There were two big occurrences to happen in the past 7 days, one on Steem and the other for decentralized blockchains as a whole. Let's start with the good news that affected Steem the most.

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RT Officially Joins Steem

One week ago, the major international news organization RT (@rt-international), formerly known as Russia Today, officially announced that they had joined Steem! Originally they started posting articles on Steem about a week prior to the announcement, which caught the attention of Steem Cleaners. However, after Steem Cleaners contacted them via Twitter, they confirmed it was indeed them, which is what prompted them to make the official announcement on Steem.

To say this is incredible in an understatement. RT has one of the largest followings of any major news organization in the world, with a weekly audience of over 100 million viewers, and are the largest news network on YouTube, with over 8 billion total views. RT can now also say they are the most followed major news network on Steem as well! For RT to have joined Steem represents a very fundamental shift in how blockchain-based social media networks are viewed. For RT to join Steem and start posting articles here means they see the network as a viable way of spreading their content and earning a following from the Steem community, which has already started happening. This is also compounded with the rise in censorship on other mainstream platforms. RT often has many criticisms (actual or perceived) hurled at it for their reporting and are definitely a target for various forms of censorship, something which is not an issue with Steem.

RT joining Steem represents a new level of legitimacy for the Steem network not seen until now. It is my hope that by RT joining it will encourage other major news media outlets to look into using Steem to spread their content as well. Outlets like Al Jazeera, BBC, Euronews, France 24, or Sky News.
(I didn't bother listing any mainstream American news outlets as it is unlikely they would ever consider Steem viable by their standards)

For now though, #RT is the #1 most followed news organization on Steem!

Let's all give them a warm welcome to the Steem community! :)

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PewDiePie Officially Partners With DLive

This one was kind of a bolt out of the blue, as I'm not sure anyone expected #PewDiePie to partner with a blockchain-powered streaming service like DLive. This seemed to stun many different groups and communities, blockchain-based and not. While more than a few people, especially from the Steem community, pointed out the past and present issues with DLive (something I will not be going into here), I think this overlooks the larger and far more incredible occurrence that happened. A YouTuber with 93 million followers decided to partner with a (mostly) decentralized, blockchain-based streaming service to show his livestreams! That is, by itself, nothing short of incredible! With Pewds now joining DLive, it has prompted many other YouTubers and streamers to look into utilizing the services that DLive has to offer, both as a streaming service and as a blockchain-based rewards system. YouTubers and streamers such as Sargon of Akkad, Vee, Rags, and others have all expressed interest in joining DLive, with some already doing so. This now represents an opportunity for blockchain-based services to be seen as true competitors to large, established services like YouTube or Twitch.

However, this also presents a challenge to those of the Steem community... Pewds chose DLive for his streaming service, not @Vimm. Many others choose Bitchute for video hosting, instead of @DTube. Steem, both as a community and as a network, offer far more leverage than either DLive or Bitchute do, yet they don't seem to be the ones getting the most coverage.

I was watching a stream by @TheyCallMeDan last night, and he offered a challenge to the Steem community. He is looking for developers to either improve or build a better version of DLive and D.Tube. This is something I plan on making another post about in a couple of days to address more in-depth with my own ideas, but I think this challenge is important. The two biggest Steem-based services for video uploading and streaming are @DTube and @Vimm respectively. To them I offer this challenge of my own: With attention rapidly looking to decentralized and/or blockchain-based services for censorship-resistant content uploading, are you prepared to rapidly improve your functionality to draw the attention of those looking at these new services? Are you capable of overhauling your current services to cater to these newcomers and refugees from centralized services like YouTube and Twitch? If you are, then I cannot stress enough that you start acting NOW to implement improvements to your systems to make it as easy and seamless as possible for newcomers, uploaders and consumers alike, to use your services. If you are unable to meet this demand, then you should be prepared to be overtaken by rising competitors in this new market that is being created, both on and off Steem.

I feel like Pewds joining DLive has really injected some new energy into the decentralized and blockchain communities, not the least of which is Steem. If this energy can be harnessed to better the services available, then I truly think that Steem can present itself as a true challenger in this emerging market.

DLive got Pewds first, but let’s make a system that will get Pewds and those like him to join us here on Steem! A place where his content can be consumed without fear of censorship or reprisal!

Let’s Make #Steem Great Again!

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