Looking forward to communities, back at socks

Once communities really drop into the Steem ecosystem and get rolling, I am hoping that the transactions on the blockchain will increase enormously once people do not have to be concerned with their single blog. Up until now, those who have wanted to separate content out based on topic have had to create alternative accounts in order to do so, and we saw an explosion of these once the Steem-Engine tribes entered the scene.

I would predict that a majority percentage of churned accounts on Steem were actually alts, including many of the ones that were created during the late 2017/18 highs as people looked to "capitalize" on the opportunity and use alt accounts to extract more value from the blockchain. You know, quality like this from people already earning far too much. The comments on the last post are funny.

Remember that back then there was no EIP in play, which meant that there was no incentive to flag (that is what it was called at the time) as it incurred a direct cost on the ability to upvote that would cost some significant amounts of fiat. Yeah, that account only took 1500 Steem or so, but it was worth a lot more in dollar value and only has 8 SP now, much like its owner who is still one of the most over rewarded content creators on the platform and has been for three years and has taken hundreds of thousands of STEEM off to market, but only holds a few thousand Steem and is still powering down - and cries to whoever will listen about getting downvoted.

You can see this here:

from @penguinpablo's reports

While the hype did bring a lot of new users into the platform, I suspect that what it mostly brought in was a lot of new alts, which can be seen in that massive and rapid spike area just as prices boomed. Just think how long it was taking Steemit Inc to approve accounts, and then how many joined in a flurry - news doesn't travel that fast for onboarding. As prices dropped (but were still around the 3 and 4 dollar mark, people suddenly "stopped joining" even though there were plenty of fiat rewards still to be had. I think the numbers of new accounts of the time are overstated and a lot fewer people have "left Steem" than the numbers indicate.

There is no way to truly know at this stage, though what I think is that people already had enough alts created and were happily abusing all the way down the price slide. However, once the effort was "too much trouble" for what it was worth, they slowly stopped posting and returned to their main accounts alone or drifted away completely.

While this is in the past, what I am hoping is communities and SMTs will help combat some of this kind of churn by allowing for a separation of content on the one account. Of course, it won't stop the abuse, but the EIP will still be in place to restrict it on Steem and the owned communities and SMT will have the responsibility to look after their users the UX, which will include policing and moderation.

I know that for me, I am looking forward to being able to mix up my content creation and add a lot more content transactions to the blockchain, but I am not going to do that until there is that separation from my core blog area. The reason is that once I am able to share content across communities, I am able to provide more tailored content for my audience in the niches that I and they are interested in.

While there are plenty of people interested in crypto and Steem related content, those same people are perhaps not interested in my poetry or fiction. The niche of crypto content is actually relatively small, but it is also naturally where a lot of the larger stakeholders and investors are, so it tends to get rewarded. Luckily for me, it is an area I enjoy adding my perspective toward, even if the group who appreciate the effort is relatively small.

"Small" is not a problem when it comes to communities and once they get into the swing of things, there can be all kinds of communities that form around niche content and perhaps rather than each create a token, some may choose to join forces and have a multi-niche token on separated interfaces to create cross-over demand. Of course, they can configure the token and manage the experience as they choose without stepping on any toes then.

What I do know is that Steem is a very strange place at times, but the behaviors exhibited on the chain are not unique to Steem itself - people are human. This needs to be factored into the experiences of the future and while people think that we should be Facebook already, the complication of having value available is a massive one that drives all kind of negative human trait behaviors, like greed.

Human behavior isn't going anywhere an no matter what happens on Steem, there will always be individuals who will attempt to take as much as they can, even if it is not in the best interest of the long-term success of the platform and themselves.

We all act as humans, 50% of us are below average at it ;D

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]