Spreading out as individuals together

At work, I go through phases where I am comfortable and think that I know what is going on and what seems a moment later, I am a gain lost - but this isn't all of my work experience as it is more nuanced than that. When it comes to the areas that I am just learning, the feeling of being lost is heavily influenced by the people who have been there longer and obviously know a great deal more than me but in the next breath, I can feel very confident again as I move across domains into one of my strength areas.

Tonight, I was with company colleagues from many departments for a quick afternoon round before we all broke away for Easter and by chance got talking to a person I haven't spoken with before but recently started a conversation with their department. A colleague from my own department joined the conversation a few minutes later and I think he was taken aback a little by the way we were talking.

I am in the training department but I am not only hired to be a product trainer as there are company growth plans, and I have some experience in helping such companies align their communication and focus their people to support and accomplish their goals. My colleague hadn't seen me talk to these types of people before and it was his turn to feel a little lost in the conversation even though we were talking about something that concerned him directly. I am going to get him up to speed on these areas though because he could be very good at it and there is a lot of work to be done.

This is the way it works though, we all have our strengths and if we are spending our time well, we are out of our comfort zones and feeling lost often enough that we are able to learn our gaps and pick up supportive and compounding skills. By surrounding ourselves with a diverse range of talents, we are able to leverage the knowhow of others and get coached at a practical level. This way, we improve and if we in turn offer our own skills, the relationships and eventually the entire ecosystem will raise. This is talent based collaboration but, not reliance as there is also skill transference.

What is interesting on Steem is that over the last several months collaboration is happening more and more and instead of projects going head to head to compete for the pool, they are pooling heads and resources and collaborating. I was listening to @fredrikaa and @starkerz on the MSP radio show with @pennsif and, they are sounding a lot more corporate than people once did.

Some want Steem to Go to the Moon but are not interested in the corporate side of the processes which is fine but, don't complain as the ecosystem changes courses. I say courses because people also forget that this is a decentralized ecosystem and while one group heads one way, another could head a completely different direction. While this would spell disaster for a company, on Steem this is what is necessary to spread risk and explore and, both groups can be highly successful.

This is the massive benefit of Steem as for example, while each application team has to get its ducks in a row to create a successful business model, all applications can operate on their own individual model that provides service for their users, clients and stakeholders without necessarily stepping on the toes of any other application.

Competing for the pool should never be the goal for applications whether for themselves or their users and instead, their process should be creating the most compelling user experience for those who utilize their product. With a compelling enough use case, the users will not only have opportunity, they will also enjoy having that opportunity. Enjoyment is sticky, as is earning but earning doesn't keep one attracted long-term because as soon as earnings dry up, users leave. People want to earn but, earning alone is not enjoyable for most.

Tell me, how many users do you think would delegate to a bidbot if there was a higher earning option for their stake? Well, remember that many of the early users on Steem got circle votes and would often say it is because they earned them because of their content and relationships but, when bidbots came they complained because they lost their votes as people delegated away. The votes they got were not because of relationship or content, it was because there was no other way of making more than that on the vote. The circles were the highest earners because they would vote on each other meaning it was a better return than curating random people who didn't have any SP to trade a vote back. Essentially, a circlejerk is a type of manual bidbot where the bid placed is a vote.

But, when there are compelling use cases people won't mind spending a little bit of value to buy their way in, just like me getting a HBO subscription to watch Game of Thrones. 10€ a month is about 25 Steem at the moment - pretty expensive if Steem was to go to 10 dollars, right? See, we don't think of fiat in that way because it is made to spend, not hold. @indigoocean brought this up in a comment last night as well talking about stable coins.

There are about 50,000 active users on Steem and I wonder what would happen if they cancelled all of their entertainment subscriptions and bought Steem instead every month, how much would it be? Let's say that on average there was 10 dollars a month on subscriptions, that would be 500,000 dollars or, 1.2 million Steem per month at the current prices. This year there will be 26 million Steem printed in the next year, meaning that the subscriptions could buy over half of it.

What kind of pressure would a compelling subscription model have on Steem? Potentially massive if they could only get a 100,000 people to buy a couple dollars worth a month. A compelling case will come where perhaps, users are rewarded with better content the more Steem they hold, not just what they are willing to pay. The subscription model could incentivize through buying in and holding for better options or cheaper subscriptions for holders or voters.

People love options and unlike the centralized platforms that are narrow in their usage and very expensive to change and reformulate without losing part of their user base, a decentralized system encourages this. A decentralized content delivery platform can offer the smallest niches use case as passionate developers can build for the markets of their choice.

They don't need to be mass appeal to create a mass amount of money - they just have to be compelling enough to attract users on a subscription model and be sticky enough not to churn them. This means - being personal and knowing the market well enough to provide well for them. All developers with the skills and drive should be looking to build for the people they know, the topics they love as it will be those niches who retain people who love them back.

We worry a lot about churn, we should be looking at retention instead. Rather than looking at who we lose, we should be discovering who we keep. If people have missed it, those that made it through the bear markets on Steem are among the most active, engaged and invested users the platform has ever seen.

While there is a lot touched on in this relatively short post, these things are very interesting for me even though I am uncomfortable with some aspects of them but, I am continually learning more. While I do falter from time to time in my patience with the platform and some of the things that go on here, I am unwavering on the chances of success that are facing Steem. While nothing is a given, I place Steem with favourable odds because like @theycallmedan said on MSP, Steem is one of the survivors of the long bear market, and as @acidyo said, many of the coins that Steem competed with in 2016 are near death floating in the 400-800 rankings.

Making it through to this point is an accomplishment in itself and that has taken a great many people working as individuals, teams and communities to support each other and in doing so, the entire ecosystem. When the prices start running up, these clusters of users are going to be vital for retaining new users long-term and it won't be because of their vote value as that has never been a retainer long-term - it will be because they are passionate Steem users who not only see the potential for themselves but can demonstrate it for others.

Lots of good here, plenty more on the way.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]