Engage me! Retain me! Who are you?

Two word often come up in discussion at Steem, the first is Engagement, the second is Retention. The interesting thing is that the conversation seems to have changed since my early days.

You know, back in the old days when I was just a little minnow, engagement was the thing I was suggested to take part in to meet, interact, get to know, support and comment to find people who may also reciprocate the relationship and look at my work. Perhaps, with a lot of work and a little luck, I would get enough eyes on my work and a little traction so that I could build a following that might even support me. I worked pretty hard at it and this is how far I got.

However now, the conversation has been commandeered and people are asking "How do we engage new users." This sounds like an innocent enough question but here is the thing, We don't.

This is a platform that potentially rewards users for their content, their comments, their voting, their holding of Steem Power, use of Steem Power, sale of delegations, bidbots and of course, eventual price of Steem going upward. All of these chances at earning are not free, they take investment. It isn't the job of most people here to engage new users, it is the job of new users to engage us.

Don't misunderstand or misconstrue this though, we can do a lot to help engagement on the platform but, if we do too much too early without people actually feeling what it is like to survive here, they are going to get disillusioned very fast. You might be saying that it is much harder now than in my time and that might be true but, it is also much easier in some ways as there is a growing amount of users and an expanding ecosystem of apps that did not exist until quite recently.

There was also no delegation and bidbots available to immediately come in and utilize. At least for me, it was all hard yards, all manual ground work in comments sections to do my best for values that people scoff at now and say 'it is not worth my time'. There were no guarantees that Steem was going to go up and when I started I had near zero idea what I was doing here at all and knew even less than that about cryptocurrencies.

This concept that the platform and the users on here have to work to engage users is a flawed view and, one that I have held for a long time. The concept of SMTs won't just engage users, it will import users from other domains that are so diverse from Steem, they would be unrecognizable.

SMTs could not just distribute and decentralize Steem, they could virtually break all connection to it except at the blockchain infrastructure level. It is possible that SMT users will never need know what Steem is at all, nor the history of Trending, Flagwars, Haejin and whatever other crap has gone on up until that point.

This is also why I also don't care much about Trending as in time, it will be gone and most of the people who have spent their hard earned SBD to get known might find themselves known for something that is increasingly obsolete. Hope they are powering it up otherwise they will be about as relevant as 1980's yo-yo champions.

People want to earn here, they want a future here but, if they are not willing to do the groundwork necessary, despite if it was easier or harder before, they don't really have a chance to get what they want. It is a brave move for a person to set up a business and expect the customers to come to them, expect the customers to do the work.

It can happen of course but, one better have something so compelling, so attractive, so addictive that the customers will not just want it, they will tell and bring their friends to it. Is that what most users bring onto Steem?

So then, this leads onto the Retention conversation and again here I am saying, it is not our job to retain at this point as the platform is in a foundation and ecosystem building stage, not an onboarding phase. It isn't ready for large numbers of users yet but, it is getting there.

For now, if people are coming in who want to earn Steem, it is up to them to be proactive and push themselves to find out all they can about the platform, apps and users here. It is up to them to find their communities and attract support to their blogs and it is up to them to experiment and discover what works and what doesn't. It is up to them to invest.

Currently, we are like a toddler who refers to themselves in the the third person and writes their name in large letters on everything they can find. Steem-this and Steem-that but, in the Steem future, the Steem name isn't necessary at all. An SMT can essentially help any site to monetize itself in a multitude of ways and those sites need not be new.

Where I see the most potential for SMTs isn't in new websites looking to monetize themselves, it is in very large enterprises looking for a versatile and tailorable solution that allows them to easily incorporate monetary functions for their providers and user base. They aren't going to care too much about several factors that we might, as long as their token performs the way they want it to.

What this means is that a lot of the arguments that are going on now will be largely irrelevant when it comes to Steemit engagement or Steemit Retention as SMT utilizers can already have engaged users with no retention problems. What this does mean though is that the current crop of apps and users are going to have to compete with other platforms for user base.

Hypothetically, The Medium platform could implement an SMT and then what happens to trending and arguments about quality? They already have professional writers, bloggers and a multitude of celebrities on the platform that will benefit from a token and then users here will have to adapt for that level of influx and ability.

What this means that really, the only conversation at this point falls back into the hands of that old chestnut, Steem Power. No matter what SMTs really do and how successful they could become, chances are that holding STEEM will still be valuable and usable for earning in a multitude of ways.

It is for these reasons that I do try to engage people, support people, retain people but at the end of the day, it is up to them as individuals if they want to actually do the growing amount of work it takes to earn on the platform. I say growing because at the moment as people are complaining about not earning enough, fast enough or easily enough, they have not seen anything yet.

This is a reminder to have what you want in this life, investments have to be made. It shouldn't create FOMO in people too much yet as there are still many good opportunities to build up a follower base, support and a significant STEEM wallet. What it should do though is to reiterate that there are large opportunities here if one is proactive and prepared enough to take the risk of losing all the energy they put into it.

Lose the entitlement and find who you are willing to become.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]