Rage against the dying of the light
70% of staff of Steemit inc. have been dismissed recently. Only the core team is still there. What a tragedy! Even though they did nothing wrong, they still had to go.
It happened because the operating costs have gotten higher and higher, but the only source of income was to sell STEEM @ whatever price the market displayed. This is clearly due to mismanagement. Every 8 year old kid will tell you, that if your costs keep increasing and the earnings keep shrinking (steem is down to 40 cents), you will go bankrupt someday.
What bothers me the most is, that it would have been so easy to cover all operating costs and payslips. Steemit.com is lucky to have very high traffic everyday. Just showing 1-one single ad on top of the trending, new and hot page would have easily earned them another 4-10 million USD per year. Whoops!
Even though the situation @ steemit inc. has never been worse than today, STEEM is still the best blockchain. There is no other chain that has accomplished more. I hope that they quickly learn from this massive failure by reducing costs and getting several new streams of income.
All this is very bad news and may create additional FUD. I don't want STEEM to die like some shitcoins, but I am already mentally prepared for STEEM to crash to 5 cents because of this mess... They need to get their shit together fast.
I think this can only be avoided, if bitcoin starts a new rally in early 2019. And it is not looking like that's going to happen in Q1.
But, I am going to stick with STEEM anyway. "If you are going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start." "Without friction there is no growth"...
The active users will probably start to decrease now and only the core cummunity might be staying for the vision, and not for profit.
Let's use this mess for a restart:
My call for action:
- lower the operating costs significantly.
- Get different streams of income for steemit inc to cover the costs of servers and payslips; just selling steem @ whatever price is a totally unsustainable business plan.
- Realise that it is in fact unsustainable and act upon that knowledge.
- Reveal an updated course and vision for steem an steemit inc.
- Get the laid off team back on board.
- Focus more on steem and bring in investors once SMTs are ready.
- Create lots of collaborations with other companies (not necessarily crypto companies) Quora would be a perfect fit for example:
Quora is a magnificently brilliant and simple site, where people post questions, and provide answers to others’ questions - for free. Why not tokenize this? This site has 190 million users...
STEEM has so much potential to change the world for the better. I can see it very clearly. Let's not waste this opportunity of a lifetime...
Great breakdown and suggestions, @ew-and-patterns. Can agree to everything except for Quora. It's an extremely politically biased site. Driving traffic to them would allow them to perpetuate their agenda. We deserve better. Also, we need to get rid of the massive control some have to wreck other steemians. That is what has likely driven off as much as the economically manipulated steem economy.
Yes, somebody should come up with a clever solution to the downvoting problem. But that is not the highest priority on the list.
Thanks for the comment. What do you mean by politically biased? And can you give an example?
Biased towards the mainstream narrative. If they weren't biased, they wouldn't survive in the world of manipulated algorithms and rigged trending sections. Surely you've seen this pattern? Don't really have the time or motivation to provide examples. That would require spending even more extremely perishable time on their site. Time not well spent, lol.
And the servers only cost them $2 million. This alone should solve the problem. One thing I've come to realize in my life is that those who jump in and at least do something tend to do much better than those who just sit back and try to come up with the perfect plan.
The ad solution can be implemented in a matter of days. There are also little things like this: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@vimukthi/steemit-improvement-proposal-cosmetic-upvote-feature-to-replace-bid-bots-and-fund-blockchain-development
Good suggestion. There are so many little things that could be improved. The frist thing that needs fixing is the finance though. I want the steemit.com interface and steemit inc to survive this bear market, whatever it costs. The ad thing is an easy fix and it would not diminish the user experience at all. Even reddit shows one ad on top of some (all?) subreddits.
Let's not forget that Steemit Inc can vet all those ads. They can also give free or discounted slots for other projects (Tron, Byteball etc.) for collaboration efforts. Devs were going for the right thing with SMTs. But they have no business sense.
In this new market, any decision can backfire later on, so I get that they try to minimize risk by making fewer big choices, especially of who to cooperate with. The best business decision now is not automatically the best decision longterm.
I don't think they have the capacity to think through what pros and cons different projects might have. They do what they do best, coding.
Let's hope it will get better and steemit will become stronger. I really believe in this project.
I think that a positive side of all of this will be the fact that the community will start to take over more of the blockchain governance and make it more decentralized so that no single group can influence too much. While it will take some time, I think there is much talent here to figure it out.
Posted using Partiko iOS
I posted a similar article...I fully agree with you.
Mismanagement case, for sure.
Anyway, I think we can survive if we finally organize ourselves independently from Steem Inc. actions.
We will become better, Sure.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Interesting, if they would allow advertsing soon combined with some increase in the market it could turn very quickly, let’s hope they make some better decisions soon.
Won’t be selling my Steem either at this point, think as long as it holds above .20 will be ok in the long run.
I really enjoyed this article.
There are 1-2 Points which can make a new bull run in Q1, but if this will not start, than we will see the lower points as you mentioned. Good Artikel
Things are looking pretty bleak but I am still here chugging along with the connections that I have made so far :-D There needs to be more user engagement however, since I rarely get commenters on my posts in this bear market but would constantly have people comment in the bull market.