Something for everybody: Quality, value, spam... "Whatever"

Today, @taskmaster4450 wrote a post on quality and value and took some flack in the comments section from people who are not seeing the bigger picture. Having said that, @taskmaster4450 is wrong, it isn't quality or value, that is a false dichotomy, it isn't an either or situation.

What is Steem?

Steem is just a content delivery infrastructure that is tailored to just that, content. It doesn't judge, it doesn't upvote, it doesn't flag, it doesn't care what type of content it delivers at all. That is on us, the users.

One of the interesting factors of Steem is that for a community of people pushing decentralization, many seem to want yo have a catchall system that caters for and feeds them exactly what they want, no matter what they want. Now, Steemit.com is just such a system that delivers what everyone wants, just not the wants of any one individual. It is a catchall that is indifferent to the needs of anyone, no filters on posting, no algorithms to hide anything other than the community's capabilities to flag to remove reward or gray out. It satisfies - no one.

What people don't realize is that Steem being just a content delivery platform is actually no different to how the average user happily uses the internet now. An individual can go to Instagram and post a selfie, to BBC to read the news, take a link of interest over to Facebook to create a post, take an Imgur meme for a reply, start a thread on Reddit and write an article about it on Medium before sharing it to their Twitter followers. Of course, then kick back and finish the day with some porn.

Wake up

People don't seem to want to recognize that Steem can be all of those points and many more, including gaming, product hunts, scientific peer review, Government voting systems, news sites, chats... Anything that qualifies as content can be included. Currently, the range is relatively small but one of the problems is the workflow most have as they tend to use a catchall interface. Someone who surfs applications by content type might use it differently. At the moment, we don't have a wide enough range of services, or a community to populate them all.

When it comes to the question of quality, I would like to spend my time consuming quality articles that engage me and help me improve my life in some way. But, that doesn't stop someone else spending their time on a site that creates clickbait articles like, "You won't BELIEVE what she did!!" Nonsense. Yeah, that can be on Steem too.

When it comes to decentralization of service, a centralized news site is pulling in content from many sources simultaneously. The pictures load from one service, the adverts another, the story another. Each one of these services is getting paid for their role in keeping our eyes on to increase their Time on Site (TOS) numbers to increase ad revenues. Steem is just starting to get into these kinds of things with services like @dclick adding adverts into posts.

Application for content niche

The applications being built on Steem need to start differentiating themselves based on content rather than trying to cater to the entire community. The people who are posting commonly through @steemhunt might not (and don't need to) give a damn about what is posted onto @dtube in the same way that someone on Reddit does not need to care what a person is watching on Netflix on the other side of the world. All of this is content that can be delivered through the Steem network in various ways, and monetized by those who choose to.

This is the way the internet works but because people are narrowly focused on a catchall delivery system, they want to get righteous about what Steem should be. I know, I used to think the same when once upon a time I would sign my posts:

[ a SteemIT original ]

 
I was wrong, Steemit is just one face, Steem is a decentralized community that can have a massive number of faces, as many as we can possible create if we so choose. There can be @ dFromage to review and discuss fancy cheeses or, @ dShoes where one can have one-off shoes designed and tailor made. It doesn't matter. You might not want to talk about cheese but, it doesn't stop it from existing or, from being valuable to someone out there.

What is Steem again?

Before we can go mainstream, we who are here need to understand what Steem actually is, not what content it can hold. Steem is a rudimentary content delivery infrastructure that can be used to share content and distribute a token upon it in various ways. Sure, there are some other parts to it like immutability and censorship resistance, but all in all, there is nothing fancy about it . Oh, except like @transisto pointed out several times in the State of Steem comments section last night, the fast, frictionless, feeless, borderless transactional capabilities. Something the applications should be leveraging heavily as often as they can.

The argumentation about quality is impotent on a platform that is as potentially diverse as Steem, because with enough users, Steem is able to cater for everyone in as many increasingly granular niches as we the community choose to create. At the moment, no one is stopping anyone from entering into some areas of Steem and, no one is forcing anyone to read anything they don't want to read. Enough with the fake internet outrage and high-horsery please, as there are many other factors and challenges that need to be addressed before that devolution.

Not a catchall, a create-all

In my opinion, we need to stop seeing Steem as one thing and start visualizing it much more like the internet at large, which has all kinds of content with most being completely uninteresting and useless to a single individual. You might be interested in watching Two girls, one cup but it doesn't mean everyone has to be, nor does it have to appear at the top of Trending on @dtaste. This is the internet, Steem is the blockchained internet.

The communities are where the real power and value lays because it will be them who develop the applications and the content that populates it. A community can set various limitations on their app if they choose. For example, I can't submit a product hunt or a meme to @steemmonsters yet, they can all happily reside on the Steem blockchain without the blockchain giving a f^ck what it is.

If you want to produce what you consider quality (I try my best), then by all means do it. If you think posting memes will earn you access to votes, go for it. Sure, there are ramifications to what we create here but in time, if the applications do their job well by producing engaging and compelling experience for those they onboard, the market will decide what the value will be. After all, that is what markets are meant to be used for.

That is what your upvotes and flags are by the way; the market deciding. If you want different, surround yourself with different, create different and most of all, buy differently.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]