Leveraging Steem clones for lower development costs

There are quite a few Steem clones out there these days which are all essentially the same as Steem in the early days with various tweaks. For example, smoke.io has 50/50 curation and has recently introduced an advertising model. While some people see these platforms as competition for Steem, it actually depends on how one looks at it from a development perspective as essentially, each can trial various aspects to try and improve distribution or empower their community that Steem cannot at this time.

For users who missed out on Steem's beginning or squandered the opportunity, they might actually find new homes that are more suitable to them on other platforms, is this a bad thing for Steem, I don't think so but, it is interesting. Over the last few months I have read of people going over to these platforms yet, here they are still on Steem too.

What is going to be very, very interesting later is that these Steem clones don't actually move very far away from Steem in many aspects which may mean that a development application designed for Steem could be implemented on any one of the clones with minor tweaks. This could mean that the better the clones do, the better the applications are able to do also as they will have access to some very distributed communities that are potentially plug and play for their app. This will be the same with the interfaces that could essentially leverage their Steem development and provide service to many communities.

Here are a couple of the clones:

One thing that I do find interesting from many of the users who move over to other platforms is that (especially for the older users) they like the simplicity of the system, they like that whaleshares feels like 'old Steem'. What people forget is that old Steem changed under various community pressures over time so expecting these clones to stay the same as they are now is an interesting approach considering that history predicts otherwise.

What is good is that how these platforms develop is going to have continually new learning from the past and from each other. Much of Steem's development was at the front of the industry which meant it hadn't been tried in this way before. This obviously means that there is a high chance for error or less than productive development but, the lessons from the past need not be repeated over and over.

This is also something that users of these systems should take into account as if they leave Steem to join one of the others and act in the same way they have been on Steem, the chance of them ending up in the same place as they are here is high. A lot of users aren't interested in the inner workings of the technology here but, the developers of the other platforms are and will likely follow a similar development tract into the future, albeit somewhat tweaked.

If you have a look at the Trending page of Whaleshares for example, you will see many familiar names and, in the development teams, witnesses and most other areas. How different are they when all the same users are there across all of those platforms, many sharing the same content, this happens on smoke also to some degree except, due to it being niche content, much less.

What this means is that all of these various platforms are both decentralization forms of Steem and, the community itself. Some of these will onboard new users who have never heard of Steem , and since they all have their own tokens, they kind of work like interface SMTs already. I am not a developer but this seems like an opportunity, as like the users who are cross-posting content, it will be possible to cross-application develop. Perhaps in this way the applications can reduce their funding requirements as most of the development is already done.

This may be a negative for Steem (I don't think so) but as far as the decentralization of Steem and the concept of content rewarding platforms go, this is a positive step forward. What would be interesting to see although maybe not possible, is how much overlap between the communities there really is. I do see familiar names that appear on every new platform that pops up. I wonder how many of them will take the opportunity to stake themselves in to 'early Steem' and how many are there just to cash out continually like they have done here. For many of the highly staked on Steem, they are also highly staked on some of the other platforms too, many at a higher percentage than they are on Steem.

Again, I don't know how easy or hard it is to develop across these platforms but it is something to think about for developers as essentially they can gain access to many communities and potentially set up one platform with multiple sign ins that will direct users to various skins and algorithms depending on their sign in point.

Just some quick thoughts before they slip from my head due to the medication fog.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]