RE: Today I Learned About The Attention Economy
I don't think Steemit will be a successful "mass" social media platform because it requires people to actually take action, think and make and effort to document their thinking strategies.
I've tried to encourage a group of 10 of my close friends to join and contribute. To date, 3 have but have done very little to produce content because they weren't willing to change their habits and work for feedback within a group of people, most of whom were strangers to them.
Steemit did not hold their attention for their efforts, so they left.
I realized that I was responsible for directing my attention to my Steemit activities if my intention was to be a successful Steemian.
In my own "Steemit 4 month experiment", I have written over 50 full blog posts and made 1 video.
I'm not bragging here, I know there are others who are and have worked a lot harder than I have. The point is, I made a decision to work at this, as if it was a very important job, not something I was doing on a whim or for entertainment purposes only.
I would have never created that content without turning my attention towards Steemit and working for it, myself and the new friends that I am acquiring, as I go.
This is why I think Steemit will not appeal to the masses.
It will appeal to people who can and do think for themselves and aren't sheep.
In my opinion that's a much smaller cohort of people. A lesson in targeting a "specific user profile" over sheer volume of registered users, perhaps.
I for one, am immensely enjoying not being pummeled by advertising, every time I go to use Steemit. It let's me focus my attention where I want to, without being lobbed by another entity and their agenda to get me to do something else.
It's a bit like peeling an eggshell, but I'm not sure the masses will fundamentally never have reason to join. They just won't be forward thinking about it and won't do it until there's already sufficient adoption to keep their attention.
I think in the interim it will be important to build things here that serve a real purpose, that offer something objective that can be used already. Like a ratings service, a better version of Yelp or Wikipedia that's accomplished thru block chain incentives. Or whatever.
And then from there the social interaction, like the way people typically use Facebook, can grow in.
Maybe the way we use social media over time will change, maybe even the appetite for it will go down. But I see no reason why it won't eventually shift to being on a blockchain.
I thought about this quite a bit this afternoon and what I came to was that there are 3 different core users. People who like to blog, people who like to read and think about what they read, and people who like cyptocurrencies. If the goal is to grow the number of people regularly using Steemit then, I think any marketing initiatives need to be qualified and directed towards these distinct user groups.
I agree that something that has a perceived value like an alternative news source, a searchable database or Wikipedia would be a good drawing card to attract new users and retain regular users.
Yeah I faced the same thing as you did, most of my friends just drifted back to FB. I don't know. I've been numbed by FB, and I don't really use it to keep in constant contact with friends and family. I don't even talk to my closest friends every single day lol..
So yup, Steemit's quite the right place for me to put out my thoughts and work, and it so happens that the community here is great. Or at least, the early adopters may seem to have some qualities that are rather different from most internet users.
Odd isn't it, I have been marked by FB too...it's been an interesting social experiment for me. I withdrew from FB after using it daily for 9 years. I tried to keep my friends list manageable and to people that I knew really well. In 4 months, not one of them has tried to contact me, just to have a chat. 2 people out of 200+ have sent me pm through FB to ask me for something. Please don't mistake this, I'm not complaining that my friends don't care, I think they are under "FB house arrest" and are so conditioned by habits or lazy convenience that they don't even realize that I've been MIA for months. It became very obvious to me that I was quite different, then I really started to think about what is making me different. I would bet there are a lot of common similarities shared amongst the early Steemit adopters. What I think is a key factor, as a collective group, is that we don't watch traditional tv or gather information about current events from mainstream media. It's very interesting when you start to unravel what makes a Steemian tick.