How Steem Has Squandered its Lead and How it Can Fix it
Last July we were ahead of the curve and massive adoption ensued. Three errors and how we can fix them:
Three crypto success factors
To be successful in crypto space you need to be easy to use, encouraged to hold, welcoming to newbies. We had all these in July and lost them due to code changes. Let's get them back!
What we had
We were the easiest to use. A name crypto address ( dash will add in a year or so). Login in from wherever through your browser. All you needed was Facebook or Reddit. Couldn't be easier.
incentive to hold Steem power allowed you to benefit from inflation and steem dollar interest was 10 percent. It made sense to buy steem power at least to see your votes mean something. You could also earn curation rewards if you were active on the platform.
Welcoming to Newbies before follow was added newbies made money on intro post. and randomn post would accumulate votes from those courting the new category or the active category.
Three changes
first the hack while a novel approach was ultimately adopted the forced crypto password took away ease of use. Now it's the hardest password. No one wants to do this. There must be a better way. New account growth slowed.
lower Inflation rate and abandon steem dollar
The inflation move took away incentive to stay in steem power.
It had to be done but it should have been replaced with other reasons to hold steem power. Now there was none and the exponential reward curve, identified universally as perhaps the #1 issue was never addressed until the whale expirement. The concentration of rewards and voting influence made steem a sellers market.
perhaps the bigger blunder was rate policy ant depreciating currency should use rates to create demand. Pivx pays 15-25 percent and yet our devs stopped increasinnrates at 10 percent. The steem dollar could have emerged as a real savings vehicle with higher rates, like pivx and dash (masternodes) have become. I agree the supply growth should have been cut when backing by steem declined but higher rates (paid in steem would have created demand for steem dollars. New comers would buy steem on open market just to buy steem dollars and earn 15-20 percent rates. Look at pivx. That's all they have and its skyrocketing. It's so much harder than steem dollars. ( also I would make pay daily or weekly or perhaps random to add gamification but more frequently than monthly.)
- follow was a disaster while it stared out very welcoming with itntro post well bid, the follow button sent everyone to a feed based not on shared topics but on friends. Is Facebook welcoming when you don't have friends? Of course not. People make friends with shared interest yet no two people are aligned. Follow encouraged voting for friends. This was exacerbated by the crazy reward curve. Exponential reward ensured newbies would almost never make anything. All this initiatives rose up (curie, etc) to find authors to recruitt to drain the reward pool. All this made it less welcoming to average joe. It also made t not worth it to even try. Posting activity went down, authors drained the platform.
So what now?
fix the freaking reward curve!
Everyone knows it's a problem. It's killing us. Why has it taken 9months to address. This will address incentive to hold and welcoming points above.
easy password
This is ridiculous . I guess it works but it's simply not woeth it. Perhaps make the crazy password needed for savings accounts or go to 16 word phrase or have a pool to repay those that are hacked. Get rid of the crazy password. Make things easier!
Use the steem dollar! what is this 1-2 percent interest in crypto. Make it competitive with pivx and people will buy steem just to get sbd. Make it 15-20 percent . People are taking. A huge risk holding this, pay them. Look at the ruble it's much more stable than sbd and can be used to pay taxes in one of the largest Coontries. Why should an expiremental currency have lower rate. Keep raising it till it trades at a premium to the dollar. 5 percent premium, 10 percent make it it a good deal. It should clearly be above a trading spread for someone buying it on bittrex or somewhere else. Make it trade at 1.1 to the dollar and watch steem soar. Come on this is economics 101.
Please these three things are so easy
It will market itself if it's easy, incentive to hold and welcoming.
Sorry for the rant.
You have made some very good points here.
SBD
In terms of basic economics, people expect to be rewarded for risk. SBD is risky, in an economic sense, and people would expect as a result to get a higher interest rate to compensate.
Steem Power
There is no benefit to hold Steem Power as far as I can see now. Unless you have thousands of dollars worth your voting power is not noticeable. Who is going to start out with crypto by investing thousands of dollars??? Without new people the platform will not grow.
New Users
The welcome now says "Your voice is worth something", I understand how Steemit works, and crypto but for the mainstream if they come they would take convincing and I am not sure they would not agree that their voice is worth something when an intro post will likely get a few cents now, or a maybe few dollars if you spend a lot of time on it and really open up. They gace it a try, it didnt live up to the what they were told. Why stay?
Passwords
The password is ridiculous. Have a vault where you can keep your savings with a hard password or better still a wallet for your computer where you can store your savings, but leave your liquid STEEM, SBD and your posting password easy to use and remember. (If you want to log in at work it's not possible now :) )
Ease of use
If you want to convert your money to fiat and buy yourself a treat after getting a big pay day on a post that you put blood sweat and tears into, it ain't easy! I am sure this will come in time, maybe just a symptom of being an early adopter but there are so many things which need to be on the list to make this easy to use that don't even seem to make the wishlist.
This isn't feasible. Because we're storing the hash and salt on a public blockchain, it's inevitable that your password will be cracked by desktop computers, just for fun. If Steem takes off and you are using a simple password you'll find yourself having to change it every couple of days merely due to trolls.
It would be a superior solution to do some kind of integration with LastPass, and encourage every user to save their keys in LastPass by default.
But I still prefer keys.
That's interesting but there must be an easy solution to the problem, maybe the best is keys.
Public blockchains do present a new challenge. Could an portion of the accounts be stored in an off chain database and users given the option of which to use? Hard password or easy.
An integration with LastPass would be the same thing in effect. It would be a third party backing up your password and allowing you access with a relatively simple one.
Sounds good to me.
You make some good points. I think I agree with you about the reward curve being an issue--I've never understood it, but people tell me it's nonlinear and puts exponentially more influence on the top holders. I personally like the follow function, as it allows me to see when other users I like have posted something new. I felt it was clunky to have to click on each individual tag. As for exacerbating the "I vote for friends" business, that's human nature. I'm finding that unless you make a point to reach out beyond your normal circle of friends, it won't happen consistently. Whales may have good intentions of voting for minnows, but they also need a plan for how they are going to do it on a consistent basis. You can read about my own plan here.
Agree . Follow could be good but it should not be center and default. And it should never have been done befor some kind of topic feed. It should be like the replies tab.
Good point about it being default. I hadn't thought of that. It might work best if the default was some kind of composite page made up of a combination of each user's favorite tags and some random stuff Steemit wanted you to see, sort of like the Stumble Upon concept. Then from there you could go to your feed or blog or whatever.
It would be a good idea if the default was a feed where you selected what topics interested you. Maybe this is something that apps like esteem or busy will be able to implement.
I saw an idea I like. Each tag should have a robot that resteems anything with that tag. Then you could follow any tags you want. Some authors maybe you only like half their contact so why should you have to follow them everywhere.