
How can I help Fuzzy?
In this stage I need people who are veterans to blockchain technology and are interested in joining the BeyondBitcoin Guild to upvote, write and/or create quality content about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology under the #beyondbitcoin tag. In a perfect world, these people would be individuals representing various cryptocommunities/projects.
Other than this, we want to get high quality content creators, editors and publishers in cryptocurrency and blockchain tech to begin posting their content with the BeyondBitcoin tag. We also want to get people who wish to find people who are interested in Helping promote the content on this site and help curate the #beyondbitcoin tag to ensure the highest quality articles make it to the top of the site's content.
Conclusion
If you look at the BeyondBitcoin site screenshot I took below, you will see that it is currently working as expected---we need only to start tightening up the content curation at this juncture and begin upvoting @officialfuzzy to keep the funding for this project to evolve and grow further).
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://s21.postimg.org/s3j45pjqv/screenshot.jpg)
This site can be seen as an Open Source template for the benefit of the entire steem community. In fact, while you look at this picture of beyondbitcoin.io, I would like you to imagine it could be cloned and reused for sites like wikileaks or the electronic frontier foundation. Or better yet, maybe it is made for SnoopDog who wants to create a content creation/curation guild around his label. Maybe a group of avid sports fans will make a fanpage for their favorite team and provide updates and payments for updating the content.
Final Thoughts
If one looks at the beyondbitcoin.io site and considers the multiple possibilities, it becomes clear that @officialfuzzy is a whale in the ecosystem who cares about developers and community members of all walks of life coming together to build important foundational technologies to amplify the value of steem. Please consider upvoting my content with 100% voting power if you want to see this important project go into stages 2 and 3 (which is kind of top secret for now unless you join our beyondbitcoin hangouts.
Interested, Shared on twitter
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Don't need guilds.
Just give a bonus for votes garnered based on a upvoters reputation.
Love your profile pic grey580
That is an idea i totally disagree with as a decision across the board. Ironically these guilds though would enable communities to choose how to incentivize participation. So you could have that added tothe open source code and put that in.
This reputation idea is dangerous. Ask people whoare otherwise good but have had their reps murdered by downvotes from a couple bigwhales who didnt like one of their posts.
To me the problem is that you have to join a guild. What if I don't want to join a guild?
We already have a reputation here on steemit. That can be used to help value the bonus a post receives.
I don't know. It's just a thought. I just feel like people won't want to write good content if they aren't getting a payout.
Then you forego the benefits of the infrastructure that guild utilizes to organize and empower itself through collective action.
Pretty straight forward really. It is kind of like me saying "the problem with making money is I have to work for a company...what if I dont want to work for a company?"
Because the answer would be the same--noone is forcing you to be a member of a guild, or work for a company. However, the majority of the population do want that.
So while I recognize your opinions, I also recognize that it is kind of actually a nonissue. :)
To this I would say: "they are getting a payout. nothing has changed on this front except the fact that people who focus on content areas of expertise will be able to more easily coordinate between one another to mitigate the "whale problem"."
In fact, with later phases of this solution, we could quite possibly enable new layers of economic activity that utilize coins for the guild IN ADDITION to the rewards directly earned from steem. Hope that helps clarify.
Hrmm... feels like we are adding a layer of complexity that doesn't need to be there to support guilds. As well as a layer of politics that doesn't need to be there either.
I'd rather have a system that's free from too much human bias.
In any case this is just my lone opinion and observation. I know it doesn't count for much. But I put it out there.
i actually think you're completely right in theory, and that what you're describing is/was the ideal version of steemit. but i think one of the reasons stuff like this is needed is because there are already identifiable problems that would prevent a true "free market" to succeed.
the idea is very appealing though...it actually makes me very curious to see what a truly free/open/decentralized platform would evolve into.
I'm giving you love for having the balls to say speak your mind--and do so civilly :)
Thanks.
Well I'm sure we all want the same goal. And that's to make the platform better.
Yelling at people isn't constructive.
Brilliant post and great points raised. I'm a newbie and learning all the time. Thanks for the information
Glad to see you read up on this! It is something we have been working hard on for quite some time.
voted up!
I like your perspective on a whale's dilemma.
Thanks :)
Very interesting.
If I understand it correctly you filter content by beyondbitcoin tag only?
So this approach can represent many niche websites powered by steem blockchain content. This way posts can be published anywhere and displayed on steemit.com plus on niche websites according to the tags used.
Each individual site will have its own looks and branding, displaying rules can be different, ... Lots of possibilities.
At the steemit site authoring and voting rewards rules will be unchanged. In fact niche sites will not be dealing with them.
In fact, you don't even have to display post value. You can use some other / internal points system.
BTW, BSD or SBD?:
What is technically needed to put up a niche site? Full steem node? HW requirements?
I can chip in to beyondbitcoin's content with the news from Synereo development if you like.
TNX!
Example on http://212.47.254.10/?p=7814 :)
I would gladly work with you. You see the possibilities too which is cool. Not everyone can say that ;)
Yes one of the next phases (with continued support from thr community) would be to give people the ability to add a new "layer" of guild token distribution-- which could even be used instead of sbd distribribution as the determinate for quality content.
Additionally, there are multitudes ofother ways to utilize guild tokens.
As for the bb site, what id love most is to have affiliate sites linked to on bb that also cover different cryptocommunities and projects. They can have their own filters but add the beyondbitcoin tag to their content to ensure it gets the benefits of both tags that have their own stand alone sites.
And much more as you stated before.
Guilds are good, but for me it's just an intermediate to proper rshares market, as its described here
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@arhag/witness-arhag-update-aug-9-2016-to-aug-18-2016
Ironically this is part of the next stage, but not with rshares as much as another type of shares that enables each guild to specialize more, but also give the ability to back the value of guild tokens with steempower. Though with that said, these guild tokens could be like micro versions of rshares
So no it is not an intermediate stage if by intermediate you mean this step will be unnecessary with the rshares market. The rshares market from what I have read will be cool, but will do very little for enabling people to work together as guilds of content creators and curators to work together to earn stake in a website.
I think people really need to recognize the power of being able to do something like, for instance, making a site like this for something like wikileaks and giving wiki tokens to guildies who pay a monthly subscription and create/curate/share content.
Is this project arhags? If so I need to talk to him a little bit.
P.S. Guilds are better than good. They are GREAT. Though I see the value in rshares, I see them as a general solution not really rewarding specialization and cooperation like guilds can. And when they have a website and their own tokens, it makes it so we can share steem based content much more easily.
We definitely don't need any "one-size-fits-all" solutions, guilds and rs-market can go together)
The meaning for intermediate was, it looks to me that people have to get accustomed to guilds first, after that they might start to realize what rs-market is good for.
(You can see that the idea of rs-market isn't new, but initially it went completely unnoticed)
Similarly I can remember that just a few months ago the idea of guilds was not much appreciated.
Everybody was celebrating a "no-middlemen" platform, the idea how it's supposed to work is very well described in this meme https://steemit.com/steem-meme/@ibringawareness/steem-meme-how-steemit-works-any-questions
It's great that now guilds are starting to establish.
However for me ( now I'll start to exaggerate, but that's just to be more clear ) guilds have a tendency to be to slow and to bureaucratic.
You start to establish a guild with one purpose, by the time it is established the original issue might be not so topical anymore....but that of course would hardly result in dissolving of the guild, instead we might rather expect some uncontrollable growth just for the case of growing.
Solutions rs-market could provide would aloud more flexible and fast development than guilds alone.
Agreed. I see them as beneficialin their own ways. Like the idea too :)
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Great idea.
I would love to chat with you about this. I am here at Steemfest and will gather some more ideas as well. Thank you for working on the Steem ecosystem and trying to make it better.