RE: Critical Analysis of Steem and Why I'm Invested
I see you are not using any Steemit improvement addons like SteemPlus (Highly recommended)
You haven't covered much of how large the ecosystem actually is. There are many dozens of alternative front-ends like D.tube and utopian.io. If you have a quick look at https://steemprojects.com/ there are apparently 337 apps and tools for Steem. (sadly I noticed a few of very important one are not listed there)
I fully agree that a lot of the reward is being indirectly "Staked" (self-votes/bots) and that affect negatively the content discovery that makes Steem valuable. On the other hand there is also a whole lot of the reward that is shared away to contributions like code or good content and that create a ton of real economic activity.
Raw staking is frown upon by many whales and is often neutralized via flag attacks, so for now promotion bots are the simplest way to earn a passive income from Steem investments.
All voting bots have their own terms of service, for example @promobot try to solve the abuse problem by never turning a profit to the vote purchasers.
While the cost paid might be equal to the value of the received votes payouts, since the money it is at risk of getting flagged during the 7 days leading to payout and half of it is being paid out as vested Steem, (SteemPower requiring 13 week cool-down) the customers have to promote content that is likely to earn them more than they risked on promotion.
My opinion is that as it become simpler and simpler for normal people to access these promotion services the competition will move from bidding skills/gambling toward creating extra value from the earned exposure on your content. The quality of the front-page will then increase along with demand for landing on it. (Trust me, very smart peoples are working towards that)
I believe Steem can easily scale as it relate to achieving world-class stake based content discovery but Steem's technology cannot currently scale as a way for billions of people to interact with their close friend like they do on Facebook, almost none of that is transactional and rarely benefit from being on a censorship resistant Blockchain.
I see Steem as a very active reactor of economic activity with a social component that makes it's future applications at a high risk of going viral and attracting a lot of external interest.
Steem is the blockchain that taps the most into the many various skills of people that are not crypto geeks.
Considering the many possible outcomes from rewarding these contributors via proof of brain, while it's users are operating within a very smooth and convenient value transfer system that's using recognizable account names and free transactions, I believe Steem is somewhat backed by real world value creation and is thus a good hedge to Bitcoin during a bear market.
I could speak a lot about the upcoming Steem core development that will greatly improve the building of various views on content and makes it easy to build subject based sub-communities like Sub-reddits but that'd be worthy of a full post, so I'll just drop this here : https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/update-communities-hivemind
Shameless plug; Delegating SteemPower to @promobot will automatically set you up to receiving 100% of your share of what @promobot receives. For more information we can contacted here : https://discord.gg/reZ84FC
Transisto,
I have looked at that site a few times (which is reason for my 5th point on there on benefits side), but at this point it is predominantly Steemit in terms of usage (or depends on Steemit), although naturally one hopes that improves over time. I still don't know how I feel about vote bots - even "good" ones that only vote for content deemed 'worthy.' In my opinion, organic growth is far more valuable than artificial for both Steem and the content creators in the long-term: That is evident in most other existing social media sites (yes you can pay for exposure, but it is nowhere near as effective).
You'll note that because my growth has been relatively organic on Steem (you can never be entirely), the quality of comments on my posts has exceeded that of most posts (at least in my opinion). This is part of why organic growth is so superior - it also builds a more organic community (for which I am grateful comment, even if I am not always the best at responding). There are a few other regulars on here that have built that type of audience as well (which isn't entirely self-serving, sub4sub type deal), which I think is the right "image" for the site.
I hope over time, applications built on Steem (but particularly Steemit) can develop to a point where high quality content (which I have a pretty high bar for that - less than 5 of my videos reach the minimum for that in my opinion) is highlighted above all else and discussion is far healthier than it is on most other competing platforms.
I looked at the Hivemind post earlier this week - it is exciting. Again, my hope over the long-term is that because there is so much passion in this community, that will help address some of the serious concerns and issues the platform currently has. The alternative is it dies / fades to obscurity, which I've already accepted as a possibility (admittedly, that's how I feel about EVERY crypto-related project). We'll see how it unfolds in the long-term. Thank you for the post and support as always.
The problem with that too much idealistic thinking of high quality content is you would need 100s of dolphin accounts and have proper value flow if you want people to not use promotion services. Organic growth is a lie. Do you think Coca-Cola or McDonalds became huge because organic growth? I give you a hint... Capital... Cash Flow... Value needs to Flow...
agreed, steem has had a meaningful journey and is absolutely a great product primed for a big breakout.
Proof-of-brain which I see is also mentioned on the Utopian website, is as I had explained in 2016 a very corrupt and flawed design that can never be fixed because the problem is not in the code but in the vested interests structure that requires the various non-objective aspects of Steem that enable the perpetrators to hoodwink everyone here.
Also the term proof-of-brain is by implication conflating the consortium DPoS blockchain design with the algorithm employed for minting rewards out-of-thin-air. Steem has delegated proof-of-stake consensus, not proof-of-brain. It’s technobabble employed for embellishment marketing to put lipstick on a pig, i.e. it is dishonest marketing babble that confuses n00b users and makes them excited to support something which is actually highly flawed.
I am wondering how large is it?
I perused many of them and they seem not that compelling. Utopian will not be useful until the upvote buttons can be embedded into the Github Issues threads and such so more eyeballs can vote. Ditto most everything else there doesn’t really have am effective adoption model. I don’t think Steem has enough adoption to drive Dtube, but I might be mistaken. Video and music is very problematic because of copyrighted material that can be embedded (such as a jingle tune in the middle of the video which was sampled from some copyrighted audio). Doesn’t seem like a low hanging fruit use case to chase, at least not until ledger servers are not run by elected witnesses that can be targeted by the authorities for hosting copyrighted content. Yet another one of the reasons that I think consortium blockchains are not sustainable.
I agree with @cryptovestor that organic growth is what builds community and stickiness. And I amplify his skepticism further more towards the cynical w.r.t. to your non-sober embellishment and hyperbole. Lots of very smart people have been thinking about this and realized the voting from a collective pool can never work. It is a fundamentally insolubly flawed game theory structure.
OTOH, I recognize that @cryptovestor is correct in making the point that Steem is the only crypto project with a significant and enthusiast community (but I don’t how large?). One thing I am concerned about is if Steem fails and all these enthusiast people become jaded and disillusioned. I hope we can do something so they will not leave crypto forever if Steem flames out.
Not if new users can’t signup.
Disclaimer: I have a vested interest in competing against Steem with the project I am working on.
I hope the communities will eventually replace tags by usability or make a nice combo with it. Maybe the trending page problem solves itself.
I hope so too, and in the meantime, I don't ever look at the trending page. Everyone complains about it, but why not just make it irrelevant by not using it?
Teach people to engage on here using other ways of navigation, which for me has been search and to some extent tags then hot. (I'm not entirely sure how hot is chosen, but it's better content than trending).
i think your commentary here is remarkably intelligent and insightful. i think you ought to be posting words/ideas thoughts like these as posts of your own! ~thank you!
You really tore the information apart.
For many of us joining the band not long ago, your kind of posts broadens our horizon.
My opinion is that as it become simpler and simpler for normal people to access these promotion services the competition will move from bidding skills/gambling toward creating extra value from the earned exposure on your content. The quality of the front-page will then increase along with demand for landing on it. (Trust me, very smart peoples are working towards that)
well said, it just needs to play it's course.
Exactly. Then when it's all loss ROI on bidding then only the real players can stay involved.
GREATE. THANKS FOR YOUR INFO