Steem and Writing – Another Lane on the Highway to Hell?

A tech-sector friend called me up a couple of weeks ago. “You’re a writer, right?” he started. “I’ve got something I need to tell you about.”

I’ve been digesting his introduction to the blockchain, cryptocurrencies and the Steem White Paper for a few days. I’ve also been reading a lot of posts on Steem to see how others are experimenting with and experiencing this new space. These words are my first, tentative steps into this new world.

Since Steem is built on a “currency”, it’s not surprising that the dominant narrative here revolves around money. As a professional writer, I’m particularly concerned with whatever cash value can be attached to my words. Let’s face it, though: how many people get into writing to get rich? So what I’ve mostly been thinking is not, “How much money might I make from Steem?” but “How might Steem affect the writing itself?”

Hence my attention-seeking title (yes, I used to write newspaper headlines), inspired by that old saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. In this case, it’s those founding principles laid out on page 5 of the White Paper.

They sound profoundly democratic and fair, and it’s hard not to cheer the very idea that the acts of writing, reading and sharing knowledge could create value for those directly concerned, rather than for those who own or control the medium. The internet has generally been bad news for professional writers. Jobs in the traditional media have vanished, and the new media often fails to value old-fashioned skills of writing and editing. So hurrah for something that promises to add value to the written word and give it to the person who wrote it, rather than the one who sold it or just passed it on.

Whether or not creative work should concern itself with a “fair” environment, or whether creative endeavour can be usefully valued against reading and “curating” are questions I want to come back to. For today, I’m most interested in the potential impact of Steem on the psychology and motivation of the writer, and hence on his or her end result.

This is going to call for some generalization.

In one corner, we have the amateurs. I’m not using that term to look down on anyone, just to define a group of people who do something for motivations other than money. We have bloggers who have never sought or earned a cent from their writings, people who before the internet came along probably wrote no more than diaries and letters to their friends and family members. Maybe the politically inclined wrote pamphlets and posters.
Some wrote purely for themselves, others for a certain readership. But all had a certain “freedom” that the professional lacks – in that if they felt unable to say what they wanted, they could choose to say nothing at all. Try telling your editor at the paper that you can’t fill that 1,000-word space on page 2 today.

In the other corner we have the professionals, those who at least try to make a living from the written word. All would like to write what they want; an tiny number succeed in this ambition. The rest consider the market. What does this or that editor like? What’s fashionable this summer? What does the brief from the PR agency tell me to do? Those with enough energy and drive balance the ambition with the daily reality: writing what pays the bills while using their spare time to pursue the dream of The Great Novel/Great Cookbook etc.

The point is, amateurs and professionals have always existed in different spaces. Their motivations are different, their target readerships different.

What Steem has done is create a space that blurs these traditional lines.

For professionals, this should not be problematic. It’s just another potential market to be exploited. Popular topics are easily identifiable; the “whales” are somewhat analogous to old-media editors in the power they wield; and value is generated by writing what people want to read and enjoy. So in this sense Steem fosters nothing new – just crowd-pleasing, commercially oriented product that will naturally tend towards common denominators, while driving niche-interest, experimental or original work to the margins.

In any market we can expect professionals to dominate, just as we would expect a professional sports team to defeat an amateur one 99 times out of 100.

Steem’s pool of amateurs, whose presence and activities actually contribute most to the community’s value, may be offering themselves up for exploitation.

The White Paper makes what I found a disturbing parallel: “The fact that everyone ‘wins something’ plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger reward.”

I suggest that this is what professionals may see when they look at Steem: a potentially massive group of users who don’t really know how to play the game, but who are busy creating value to be creamed off by those who do know how to play. To maintain the casino analogy, Steem professionals will be like the pro poker players who hang out day after day at the tables, waiting for the rubes who inevitably show up.

And what of the amateurs’ writing itself? They are no longer writing in a “free” space. They too are thinking about what their words are worth, about how their posts will be received, ranked and valued. Rather than express a viewpoint that the Steem community may find objectionable, perhaps writers may choose to censor themselves rather than risk being downvoted. Surely many amateurs will choose to pander to the market in hopes of strengthening their Steem Power. After all, being valued and judged can be an overwhelmingly negative experience for many writers. The safest place to be is swimming in the mainstream.

Well, these are just a few thoughts and definitely no conclusions. This is still an excitingly experimental space and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next!