RE: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bid Bots
I believe steem is interesting because it allows people who don't care much about crypto at first to begin paying attention to some new mechanisms of interaction that are simply non-existent on other blogging or "creative sharing" platforms.
I wouldn't bother too much marketing steem to people with a background in crypto already - their ideas are already made, they have "built their internal image" of what crypto should and shouldn't be.
Steem being so different from other cryptos, it's almost certain that they will reject it instantly as not fitting their ideas.
I'm more interested in making people with zero idea about blockchain discover that "blockchain" is more than computers burning electricity to calculate useless hashes, that it's more than sending some numbers called "crypto" from one computer to another ("who cares?"), that it can have a direct role in intermediating social contact.
Premine is mostly irrelevant here.
Yes, and the point of blockchain that there's now alternative to that kind of system, so people rather not jump to a system that's just more of the same.
Hmm, yes, I see what you mean and that is typical of people who come from bitcoin. They were attracted to bitcoin first because they thought bitcoin is an alternative to our real world system. Bitcoin's ethos is that, indeed, and it was that for as long as people could mine bitcoin with their CPU. Even bitcoin has created a social stratification now between those who can afford an S9 or other ASIC miner and have on top access to cheap electricity and those who cannot afford the upfront investment (let alone the industrial miners who have invested tens of millions in equipment)
After bitcoin, these people took an interest in crypto looking for "the next bitcoin". I contend that is a vain task (see the tweets of @aantonop for instance). Most importantly, this set of people, the "bitcoiners", is limited, is not growing and will not grow. 99% of the people, even if not very happy with the current system, are not ready to see in bitcoin an alternative.
That's a good reply, but even in the eyes of average joe the system needs to be fair, not sure with the current bid botting and lack of manual curation that it will happen, perhaps, perhaps not. We'll have to wait and see what will happen once the next bull run brings ton of new people here.
I love bull runs. Bull runs are breathing life into the system and allowing us to progress, even (or especially) when irrational and based on wrong assumptions ("trees growing to the sky")