Before I started teaching as pretty much my main thing I primarily worked on social and mobile games in San Francisco. I also worked in app development on a few projects as a UI/UX artists and on some as a UI artist. To be honest, back then I wasn't at all interested in UI design. I just wanted to paint cool environments, cool armor dudes, monsters and spaceships.

Here's a few random ones so this post has more than just words.

As I got a bit older I think I slowly became less geeky and my interests started to shift towards applications that had a bit more of a practical use case than games. I haven't actually worked on anything like that but if I was going to go work at a company these days, I think I'd rather get into that than more illustrative work.

That's a bit of background, but not really the point of this post. The point of this post is to tell a few stories from real life experiences that I think are relevant to the current state of Steem.

X-Wars and the power of analytics

One of the first jobs I got straight out of school was working on X-Wars games, basically the type of games Drug Wars is based on. Coming out of school, I was a "real" gamer. I played console and computer games and frankly thought these games were stupid. I figured they would definitely not make any money and no one would ever play them.

I was wrong.

These games were hugely popular and I don't remember exact numbers, but they made a ton of money. It wasn't my demographic, but I learned the world is a lot bigger than my demographic. What else these projects taught me was the power of analytics. This is basically all that evil data collection people complain about these days.

We would track, the users progress in the app, what they click on, how much time they spend on each page, where they leave the app, how long they spend on average playing in each session, etc. This data was then usually visualized in easy to understand graphs(there was a whole department for this) and it was king. All assumptions and opinions were secondary to the data. At the time, this was something I was regularly frustrated with. I wanted to just try things, but if the data didn't suggest that a change was needed, it wasn't going to happen. The apps did really well for a while, but eventually fell out of popularity. I went through the process long enough though to come to respect analytics and the value it brings to the table.

I don't know how to, but I know you can query the blockchain to find all sorts of useful data. I'm remembering an interesting post by @abh12345 about downvotes after the button was moved, and after a deep and thorough analysis I came to a conclusion.

I'd love it if one of you peeps with the skills might look up downvote usage on Palnet, as it already has the free downvote feature coming with the EIP. Maybe I'll be surprised.(I won't be)

The idea of having the casual users "balance" rewards payouts was an interesting one. If you still feel like this is the best solution to sort content specifically, what would it take for you to say "This just doesn't work, let's try something else" This is where I'm at. I'm for using downvotes to fight abuse by the way, and I hope the EIP will make this more effective.

I think regardless of peoples opinions and the way they WISH people would behave the data will say, "...yea, this doesn't work."

The Wrestling Game, and The Power of Communities

Years later I worked on a turn based Pro Wrestling game. The company I worked at had a proprietary 3D game engine that could push pretty nice(for the time) 3D graphics in the browser. This was before this was super common. Jon was a lone indy engineer that had built this game by himself and it had a small, but incredibly loyal following. He wanted to scale the game. It had no graphics or visuals other than a simple 2D avatar system. We were going to build out a 3D avatar system as well as 3D animations for all the wrestling moves and matches. It was originally text based.

While Jon broke down the history of his game I learned something interesting. The game had a few users here and there, but then he added a trash talking feature, so that the users could DM each other while they were playing. This dramatically improved retention in his game and his users LOVED this feature, so Jon, being the smart guy he was listened to his users and added more social features to the game. He allowed for tournaments, he even came up with an in game marriage system where two characters could get married in the game. It didn't have any effect on the mechanics of the game, it was just something for the players to play with. Turns out multiple people in the game end up getting married in real life.

In the deal with my company, Jon sold the rights of the game to our company. He was still the lead developer, but he no longer had ownership. We then commenced to sink a few million into this game making it a 3D game.

The users didn't care. The users didn't actually care about the game. They cared about the community. They DID play the game, but that wasn't what they came for. They made real friends in this random online game, and THAT'S where the value was.

So once we added all the 3D features in the game, and the userbase didn't increase, my company trashed the game and refused to sell the rights back to Jon(for some reason).

Lesson: The community/users are the value. Everything you build is about empowering them, solving their problems and basically making sure they're having a good time. I want to take a comment that I posted on another post and share that here as well:

The average user won't be an investor. Is this an investment platform? It's a blogging platform that a user can choose to invest in, and will eventually hold a stake in if they continue to use it. The thing that gives it value, which would make it attractive to investors is USERS.

Just think about it like this, imagine all we had was Steemit Inc. in it's current state and NO other developments, but we had 5 million daily active users

or

We have SMT's, Communities, a super scalable solution, we fell on the perfect economics balance, but we have 50 Daily active users.

Which one is more valuable?

TheWorstDrug.com

Last but not least is a project I didn't directly work on, but my best friend at the time and roomate worked on, so I got a daily blow by blow.

So my friend worked at a game, turned app company that was a bit uninspiring. In their spare time, my friend and one of the engineers there created their own project called theworstdrug.com(it doesn't exist anymore by the way) The idea behind this was that at work they were bored a lot and spent a lot of time sending each other stupid gifs and meme's. So they built an app that scraped the internet to find the most popular gifs and collect them all. The site interface had one button, which just went to the next gif. It was meant to be the ultimate procrastination site, but...

Turns out about 99.9% of all the webs most popular gifs were porn.

Also turns out, people like porn. So without meaning to, they ended up in the porn business, because the site organically exploded in popularity. They were featured in several high profile online publications and had so much traffic, they were running into issues with server costs.

Eventually investors got interested and started making offers(which they turned down) and they started to test monetization strategies. It ended up falling apart because of their own personal differences but it had a good run.

Lesson: You might design something with one thing in mind, but once it's out there, it might become something totally different. Don't fight that, go with it. It's hard to make something that's successful. If you stumble on something, don't squander it by trying to bend it to your will.

This post might seem a bit random but it was originally inspired by something I read about downvotes that sort of triggered me. I started this post pretty fired up, but then I got interrupted, and ended up watching the first democratic debates. By the time I came back all my fire was gone, but hopefully the little life snippets are interesting for you.