What is the ten year vision for Steem blockchain?

What will the Steem blockchain look like in ten years from now?

I'm especially interested in incentive structures that will dictate what kind of content there will be. "You get what you pay for" applies very well to Steem. That kind of content will be produced, what the blockchain will pay for.

Steem developers and the community should always have a vision what Steem will look like in the future. It's important to separate Steem blockchain and Steemit.com (which is just a first user interface for the blockchain). What kind of usecases there are for Steem blockchain? How many of those usecases can be used in one blockchain with certain kind of incentive structure?

The best long term vision will be the one that will include several different kind of usecases at the same time. The more usecases we have, the more users we have, and the more beneficial Steem will be for the humankind.

Developers should design Steem blockchain to be suitable for the long term vision, and then make sure that Steemit.com works well with that vision. Again, it's important to separate Steem blockchain and Steemit.com. First priority should be to design the blockchain and especially the incentive structure according to the vision. After that Steemit.com can be adjusted to work as good as it can with that vision of the blockchain.

Right now Steemit.com and especially the trending-algorithm will dictate who will get the biggest payouts. But that's not going to last forever. Someday there will be so much content in Steem that nobody can read all of that. If all the best content from every category will be shown in "trending", it will interest only a handful of people, because most users don't care about every kind of content. They just want to read what's most important to them and ignore the rest.

If the payout algorithm is adjusted now, based on what's happening currently in Steemit.com, it's probably not going to be well suited for the future. The payout algorithm should always be adjusted according to the long term vision. When somebody is thinking how to make it work better or fairer, they should ask first "will this work also in ten years from now?"

Usecases

The incentive structure should be able to reward all kinds of applications and content types: short messages, blogs, books, poems, manuals, pictures and videos, news, marketplace. And of course we can't be sure what the future will bring, maybe Steem will create totally new form of art?

Maybe there won't be one incentive structure that is great for everybody using every possible application. But the main goal should be to build ecosystem where incentives are good for the largest possible group of different users and usecases.

Languages

Right now most of the content is written in English. But that's not going to last because people around the world will also want to use other languages too. Probably there is no need to adjust reward mechanism to be different for different languages. But it's important to keep in mind that the system will have other languages too, to make sure there won't be any artificial barriers to adoption.

Easy and fast way to make other languages possible is to start using ISO 639-3 codes. Posts should have language code as metainfo to tell to the user interface what language the post is written in.

It should be noted that once there are several subcommunities in Steem that use other languages than English, it will be more difficult to adjust reward mechanisms. Changes based only on English speakers using Steemit.com might be harmful for groups that are using other languages with different user interface. That's why it's important to keep in mind the long term vision and act according to that and abstain making decisions based on short term thinking for one certain usergroup.

Biggest challenge

I think that the most difficult decisions are those that dictate how new or old content is rewarded. Should we reward only relatively new and fresh content, like we are doing now? That will lower the rewards for books published in Steem. But is book-like timeless content really so bad that we should discourage it? Where do we draw the line?

Personally I'd like to see most rewards going to book-like content. Well thought and done long texts are usually the most valuable. Short messages, memes and links to news are nice, but people are doing them already without any compensation in traditional social media platforms. Internet is full of them, so I'm not sure is it really necessary to greatly reward people who produce that kind of content.

Sidechains as a solution?

I haven't really thought about this enough yet, but maybe there should be several different blockchains that will create bigger Steem ecosystem. Different blockchains would have different incentive structures to stimulate the creation of different kinds of content.

Three-blockchain-model could be something like this:

• Fresh content. Twitter-like short messages, memes, breaking news. If content is older than 24 hours, very few are interested in it anymore.
• Blog-like content. Essays, opinions, commentary, etc. Stays relevant from a few days to a few months.
• Book-like content. Long texts. Stays relevant for years.

There might be a solution that will reward fairly all types of content in one blockchain. But if there is not (or it will be too complicated), maybe the best solution is then to create sidechains?

Why long term plan is important

It's always good to have a plan, even if the future seems very uncertain. If you have a plan, you can know whether or not you are working towards a certain goal. If there is no goal, work you do might be more or less useless. You are just reacting to random stuff that doesn't really make the system any better. If you start to think that the plan is bad, you'll change it and start working towards the new goal instead of just abandoning the bad plan.

I'd like to see maybe once or twice a year post or video from devs about ten year plan and what they have been doing to achieve that. That would force them to think about this regularly and adjust their work and short term goals if they realise that they are not in the right path at the moment.

Any ideas?

Predicting the future is hard but interesting. I'd like to hear your ideas too. Steem blockchain is amazing innovation which will change the world. But how, exactly?

What kind of incentive structure would be the best for Steem blockchain? Is one incentive set enough or should we try to implement several different sets in one blockchain or launch other blockchains as sidechains?

What kind of communities Steem will attract? Forget who uses Steem now and try think who will use it in ten years from now.

How Steem can serve as many different communities as possible?

Personal biases might be strong in these kinds of predictions, so try not let them influence your thinking. Don't write how you would like to get paid for producing certain kind of content. The goal of Steem should be to be as beneficial as possible, to as many different groups as possible. Think about the possibilities for the whole world on a general level.