Why Steem

in #steem6 years ago

I've promised a lot of people that I will be posting more regular posts and while I'm still finishing up on some projects that are prime for restarting now with the new hardfork I'll try my best to post more here and there. The pressure of having to post long and quality posts due to so much stake and autovotes being cast onto my account has dropped after the hardfork and after my streaming spree as well, so now I can finally just post about my thoughts without giving it to much thought, hehe.

Without trying to brag about it, I just wanna mention that way back when most people heard about Bitcoin the first time, the majority ignored it and quickly forgot about it. To many mainstream news were the deciding factor, many didn't even research it properly and many didn't even hear about the underlying technology as we all know today; blockchain. For some reason I decided not to let go of this, ignore the fud, the negative usage of it and the volatile price. I like to think I've been right many steps of the way, sticking with Bitcoin even tho the majority of no-coiners called it a scam, sticking with Ethereum even though the majority of bitcoiners called it a scam and finally moving over to DPOS coins even though the majority of blockchainers called it a scam and shitcoin.

Well, well, well. While Bitcoin is looking into centralized options to scale such as the Lightning Network, the Ethereum Network is looking into evolving into Proof of Stake. Oh hello there, welcome to the club. While I have to admit that PoS still needs a lot of things to figure itself out and stabilize, same thing goes to say about DPoS, we are still way ahead of PoW chains that are just slow, costly and ineffective for daily usage.

Many of us were here during the last bull run and noticed every coin being bought up or manipulated to be bought up, there was not much reason going on. It felt like a mania of FOMO from outsiders and insiders feeling like they've missed something in a coin and not wanting to miss out on astronomical returns by not holding some of it. It was a lot of dumb money coming in combined with greedy money from easy profits and many hedging their Bitcoin profits into the next rocket. What I am hoping for the next bull run is that it will be a lot more deciding on what the blockchains and projects have actually managed to make of themselves during the last bear run. As many agree, such as the CEO of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is that there aren't many currencies yet with actual usage. Most of the ERC-20 tokens have barely a handful of active daily users, going up to the most popular ones its still miniscule compared to Steem's daily activity as well even though we are at the lowest we've been this year there too.

While big projects are still working on scaling, we at Steem are already way ahead of that with the base being DPoS which makes transactions have no fees, believe it or not the barrier of entry to Steem is the easiest around even though to us it feels quite difficult knowing how much can still improve and with the recent hardfork hopefully will. Most importantly though the use-case. "Steem revived blogging" was quite a popular saying at one stage but unfortunately I haven't heard it a lot lately. Sure it might be due to Medium's success but even there it is quite centralized and middlemen are taking a big cut for essentially doing something that Steem already does for you for free. The barrier of entry for a blogger to open up their blog and quickly (relative to other sites) connect with other authors, readers and curators. I can't wait until authors figure this part out, but I also can't wait until serious investors get into the space and start to realize that blockchains with actual use-case, scaling issues resolved and genuine activity are not many and some of them have been underappreciated for a long time and are in need of some funding through investing to put them into a new gear for further evolving.

There are some exciting times ahead of us, most of the people I talk to daily agree with me that if they can they try to not sell Steem at these prices. I'm not judging those that do, there are a lot of people stating that they will only be one trade away from Bitcoin back but with many thinking the same thing and liquidity being low I just want to warn people that not everyone will get the chance to jump back in in time before this rocket leaves the atmosphere.

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This place didn't just revive blogging. Some of us are reinventing it.

Any time I see a medium article, it's just the same old junk. Words said 1000 different ways that all come to the same conclusion. Just writing words in an attempt to get that spot near the top of a search engine. All of these so called "rules" are followed because they searched "how to be successful blogger" and followed the "Top 7 ways to be a writer" shit post that's been on the internet for nine years and has three shares on Facebook.

The crypto crowd is tiny and the arts and entertainment crowd is massive. If people only knew this place doesn't have to be treated like every other bland forum on the internet and they can be as creative as they want here... dammit I lost my chain of thought.

Oh yeah! I remember now. If you want invest in something, the arts and entertainment world generates billions upon billions of views and dollars every year. This place is a full multi media experience. Anything that could be entertaining to anyone including a dumb essay about rocks all the way up to an awesome vlog/blog combo with music and art while someone else is over there writing a book. Nobody can tell me the arts and entertainment world doesn't have investors and expect me to listen to them because that's bullshit crap. It just seems like the crypto crowd likes to invest in a thing and hope the thing goes up in value but here we have an entire industry and goddamit I hope people realize this potential someday.

Oh and before someone shits on me, just know I mean no disrespect to the crypto crowd. That's all included in what I said. Arts and entertainment includes videos and write-ups about everything. I use the term loosely AND with that I'm done rambling.

If there's a typo, I don't care, I'm half drunk.

Haha I feel the same way about Medium, the only times I use it is to read something interesting a crypto project/CEO has said. Edit: I think over time the decent blockchains out there will see the value in writing and engaging on an immutable blockchain considering all the vote manipulation, black markets and shadowbanning that are happening over on Reddit.

Also can you imagine someone clapping after reading an article? Just no.

I don't know if they're clapping but I do know some people have shot beverage out of their nose over some of the things I've said.

Haha, the "clap" feature that rewards authors somehow.

lol.

Make clap great again

PS- even crypto people have other interests, like me!

the only problem here is that it's not exactly easy to figure out what's going on here. The regular person won't stick around to figure it out yet. I hope it comes.

I'm a regular person, I think. I certainly don't feel irregular. ;)

So am I. BUT I also have patience and curiosity. I was willing to read and learn and see what was possible. The 4 people I told to check this out all abandoned months ago. I've only been online since it came online. I'm not afraid to ask either. Most arent.

But what would your friends and family say? ;) lol

I'm making a big effort to understand what is talked about here (the main article + comments).
Acidyo recollection of an interesting read :

[to read something interesting a crypto project/CEO has said. Edit: I think over time the decent blockchains out there will see the value in writing and engaging on an immutable blockchain considering all the vote manipulation, black markets and shadowbanning that are happening over on Reddit.]

made me read it 2, 3 times and even then I couldn't make heads or tails of it. NOTE - to make this worse , a CEO had said this , which made me loose hope of ever understanding.

On the other side of things - aside of making steemit a new hub for blogs , you've introduced a secret language code and to decode it you need coins ?

I loved Medium until so deemed 'top-stories' got all the attention which created a gap between other stories. I just remembered I once made a comment about a story which got about 3000 reads and 1 or 2 replies and no answers...

Well, uhm I'm moving on , bye for now crypto-people , may it rain blockchains for you !

I think some would, but most of the people have to feel somewhat certain to invest their time nowadays, which is nothing still that relates about crypto to the mainstream

Just to but in here, I agree, we are reinventing blogging, thank god. I was so sad when blogging slowly slid away and we were replaced with FB thumbs up and just memes. I love bloggin, I know it's so 2000 and late, but I don't care. I love it :)

The car replaced the horse and that improved life. Whatever Facebook replaced didn't seem to improve anything. That thing has made people miserable for nearly a decade. It's like a drug they can't stop putting into their body even though it doesn't make a high anymore. An entire generation, zoned out. Just because everyone else is doing something, that doesn't make it a good thing.

It's almost as if it was 'planned' that way ;)

The amount of knowledge gleaned about the human animal and it's mind's conditions since the World wars has been put to good use in much of our modern 'aides', crazy old world.

Tosses away the principles of "Top 7 ways to be a writer"...adopting the "I don't care, I'm half drunk" principle from now on.

Amen!

Never get full drunk and type though. That's how you crash. You'll wake up the next morning with an immutable hangover and you'll have to live with that for the rest of your days.

I agree 1000%.

I am often accused of being a schill for Steem and ignoring what is taking place. The fact that I am super optimistic counts for nothing with people.

Personally, I don't get it. What you state is rather obvious to everyone in my opinion. Or should be. If people would only look around at other blockchains to see the struggles they are having and Steem's look minor in comparison.

Being optimistic does not mean being ignorant to the challenges ahead of us. There are many but I would rather deal with the Resource Credit problem as opposed to figuring out how to scale up.

I have been massively excited and positive about Steem ever since I realized its full potential, a while ago. More than a year ago, most likely.

Ever since then I've been doing everything I can to increase my stake here because at this point of time in my life it seems like the only way out to financial slavery to the control system. The one that tries so hard to keep the majority poor, struggling.

They have done a good job but, steem is my jackpot. 100$ per Steem is no dream. When investors realize the same things I did. The Dapps evolve, SMT's come and erc20 based dapps move to SMT's. 100$ per Steem is definitely not going to be out of the question. Like it is for many now. But not for me.

I'm already lookin' at steem from that perspective. Meaning I have 700k $. Meaning, I'm already a mulit-millionaire in my national currency. Meaning that I've already made it!

But I'm pushing forward. Stacking that Steem whenever I can. Scraping the little fiat I have to buy more. Doing everything I can to be better the next day and produce better content. That's another thing I like about this place. The incentives are strongand push us to be better. Unlike fb and others who want to make us into straight up tards. Immoral bastards.

STEEM is the future and I'm glad that I already got 7k and that I don't have to sell it to feed myself, yet. The longer it stays that way, the better.

Moon baby, Moon.
I'm already there in my mind.

Agreed, especially when you mention the exciting times to be had for us in the future! Can't wait for true internet tokenization to start kicking when SMTs launch! I wonder what's in store for Steem after March when SMTs release, probably a bit of a revamp of steemit.com is in line, we all know that it's not necesary to use steemit at all and that there are better condensers out there but for newbies that's the first thing they say and a lot of people like to choose platforms by appearance over functionality!

Are you going to pop into Vimm one of these days? Also with all those people that you've started following maybe you should unfollow @dlive :^)

we all know that it's not necesary to use steemit at all and that there are better condensers out there but for newbies that's the first thing they say and a lot of people like to choose platforms by appearance over functionality!

Yeah. Steemit is still Steem to many people. "Where do you post your stories?" "On Steemit!", not Steem... I'd like for this perception to go away but it's hard for people to focus on these small matters.

First impressions matter! I think busy is the best one of them all, maybe they should just fork busy and work from there :^)

Lol, agreed. Busy has some things that Steemit has, Steemit has some things that busy has. I keep switching back and forth depending on what I'm doing. I do browse and post only from Busy, though. I wish there could be a merge or something, but Steemit would have to upvote like Busy for me to post from there :^)

I'm excited to hear more about the new app @ned was talking about. :)

Oh? I didn't know about that! I'll have to keep an eye out for more information about it. Thanks for mentioning it.

He mentioned it in one of his recent comments. :)

Haha thanks for the reminder, after I followed everyone in that thread the other day I remembered that I should've unfollowed the inactive ones first as now I have about 1.5x more accounts to go through to determine who the inactive ones are. Oh well, I'll find the time for that one of these days. :D

Yes, it feels weird that I'm almost hoping the next bull run won't start until SMT's have had some time to get started so we can make most of the existing blockchains obsolete. ;)

I can send you a list of accounts you follow, by order of last post if you want?

That would be much appreciated! :D

on it's way via discord :D

How can you do that?? :D

Maybe you could get someone to write a script that detects who hasn't posted for X amount of time. It couldn't be that hard, I reckon.

Well I have seen accounts being resurrected with just a little enquirement, like some people get discouragedand leave but a comment or feedback can summon them back

You're right, good idea. :)

I was never much of a coder hence I keep forgetting about that aspect of making life easier. :D

Somebody already did, I think it was Asher, maybe (@abh12345)?

:) Coding is really cool for that. When I started, I realised I had found what I wanted. Now I can be lazy and automate everything that can be automated in my life.

I think you will be right, because it looks like the next up trend will be just around that time zone:D

Steem has hard stops for writers. When I started, just like many newcomers, I didn't have a following, and I've seen thousands who come with great content and are discouraged almost right away because they can't get ahold of some readers.

Medium and other such middlemen-based alternatives do provide a bit more of a guarantee of readers and payment for now, but it's of course at the price of paying the middleman for something that Steem would do for free.

I think that Steem can be greatly improved to favour bloggers, but I'm not sure if that's the focus we want to have. There are also the dApps for many purposes, the SMTs that are coming, the many communities. All of these are Steem amplifiers and things that will work together to make the price of Steem go up when the next bull-run comes.

Do you think Steem should focus on being a blogging platform, something else, something in-between or what? This is a controversial topic nowadays on the blockchain.

Medium is much older than Steem. Initially, on Medium there was mostly only your Twitter following and if that was large enough you could show up on their internal analytics and potentially be curated to the front.

I agree that blogging may not be the highlight of the blockchain in the near future but I doubt it will completely go away. I'm hoping to see some improvements in that aspect for readers and curators and I'm sure with oracles and SMT's that's something that can be improved a lot to make the onramp even easier for new authors that don't already have a big following that they bring along with them.

It's interesting to hear someone big up steem as a blogging platform for once!

TBH it's all I'm really interested in using it for... it's still the best outlet for my eclectic personal interests.

No other platform would pay me quite as much to just exprsss myself.

Steempress is a game changer if you ask me... it's not just their 1m SP holding - it's that WP is so much better than any of steem's UIs... and I'm not sure if anyone could improve on WP TBH.

Maybe that's the future for dapps - more cross platform integration to open source stuff that already works, it just seems more efficient than developing worse apps from scratch that you can only use on steem!

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@acidyo, I hoping steem blockchain will be growth up more and start more projects in future. After HF20 could be more advantages for high SP holders. But limitation for less SP users here with RC's. I have big hope after launch SMT next of March steem worth more boost and increase worth for more SP holders their account. Already hodl all invested tokens. Thanks for your experienced thoughts.

Steem being an utility coin with a community behind that is really using the tokens for something that couldn't be achieved otherwise is trul unique. However, I am less optimistic about the next bull run. I fear it will be the same thing all over again, with coins exploding in value without differentiation - and the inevitable fallback. I think we need a much harder crash to really seperate the useful from the scam.

I kind of agree with you but at the same time if this is the bottom and most of the scams and low potential ones or the ones where you don't even really need a blockchain for it die out through no funding, it bodes well for the ones that will continue to exist a couple years from now.

Hmmm, when it grows, we could freeze in stable values and invest smart. But it's inevitable for a bull-run to be followed by a bear run. Sad.

Nice, good to see what u think. There will always be people who want to get rich quick through some crypto... These are the ones that will sell steem and stop believeing in it while we're this low. But, that's what should we expect.

Does STEEM have some marketing plan or we hope people will hear about us?

I'm hoping for some marketing from Steemit inc, that's something that will also require a bit of a boost in price to make the cost of that less compared to their stake I guess. The best marketing is still the community, word of mouth and now being able to claim accounts and create accounts for the people you want onboard. When prices start to soar that's also a great marketing tool as coinmarketcap.com is still quite a popular website and just being there relatively close to the top does wonders for new users and investors.

I have some plans to help that along as well through the subreddit r/steemit. (subscribe to it if you haven't yet) :)

Nice. I am mostly spreading the word about STEEM on FB because I have around 15k people there in my group and profile(s). But as you said it, when the price is too low and my posts don't have that big reward, it's hard to promote STEEM Blockchain. SO hopefully, when STEEM goes up it will be easier. At least I know that I started to get their attention because some of them started to ask more and more about STEEM.

I am subscribed, but since I'm on STEEM, I forgot that reddit exists... :)

I'm doing the same with my 13k team on Twitter. But like you, they expect to see me showing that social proof of success on Steemit for more of them to dive in.

I have every confidence that will happen, it's just a matter of time and continuing to network with my brother Steemians.

However, I see the blogging aspect as just the "front door" for now. This package of platform and crypto will be so much more in the future, that we may need to start framing the benefits apart from the blogging, to let people know that we're more than that.

Exactly. It's on us to promote our home so I don't worry. I know when I started, I had no likes on my posts and now I'm getting to something. Even got some FB friends to join my streem and see how it looks like... #fckingdlive

STEEM Blockchain is a stage for our creativity and it will get much better in time. I hope people will not ruin it like they ruin almost every good thing..

It really seems that the marketing will have to come from the users themselves. I can't see steeminc taking any steps in that direction.

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They have the biggest stake so it's probably in their best interest to take care of some marketing as well after the most important things like scaling are out of the way. :)

Let's hope that is what they have planned. There is no point in developing a great blockchain if you don't tell anyone about it.

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On the same note, we could probably unite as investors to create an advertising program. After all, our stakes depend on Steem's success as well.

Frankly speaking, Steem has become part of my daily life - I barely stop writing, unless I got some unavoidable/unbearable issues happened in my life...

Same for me! Since I started Steeming, I started a lot of parallel projects, but regardless of how well it goes on that side, I'm still stuck here participating every day. It's a really nice community that has become some sort of home to me. I really hope it lasts. I wouldn't like to have to leave for unfortunate reasons byeond my control.

Hehe, looks like great mindset people gathering in Steem for the same reason @cryptosharon Glad that you're one of us :)

+++Same, and compared to where Steemit was back in 2016, now it has improved a lot

Steemit awakened the joy of writing in me. It's so much fun coming up with new post ideas, crafting the piece, then watching to see how it does.

Like having a kid and sending him off to school. :)

Hehe, well said, especially the last sentence lol

It's not easy to become a "Steem's parent" XD