An Open Letter to Steemit Gods, Dan in Particular Are You Trying to Build the Buzzfeed of the Blockchain?
Does Steemit want to be the Buzzfeed of the Blockchain world, because without residual payouts, that's exactly what will happen!
I understand that a major tectonic shift took place and very few are even aware of it. I know I am not the only one with the understanding that long term content monetization was the goal of this platform.
But, looking for information to share with others trying to build something lasting here, I found this post: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/267
I'm pretty sure no one that matters will ever even see this, but they should. As a writer, I have all kinds of easier places to make a few bucks off of creating fresh content day after day, at guaranteed rates.
That is not why I came here!
*If you are looking to create that kind of site, fine, but understand this, anyone with a brain and half an ounce of writing talent won't stay. Good luck with the beginners and scam artists that will become the new denizens, because there are too many other places to write for one time money. *
##Perhaps this is just my bad and I have spent the last four days trying to crack a code that has little use for me as a creative writer, not interested in Buzzfeed quality post creation. ##
Here is the change I am referring to: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/267
The way I see it, the potential for this as a content publishing platform is extremely limited if it's one or two payouts and done.
I can sell my work for one time money anywhere. In fact, it's what I do every day. The biggest reason I came to steemit, and obviously, the steem world does not revolve around me, was residual payouts.
**Here are the problems I see for writers if the platform only pays out twice. **
- You either get the attention you need in 12 hours, or your screwed. This might not be a problem if you're prepared to produce schlock daily for a living. I'm not.
- This platform creates a searchable record of that content that could outlast the author. There are several problems with this, if it is not possible to generate ongoing income.
- There's an awful lot of people counting on the fact that evergreen content will be a staple in the future, this will never be true in this environment, with 30 day max revenue development.
I don't really see an upside for authors to continue producing content on this platform if this is the way it is
- Why buy a book from Amazon, if that book is already shared free on Steemit?
- Why purchase other content from an interesting writer, if a huge volume of it is free on steemit?
- Why should we continue sharing anything on Steemit with potential future value? The answer is, there is no reason.
I don't understand the intricacies of the blockchain and the problem of storage. I realize that.
I am not arguing, even, that this is not fair. This platform is the property of those that built it, the same as Facebook, or Twitter. What I am saying is, author beware, this may not be what you think it is and some of you already have a lot of content here, searchable forever.
I wonder if authors like @EricVanceWalton are even aware of this change?
He has already posted the first chapter of his novel. I wonder if he knows, the first payout and one more are all that first chapter is worth? Hardly the revenue one could hope for from 100k sales, or more.
But again, why would anyone buy it, if its on Steemit for FREE??
Maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill, and I am sure that no one of substance will probably even see this, but, I think authors deserve to know that the game has changed and it might not be as steady, or ongoing as they are hoping it would be.
If you find this doesn't work for you either. I suggest you post about it. Again, this is not a complaint, the developers can do what they want, now it's up to me to decide, is this worth it or not?
Personally I think authors should get residual income, otherwise it's bullshit (just my honest opinion). Plus it can be a competition vector to say "hey, we made something like steemit, but we improve on it by also paying residual". I wouldn't leave that door open.
Now, I've gone over the github discussion. Two points
a) RAM issues. I don't understand how it is possible to have a blockchain sitting at 2gb and this requiring ...7gb of ram to handle it. Something is messed up in the software (?) and it should be fixable.
b) Absence of any mention of reward-scaling problem. What I mean by that is that the major hurdle of Steem is how to scale rewards along with the userbase. If we want to have, say, similar rewards to what we currently have, then that means 1000x userbase (70mn) requires 1000x marketcap (200bn USD). Now this is extremely difficult to happen because the explosive userbase growth cannot be shadowed by a similar marketcap increase (in all probability). So what we have instead is, say, a 1000x userbase and a 10-20-50x in marketcap, which effectively slashes the avg reward per person by 100/50/20. This problem is very severe and actually punishes Steemit for becoming successful due to the diminishing rewards. If you then start paying the old content, which as time progresses forward will dwarf the new content, then the payouts for new content would be so tiny that nobody would even bother. So there would have to be some type of percentage allocated (like 10-20-30% for old content) so as not to entirely drain the rewards for new posts. But even at 70-90% of the reward pool allocated for new posts, the problem will be severe if the userbase goes up significantly.
I think the rewards will scale downward, as a certain amount of steem is released each day and competed on by those posts. This amount increases as the pool grows, but only on an annual basis, from what I understand, so the $10k post will eventually be a thing of the past, except in rare occasions.
It's kind of mathematically inevitable that it will happen... in a sense, the big payouts right now are an anomaly precisely due to the small userbase.
Which is fine, but if I could count on a couple of bucks a month from an article, or story, that could really add up quickly.
Indeed. That's why the 30-day cutoff hurts.
This has been my biggest concern in publishing on Steemit. I'm glad I'm not the only one. The fact that we can't delete content means that we really do only get 12 hours to make it worth it.
I don't mind if it's a short story here and there that was written for the sole purpose of finding an audience and hopefully making back its editing fees, but I was hoping this might be a place to publish ongoing comic book pages, serialised novels, etc, and the one pay and done model sells the artist incredibly short.
When I write a novel I hope that it will make me and my family money even after I'm dead. That's one of the single benefits of spending hours and hours and hours pouring your life onto the page. The idea that you're investing in the future, and not just trying to get enough to pay rent for that single month.
What I saw here was the ability to build income in the three ways that are recommended : immediate, residual, and investment, all rolled into one. I think it's short sighted if they don't find a way to quickly correct this error. The only way to make money here on a regular basis until they do is to crank up the content production and hope that you cant then publish it somewhere else without suffering for having it here already. Sites like Wattpad are built on the backs of writer slaves who get nothing for it, does Steemit really want to be that kind of site? They talk about it, as if the site is contributor owned, but only a few months in, the top voters have thousands of times more power than newbies, meaning that whatever gets done, there's little chance of it changing.
We have to acknowledge that there are limitations to the voting payout model. Without setting finite bounds, voting on all historic proposals indefinitely introduces complexity that grows as a hyperbola. It approaches infinity quickly and is not sustainable.
The white paper correctly identifies problems with traditional models of reward as well as experimental models such as tipping. All these models have some limitation, so why not apply them where they are appropriate when another model is not? This is a problem that needs to be solved, and voting is not the only tool at our disposal.
It would be quite easy for Steemit to introduce tipping for posts that have gone beyond the payout period but where users still wish to reward the creator. It's possible now, just awkward.
Similarly, loathe as I am to suggest it, the SteemIt website itself could place ads on the pages of older posts from users who opt in. The revenue could be shared between the creator and the site. The user thus pays with their attention.
I'm not at all in favor of ads, because ads quickly become competing content and make the newsfeed unbearable. There is a vast gulf, however, between an arbitrary 30 days and infinity. Also, a mechanism whereby any post that never earned a payout, or even earned a certain number of upvotes is dead in 90 days. No reason to keep everything for ever, but those posts that the community got behind shouldn't end their usefulness as revenue earners. They stay here forever,which would be great, if they could make a little, but as it stands, I can't go and sell something that is already here very well, consequently, I'll be creating disposable content for the most part, until this changes.
It would also be really easy to implement Steem-Patreon, without the huge fees of that platform.
This is a very important point. I have personally brought it up and a number of other people including @smooth have also discussed it.
I have yet to hear from any of the team such as @dantheman or @ned addressing this. As someone who creates art myself the current 30 day limit is quite disheartening.
I think for many professional artists and content creators this could be a deal breaker that will put them off posting their work on Steemit. I am not just talking particularly about big name artists to whom even the largest Steemit payouts will seem like peanuts.
I am talking about those artists and creators who consider their work to be timeless. I think the vast majority of artists think that way. The whole attraction of Steemit is monetising content but if that monetisation is so fleeting what is the point.
Some pieces of work can take weeks or months of preparation to create. It just would not make sense to have to forget about them after 30 days.
It essentially incentivises people to produce cheaper, more rushed work with transient value that will not stand the test of time.
Since these things are stored permanently on the blockchain it will not reflect well on Steemit if most of the work falls into this category.
Indeed this kind of thing encourages the mercenary posting of plagiarised content since the real artists will likely stay away and the scammers will try to take advantage of that - make some money and run.
It is worth the risk for them and the 30 day issue encourages it.
Just today I have seen more examples of this kind of plagiarism via newly formed accounts. Luckily they were caught by community vigilance but that will not catch all of them.
Anyway I hope the team listen and solve this issue.
Timeless? there's a vast gulf of difference between timeless and getting two tiny windows, spaced thirty days apart, for content that stays on the block chain, to be profited from, virtually forever. Other revenue sharing sites do this as a matter of course. It makes no sense to me.
So, there are a couple of comments on here I can't see, one of them mentions the technical challenges, here's a comment on the github post I referenced in the article, perhaps you could address this, again, this is not my comment:
@theoreticalbts Uhm, not buying this part one bit...
I call shenanigans because the very principle of a blockchain is that it is able to archive everything starting at the very beginning from whence it came. If the problem is simply indexing it in a database then making it easier to query with less stress on your server, maybe it's time to put some of the massive amounts of reserved capital to good use, and make use a data center like every other major platform of this proposed magnitude. The entire "print" library of congress would fit into 15TB and all of twitter from it's inception would fit into 20TB.
Source : The Library of Congress Article On Digital Preservation
Saying it's a memory issue is simply a cop out and a total attempt to convince the less tech savvy that long term accessible storage is expensive, RAM is out of the question, processors are unattainable, and that renting or maintaining a server rack is an unreasonable expectation. The Steemit blockchain does not store pictures, audio, video or anything that is storage intensive right now. Having personally analyzed the blockchain, as of right now it only stores plain text.
I'm not buying it for one second. If that was truly a real issue, then big data centers couldn't exist because they would simply be too cost prohibitive which they obviously are not. Nice try on using a false scapegoat as a cop-out excuse, but anyone here who has any experience with big data knows that :
The above statement simply is not true.
Feeding people BS however, IS counterproductive. I store the entire Steemit blockchain on a flash drive right now. In fact I can fit the entire 2 years worth of the Ethereum blockchain on a flashdrive right along side Steemit's and still have room for plenty of future blocks from both chains.
I'm not buying this excuse for even a nanosecond, and neither will anyone one else with common sense and even a basic understanding of how big data works...
The commenter doesn't know what he is talking about. Steem blockchain is based on Graphene which works differently than other blockchains: https://bitshares.org/technology/industrial-performance-and-scalability/
Okay, why was that choice made if other block chains are so easy and affordable to scale up?
Other blockchains are not easy and affordable to scale up. That's the problem that Graphene has solved.
So then he does know what he's talking about and storage is not the issue? You seem to be making contradicting statements here.
I agree the payout should remain live as long as the content is up. It could be reduced some after a certain period of time, but I don't think the content should lose its value for upvotes after 30 days.
The "content" is always up, and cannot even be edited past the first payout. Why do you feel payouts should be reduced? I don't think repeat votes should be allowed if that is your concern. One vote per account, per piece, in one round of upvoting. There's really no reason content should not compete again against incoming new content for payouts. It would incentivize quality talent. What do you see as the need to dissipate earnings past 30 days,if content doesn't draw new fans, that would happen naturally.
I agree!
Yep. Now I just have to figure out how to get to that big payout for a few weeks before I invest it all into something better.
I already completed step 1. Now working on step 2.
Btw, someone has mentioned that perhaps the Graphene blockchain can't handle the load to keep content voting open ended.
You also find my discussion else where relevant.
Yes, I heard that, but then was told that graphene is, in fact, more robust than other options. Sigh... once again, art held hostage to technology, I guess. LOL
I'm working on it.
These are fair criticisms coming from a content producer, but there are real technological challenges that need to be properly handled.
Such as? I've heard the storage argument already, but I also saw it refuted. This was already the case,before it was changed to take it away. Please, give me one good reason. What benefit to the platform can there be for deincentivizing quality writers to stay and make their homes here?
The storage argument fails because it assumes that there is no difference between storing certain database information in RAM vs. the hard drive.
What would need to be done is to re-design the database so that not all of it needs to be stored by everyone. Say 3-4 pieces that are redundant, different overlaps between witnesses, etc. But this is challenging, coding-wise, not to mention an issue once scaled beyond that.
I don't disagree that this is a problem, and I think that there may be a solution. But we need to figure out how to approach it.
Requiring everyone to have 32 TB of RAM (TB not GB) is far from a solution.
What could be done is a type of 'rolling database' on what is to be paid out that day, but it would require some additional tweaks to the protocol.
Say that you do monthly payouts for all posts. After the first payout, you fix the 'payout time'. Then, all you have to do is a pre-fetch of the info stored on the harddrive to RAM so that it can be properly processed at the right time. Say, you do a pre-fetch 5 minutes before. After the monthly payout happens, the current queue slowly drains and refills itself, as it drains, it rewrites the fixed monthly payout queue and adds any new posts into this setup.
In this scenario, you wouldn't be storing everything in memory all at once, and you'd probably have negligible amount of posts that are in the same 5 minute window, given that it is a 5 minute window for one month.
You may hit peaks, depending on user activity, but I think the amount in memory would still be low.
I can't imagine what happens if steemit becomes the 1/10th the size of Facebook.
I've been using Steemit for four days now so I fully understand it :)
I think it is absolutely amazing but agree with you that it is being shaped into an overnight hit contest, and that quality content that deserves to be rewarded for years is not going to be with the current set up. I hope they change that, and make the payouts continue for all up-votes, indefinitely.
I readily admit I don't get it. But there are guys on here spilling good stories that could be making residual income for them, as Ebooks on a thousand other platforms and that value will be diluted by the fact that it can be had for free, forever, with no hope of any revenue past 30 days in. Not what I signed on for, what about you?
Well that may be true for people who write for a living and who have the talent for it. I for one am not a talented writer , I don't really think I could come up with something that could give me residual income and I think most of the people here are in my same position. You are only right if you already have something in the market and it is selling. For aspiring writers I think this is a great platform, they could make some money, make themselves a name and eventually move on to fame outside of Steemit.
That sounds good, gduran, but, as a professional writer, let me tell you, unless you find a way to build residual income, such as book sales, a subscription based blog, or something like this, it's not as easy as it sounds. It's a constant starting over. What you describe is not effected one way or the other. You could do that before the residual payments stopped, you can do it now, but that could happen almost anywhere. Good luck to you, and a bit of advice, brand yourself now, build a blog, and share some links here, because when this is no longer enough, you will need to have built a bridge for any audience you've built here to follow you out into the wide world, where the competition is a hell of a lot stiffer for attention than here.