The many faces and future places of Steem

Early on in my Steem journey I set targets for my content, some were earning targets like many might aim for, but there were other things too and while I went about my day, I would find all kinds of topics I would want to write about. I still do.

The content targets were driven by my own experiences and, I consciously chose to look at my world with the purpose of writing about it. What I quickly found was not only was I more aware as to what was gong on around me and therefore living what I consider a richer experience, writing allowed me the mental space and energy to process what I had experienced, time to think about how and why I felt what I did, thought how I did it and consider my own judgments along the way. This has been quite a journey of discovery through writing and I believe that I know myself much better as well as the world I inhabit much better for it.

One problem I did face however was, "post a max of 4 times a day" which was actually the rule when I first started here. The problem was that I could quite happily post twice that based on the notes I would take throughout my travels. I used to use Wordpress to store my notes and flesh out content from, and I literally have thousands of drafts sitting in there still, many of which never saw the light of blockchain.

The reason for the post limitation was that it was seen that someone couldn't put together more than four decent posts in a day and those that did, were often discovered to be spinners and plagiarists. The other reason was that people wouldn't support as auto voters at the time were less sophisticated than now and couldn't limit the votes on an author. This meant there was a lot of "auto vote abuse" going on where people would take advantage of unaware auto voters. Many of the people who acted like this are not here now, some still are.

But, this is a social blockchain and since most users are accustomed to "normal" social media usage, the idea of post quality goes out the window. I am wondering if with the coming hardfork where author rewards will be diminished to favor curators equally and 10% of the allocation will go to the SteemDAO - 65% of the pool instead of 75% - Will people post more to try and maintain reward levels.

For some, this might work if they are able to produce content that gets supported well often, but for others increasing posting will drop them off the radar of curators, especially if it is obviously posting for reward without adding much of value. On Steem. But, off Steem I think that through the "extended tokenized applications" of SCOT and SMTs, there will be more chance to use Steem as a more traditional social media, with shitposts and quality mixed in together.

Steem is a content delivery blockchain and it doesn't care what it delivers, but it is also powered with an economy through staked voting and a community with stake that chooses what gets rewarded. This means that there is a lot of factors that get considered in making a voting decision, not just the content itself. However in general, fast content like random photos make less than longer form content, but that might change.

With the tribes and future communities being monetized on their own tokens, it is up to them to create an experience that suits their audience and while on Steem stakeholders have the stake to redirect the stream of Steem away from content they don't think deserves it, a front end might encourage just that kind of content. This is quite a brilliant function as it can roll all social experiences like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Medium into one, without stepping on each other's toes - while still being able to interact on Steem together.

With the coming free downvotes it is possible that content has a lot of token stream directed toward it on one platform, but directed away from it on another. If communities are looking to build a niche experience for their uses, it is up to the community to make sure that their pool is rewarding what they want to see more of. This has previously been a problem on Steem to sort as while some people think some content is worthy, others think it is undeserving.

However, Steem the blockchain doesn't care either way, it is completely impartial to content type, form or quality. This is important too because it means that any community can utilize the Steem blockchain to build and reward their userbase without encroaching on other communities at all. Perhaps at some point, the frontend visibility of Steem disappears completely as it becomes so cluttered with all types of content it is unusable.

If those remember the speed and the quality of the content that ran through the "New" tab when prices were up at their peaks, you might remember how useless that tab actually is to find anything. While it has slowed down during the bear market, it is useless because it is filled with actichrist reports and previously, drugwars battles.

But for the creatives and lovers of niche and exclusive communities, these changes can be a boon for their creative juices as no longer will people be punished for their poor content, on the interfaces that welcome what they have to offer. This means that there could be a tokenized community of blurry phone photo connoisseurs who can consume smudgy pictures of cats to their hearts desire and upvote them with all their stake without fearing retaliation.

Again, this is something that people are not recognizing with the downvote mechanism as they are still seeing Steem as a singular experience, rather than a multiple of experiences all with their own economic processes and preferences. Of course, if you want to earn Steem - it is the Steem stake that has sway but, that stake has no control over any other token - unless they earn or buy and powerup for that particular niche.

This is a hard pill for many to swallow of course, because over the last three years we have been conditioned to value Steem tokens and therefore have more of an affinity with them than a new token with an unknown future. Just remember, Steem started with no history, as did Ethereum, as did Bitcoin. What makes a token valuable is the community who decides it holds value.

For me, I am a collector of Steem as am a supporter of the underlying protocol that facilitates the interactions above it and, I believe that from this position, Steem has a great deal of potential. But, many tokens that are or will arrive on the Steem blockchain have potential too and, they could outpace the value growth of Steem if they manage to get traction.

With the coming communities, it will be a relatively painless process for anyone to build and own a monetized community, adjust the economics, empower users and for those who are able to get attention and traction, make a veritable shitload of value. All of this while giving an ownership and platform for expression to people of like mind and preference. The potential for small, medium and large existing communities on traditional content management systems to integrate Steem into their experience is massive.

This is why I do not understand why so many of the content creators are so upset about the changes in the economics as what it is essentially doing is encouraging investors and curators to secure the chain so that a great deal of opportunity can be built upon it. While I do understand that it feels like a very hard loss, I believe that a secure chain that encourages development upon it through the SteemDAO will completely shift the potential for creatives of all kind to not only get rewarded, but build economies that they can actually work in to earn and own.

For three years Steem has been doing this and while it has had a great deal of failure in the way it has managed distribution, each tokenized community gets to reimagine what works for them specifically without having to worry about pleasing everyone in the entire community, which is always a losing game as it is creating a horse buy committee and ending up with a cow.

The tokenized communities don't take away from Steem, and Steem adds value to them through resource credits, stability, security and speed. In time, there will be many tokens riding along the Steem blockchain and each will have a value assigned it by the community that uses and markets it. Some might be a group of 1000 people who love collecting stamps, another could be a group of a million who like to shout about extreme politics - the value of the token is not made by the numbers, it is the demand and if the stamp community can offer what stamp collectors find valuable, they could outstrip the million people screaming in worth.

What I believe is that while the hf21 might interrupt, disrupt and annoy many people on Steem, it will create a dynamic that encourages more and more communities to own and tokenize themselves. Soon after this hardfork, I am hoping the next with delegation pools, communities and SMTs follow and then, another with a complete toolbox for creating, onboarding and tokenizing any community on the internet, new or existing.

Creativity comes in many forms and of the greatest talents we have as humans is the ability to build tools that we can use to meet our needs. We do not need to make more atomic bombs - but we do need to find ways to empower us again as the builders and thinkers we have evolved to be. While people focus on the economic loss of the moment, they might miss the massive opportunities of the ones to follow.

The frontends have already facilitated a shift in content creation and the hardfork is set to push this further along the chain - 3 seconds at a time. It has never been a better time to be a content creator on the internet than it is today and this is still the just the beginning.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]