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RE: The Perfect Steemit Pitch and My Steemit Strategy
Great stuff. My only minor quibble would be with your claim that there's no possibility for censorship. It's true that nothing can be kept off of the blockchain, but it's very easy and common to censor content on the steemit platform... and I'll even say that it's a good thing. A truly uncensored alternative will likely come along soon and I expect it to be a disaster.
I think of that as "curated" not censored :)
I totally get your point though.
I asked this same question below. I've seen several people downvoted away because they were major trolls. Trolls need to be downvoted away.
Yup. It's just part of good curation.
So we're saying that there is some blurry line between censorship and curation, the posts, comments and content that is "pseudo-censored" is at the bottom at the barrel due to the process of curation. They are there but not on top as long as we do our jobs.
I think that this is a 100% valid argument, but I also think it is a largely semantic one that doesn't really belong in a pitch. A reasonable argument can also be made that this is NOT censorship but curation (as @clevecross pointed out). All speech remains publicly available on the blockchain. In addition, "real" censorship (it could be argued) is done by governments, and that too seems nearly impossible on Steemit. That being the case, telling people that "censorship is impossible" (which I still think is technically true) is a far more compelling pitch than, "well you can say whatever you want, but if it's so offensive that a majority of users or power users can hide your speech..." Normal humans (as well as legal institutions, though few of us are a fan of those ;) ) tolerate a certain degree of "puffery" in advertisements which I believe this falls well within. If when pitching people have questions about the censorship (which they almost always do) I use that as an opportunity to explain the way that speech is curated and hidden by the crowd so as to avoid spam and abusive speech and how crowdsourcing prevents the process from being corrupted. So I largely agree with you guys, I would just say that everyone understands that the rules are different in pitches. They understand that precision is sacrificed for brevity. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, I'll certainly keep an eye on this, but currently I think that this is only an issue for people who prefer hyper-technical detail (like myself actually), as opposed to most people who just want the meat and potatoes of a point.
Right. What I meant is that because it's a complicated and controversial point, it might be best to just leave it out of the pitch entirely... I certainly don't go there when explaining it for the first time.
I think that's reasonable, but then you're eliminating from the pitch one of the most innovative and compelling aspects of the platform. Definitely think it comes down to personal choice and subjective determinations. But in my experience no one comes out of a pitch like this thinking that I've been deceptive about the censorship aspect. Either people don't care about the censorship issue at all in which case they don't think about it again, or they care about it and so ask for details and then appreciate the sophistication of the approach. The value of this cannot be underestimated. I promise you that no one will ever care about the censorship issue if you approach it by carefully explaining the mechanism. Telling them that it's impossible piques their interest and actually opens the conversation to talking about censorship and the sophisticated manner in which it is handled. No one has ever remotely indicated that they felt this was not a reasonably accurate description of the platform except people who are already part of the platform which is the precise demographic you do not want to pitch to. The probability of this pitch misleading people or turning them off to the platform is effectively zero, though that does not mean that it will turn them on to the platform. However, if anyone uses a pitch like this, talks about censorship being impossible and gets a different reaction with a high frequency, then I will consider revising the pitch. However, as someone who has used this pitch I know that is not the case. The biggest problem with this pitch IMO is that it is probably not as compelling as it could be. I think insights from someone with more experience in marketing and advertising could probably make it a much more compelling pitch. But fundamentally what this comes down to is whether you think the point of pitch is to be perfectly accurate or perfectly persuasive.
I guess I'm just an honesty freak. As far as I'm concerned, steemit sells itself just on the single point of it paying its contributors. No persuasion is necessary 'cause it's the only game in town.