Steemit and the Internet of Things

Hi, I'm Jack - I haven't done a proper #introduceyourself post yet - but I'm into comedy, writing, data analysis and finding out about stuff I don't understand. I've been thinking about Steemit a lot over the past few days and wanted to write something - and I finally got motivated by something I saw in the news. Hope you find it interesting.

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Today has seen the news that ARM Holdings, which is a global leader in smartphone chip design, is being acquired by the Japanese group SoftBank for £24bn. This is being reported as a huge vote-of-confidence in the future of the Internet of Things.

I've always been ambiguous about the IoT. Sure, the possibilities of internet-connected things seem endless, but the reality so far seems to be lightbulbs that need firmware updates before they'll switch on, and StackExchange users thinking about how your smart house could try to kill you.

The big sticking point for me, however, has been the centralisation built into the IoT. Vendors have played the role of informational gatekeepers and the result has been both fragmentation and 'bland-ification', as a bunch of devices consume and regurgitate very similar sorts of content and information.

What I'm trying to say is: I have enough devices that can tell me the weather.

Peer production and the IoT

The news about ARM being acquired got me thinking. I know what I don't want an IoT world to look like: my fridge giving me a weather report and the same headlines that I can get anywhere else. But what I would I actually like an IoT world to look like?

Well, one of the things that excites me about the way the economy could be headed is peer-production, the kind of distributed, self-managing and fulfilling work that is enabled by modern information technology. Steemit is, of course, an example of peer production: rather than the value from producing the content and building the network being absorbed by the platform, it recirculates to the people who actually did the work. And Steemit is probably the most interesting use-case of the block chain so far precisely because it gets information off the chain and into people's daily lives.

Combining the peer-production of content on Steemit and the consumption of information via the IoT has enormous potential.

Steemit on the IoT

Here's why.

First, peer-production of information promotes a diversity of content that IoT devices could consume, and Steemit provides the economic framework to motivate content producers to keep producing, and the technological framework to deliver it. Let's think about the smart fridge example. I'm not keen on being given bland headlines when I reach for the milk, but if my fridge is going to fire information at me, what might be of use? Well, recipes from users that I follow is the obvious answer - and recipes that feature ingredients in my fridge is another. If I find them useful, maybe I push a button to say so, the recipe-maker gets a bit of Steem Power and the little smart fridge economy we've built up rolls on. Or maybe what I need from my fridge is the opposite: a nudge to stop eating. Maybe the fridge knows about the temptation of cold pizza and reacts to my footsteps at 3am by pulling a post from the #motivation hashtag.

Maybe I would listen to that puritanical fridge or maybe I would eat the damn pizza - who knows? But what I do know is that there are real possibilities in moving peer-produced content from Steemit off the screen and into the real world.

The second area that excites me about Steemit and the IoT is the curation and creation of machine-readable content. Right now, Steemit users are already producing content in machine-readable form because markdown documents are just plain text with some simple formatting markers. So, even without explicit support for machine-readable content from users, what if I were to just include, say, a representation of a location in a code chunk, on a specific hashtag, like #pokemon-go-locations?

{ "type": "FeatureCollection",
    "features": [
      { "type": "Feature",
         "geometry": {
           "type": "Polygon",
           "coordinates": [
             [ [100.0, 0.0], [101.0, 0.0], [101.0, 1.0],
               [100.0, 1.0], [100.0, 0.0] ]
             ]
       },
         "properties": {
           "PokemonName": "Pikachu"
            }
          }
     ]
}

I could feed that into an app that subscribes to certain hashtags and extracts valid code from them - and then go hunt Pokemon. If the tip was good, I could send some Steem Power to the user who helped me out. (Disclaimer: there is no Pikachu here - do not go.) I can see this kind of thing being useful for walkers, runners or cyclists who want to download a route to their GPS. But lots of hobbyists, like birdwatchers, would benefit too.

Conclusion

I hope this post gave you a sense of how an online network can grow even bigger by moving into the real world. Steemit has a big advantage there because it incentivises lots of people to have a lot of good ideas to make that kind of leap happen. I'm sure there a bunch of other use cases that I haven't even thought of for Steemit and the IoT, so I'd love to hear your ideas too.