SteemMag – Steemit’s Weekend Digest (‘Steemit is 6’ MEGA EDITION) #14: An Overview: The Story So Far – Exclusive Chats With Whales, Dolphins and Minnows…… The Steemit WishList… Meeting The SteemSTEM Team…… and lots more

I’m ECSTATIC. It is with great delight I welcome you guys to the fourteenth edition of SteemMag, a weekend digest for Steemians.

Every week, I take a look at some of the most important topics and have a chat with top Steemians who have expert views on such topics.

In case you missed it, here are links to Issue #1 , #2 , #3 , #4 , 5 , #6, #7 , #8, #9, #10, #11, #12 and #13

This week is special for two main reasons:
It marks my 4th month on Steemit… And the 6th month of this amazing platform –Steemit.

To celebrate this in SteemMag's special way, this weekend’s edition is chock full of info that would last you through the weekend…

So get lots of coffee or tea ready. And let’s begin this exciting overview

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In page 1:
For the first time, SteemMag’s page 1 would be featuring quite a number of people… 6 months of Steemit has witnessed the introduction of a lot of wonderful individuals. So I thought it would be awesome to have a chat with reps of the Steemit Ecosystem.- whales, dolphins and minnows

SteemMag had a chat with:
@clayop – A whale, a witness and one of the main drivers for Steemit international adoption through his efforts with the Korean community.. He’s generally a great guy to talk with.

@laonie – Remember him? A whale, he’s one of the biggest investors in Steemit. He’s also a popular bot owner.

@lukestokes – A relatively popular Steemian. This active dolphin ;) has always been an active participant in discussions. He runs analysis on various Steemit's topics and his latest is the Exchange Transfer Report. A very cool guy.

@chitty – One of the earliest Steemians. I discovered some of his articles on Medium while learning about cryptos. He’s also a backup witness.

@kiddarko – An amazing artist and a lovable guy.

@steemitqa – A really interesting guy who participates frequently in discussions…

In Page 2:
SteemMag had a chat with the SteemSTEM team, a bunch of amazing guys who are actively growing the science community on Steemit.

SteemMag also had a chat with @timcliff, A backup witness and the man behind the Steem WishList - a list of features steemians would love to see on Steemit.

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A Chat with @clayop

SteemMag:
When and how did you join steemit?

@clayop
I first mined STEEM at 2016/4/11. I have been participating in Graphene-based coins (E.g. Bitshares, Muse, etc.) and I saw Dan’s post introducing STEEM on Bitsharestalk around 10 days ago from that day.

SM:
Steemit is 6 months. Did you envisage that this social experiment would have lasted this far?

@clayop
Absolutely. I was not that convinced before I read the white paper. But after I read it, I strongly believe its success. In addition, personally, the existence of Ned is very important to me. I have been with Dan for about two years and knew Dan is not a perfect person. He surely is a high-level developer, but not a skillful and experienced manager. Ned fills the gap, like Jobs and Wozniak. As long as Steemit has this fantastic team, I won’t lose faith on them.

SM:
Which changes do you want to see being implemented (a) On the Steemit Platform (b) Steem Blockchain?

@clayop
(a) In my opinion, Steemit needs local apps, like Piston or Steem Pressure, which can protect anonymity and can encourage anti-censorship.
(b) I will put my 120% for Delegated Curation Guilds (DCGs)

SM:
What’s your favourite moment on Steemit so far?

@clayop
It was a month ago, when Korean community joined Curie project and we got rewarded posts from Curie for the first time. It really encouraged Korean people to jump into Steemit.

SM:
Where do you see Steemit and Steem price in the next 6 months?

@clayop
I think 6 month is not enough for Steem(it), it may take longer time to bloom
And Steem price is harder to tell. But the market price may remain at least or slightly greater IMHO

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A Chat with @laonie

SteemMag:
When and how did you join steemit?

@laonie
I joined Steemit 3 month ago, the first time that i heard about STEEM, is one of my friend told me that the marketcap of STEEM had surpassed LTC.
So I spent a few days to read the whitepaper, and was excited about it.

SM:
What has been your experience so far ? And has Steemit met your expectations?

@laonie
I was too optimistic at the beginning, and I bought too much, too fast, with a price that is too high. (I spent 400 BTC on STEEM, worth 240k$ at that time, and it’s worth only 35k$ right now.)
I introduced Steemit to a lot of my friends, but only a few of them still stay here, I didn’t realize that the incentives of money only can keep a user here for a short while.

It’s the connection between people can make people stay, we are competing with reddit, twitter, Facebook, it’s not easy to build the user base, we have less than 5k active users, and the numbers keep dropping.

I believe the power of a blockchain platform is from the normal people, from the crowd, but not from the elite, the famous or the popular people.

So I designed a voting robot @better, it votes for the posts that was at least 30 minutes old, Less than $1 earned.

The difference between the curation guilds (like RHW, CURIE etc) and my bot is that, my bot treat every active users as a natural, organic curator, with the concept of “one man one vote”, it’s more decentralized. For more info please check this post: https://steemit.com/robots/@laonie/introducing-my-new-voting-robot-better , I hope it can help to build the user base of Steemit.

SM:
What has been your favorite and least favorite moment on Steemit?

@laonie
My favorite moment on Steemit is first two weeks after I joined Steemit, the price was high, people were high, and I was high, I felt like a super super hero at that time, and I feel the opposite right now.
The least favorite moment is right now.

SM:
Steemit is 6 months.. Do you think Steemit as a social platform can ever reach the heights of big social platforms like Twitter and Medium? And where do you see the Steem Blockchain among other cryptos in the near future?

@laonie
It’s possible, because the blockchain has the ability to evolve, twitter or medium hasn’t, a few months ago, we were rewarding tils, boobs, and now, we are trying to reward unpopular authors.

On internet, winners take all, unless we find a way to make people fall in love with STEEM and the platform, or it will fall, other cryptos are the same.

SM:
Where do you see Steemit at the end of this year?
@laonie
I think the price will keep dropping, and active users will keep dropping too, until we find a creative way to stop it.

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A Chat with @lukestokes

SteemMag:
When and how did you join Steemit?

@lukestokes
I joined Steemit on June 25th when my friend @sean-king told me about it. Sean and I have worked on some Bitcoin related community projects in Tennessee, and he knew I’d enjoy the social side of it as we both like expressing our opinions. I was traveling at the time, so I didn’t do anything with the platform until July 6th, when I posted a Facebook comment to test things out. I also saw my friend @billbutler posting on Facebook about Steemit, and he’s been a long-time fan of Bitshares.

SM:
Steemit is 6 months old. As a dolphin, what has been your impression so far?

@lukestokes
Heh. A dolphin. I always thought I was just a tuna. :) I love this place. I love the insightful comments, the relationships, and the motivations for positive, respectful interactions and reputation building. I feel like this is a digital home where I can be myself, learn, grow, and prosper. The economics of the system are still shaking out, but I’ve been around bitcoin since early 2013 and am used to volatility in the cryptocurrency world.

SM:
You’ve always been outspoken on issues concerning Steemit. What changes have been your favorite and least favorite?

@lukestokes
I think my favorite change was actually seeing the Mute functionality work (well, that and a feed of my followers’ posts). Early on, it was brutal. Some people were being abused, and I even wrote a script to hide comments from certain users to hopefully help those who were being targeted. Other than that, I really like the resteem feature as it’s a way to promote new authors and undervalued content to my followers. I’m not sure I have a least favorite change… I review the major releases and as a programmer (and somewhat of an anarcho-capitalist, if we’re using labels), I not only agree with the code changes, but much of the philosophy and reasoning behind them.

SM:
Based on the exchange transfer report and other indepth analysis you make weekly, where do you see Steemit as a social platform in the next 6 months?

@lukestokes:
That’s an interesting question. Steemit, I think, has some identity concerns it has to work hard to communicate through. This is a really complex system! STEEM is a cryptocurrency, but it’s also an app coin which drives a social media platform. Steemit, inc is a company, but it’s also the maintainer of an open source cryptocurrency and steemit.com. There are licensing concerns from some in the OSS community regarding how much control Steemit, inc has. The social platform may be used separately from STEEM, SBD, and other concerns related to investing and cryptocurrency, but it’s also deeply connected to those tokens of value which provide much of the motivation and uniqueness driving adoption.

Complicated, unfamiliar things take time before they will be adopted and used by the masses.
Few people understand the detailed workings of their car’s combustion engine, but they use them daily just the same. Steemit as a social platform will have to explain the technical and economic issues (like, “Where does the money come from?”) in very simple terms. It needs to explain where the steering wheel, brake pedal, and gas pedal are (and, hopefully, some directional signals as well).

If it can do that and people continue sharing their original Steemit content on other platforms to draw in their friends, family, and followers, I think Steemit could have a very bright future. Whether or not we’ll see that in 6 months time or in a couple years is hard for anyone to say. I, for one, plan to be here as long as there are interesting people to engage with and the platform continues to evolve for the benefit of the network and the users who enjoy it. Sure I’d love to see a return on my investment financially, but the value I’ve already received from the community relationally is hard to price.

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A Chat with @chitty

SteemMag:
When and how did you join steemit?

@chitty
Like many others I first found out about Steemit through bitsharestalk, at first I was skeptical and probably worried about so many BTS devs spending their time on another project, but it was my trust on those guys that made me join Steemit. I know how skilled most of them are and I thought to myself: if the likes of xeroc, svk, abit are here then I have to check it out… I am glad I did.

SM:
What has been your experience so far? And has Steemit surpassed your expectations?

@chitty
Steemit has not only given me the possibility to monetize my written content that I was giving away for free at medium and reddit; it also introduced me to a lot of people and I have learnt a lot from posts and from being a back-up witness. So my experience has been good and yes it has surpassed my expectations.

SM:
Where do you see Steemit at the end of this year?

@chitty
Well the end of the year is not that far away, so I don’t think we will see a major difference from what we have now. We are probably going to see some improvements in the interface and its design but I hope not many changes in Steem, we have had enough hard forks already and I think we have reached a reasonable steady version with 0.14.2

“At the moment Steemit has an intrinsic problem with its core value proposition:
“Blog and get paid”
“Post and get paid”
“….GET PAID”
People are using other social media platforms and giving away their content for free, so in a way you should expect that this slogan would attract a lot of people to steemit and it does, the problem is that it builds expectations and most users that come in for the money end up disillusioned and quit, some of them go away silently but others start throwing non-sense accusations like “steemit is a scam”, we have to wonder if these are the people we want to attract to our platform.”

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Steemians Speak

SteemMag:

Steemit is 6…what has been your experience so far ? And has Steemit met your expectations?

@kiddarko

I have been on Steemit.. 3 of the 6 months but didn't do much posting the first month just observing. I started posting the second month and feel my work has been well received and appreciated. I didn't have many expectations really.

I feel it's more about what I didn't expect like when I would work really hard on a post and felt it was "amazing" but didn't end up doing well when posted. When I say "well" what I mean is well rounded with upvotes, rewards and comments.

It is however nice to hit one of the factors. Also I didn't expect to sell my personal art when I shared it. I am refereeing to the sale of one of my painting to @berniesanders https://steemit.com/art/@kiddarko/painting-collection-my-very-first-acrylic-painting-super-mario-on-shrooms . Overall, Steemit has impressed me a lot. I have net many kind individuals who have helped me along the way and I hope to give back to those who are new to the site and need advice as I did.

@steemitqa
Steemit has exceeded my expectations so far and couldn’t be happier. I’m actually able to pay content creators on my posts ( profit share ) so it enables me to be a mini-job creator and also start my own company ( https://www.steemverify.com )to better help the SteemIt eco-system.

2. Where do you see Steemit in the next 6 months?

@steemitqa
I do see Steemit growing in its features and innovation. I think they will solve the issue with retention and on boarding. These are all growing pains.

@kiddarko
I see growth in every aspect in the next 6 months and these are the reasons why. I see steemit pulling in many more high quality content creators increasing users and user interest. I myself am doing my part buy pushing steemit onto my good friends who are successful artist, even going as far as to produce their first few posts for them just to show them that steemit is “real”.

I personal believe in steemit and its potential for great success and many on steemit are just as motivated as I am, or even more motivated. I will be continually putting my energy into creating quality content for the viewers and whales alike. I also use other social networks to advertise steemit. I post my links on Twitter and Instagram bringing in new users from other successful social networking sites. I see more people on steemit doing this daily. It’s hard to imagine Steemit not growing in users and content creators when steemit is linked to quality content and shared on popular social networking sites.

Also steemit has a “gamble” feel to it and can be very addicting. “I just posted my best post ever,am I going to hit the lottery today? let’s watch steemviz.com and find out….. Oh @Ned just voted my post, JACKPOT!” I’m 100% steemit addicted and the addiction is spreading.

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Check out page 2 for more exclusive chats and Free SteemFest Tickets Giveaway

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