You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Steem has an image problem and we need to fix it!
Thanks for sharing this important issue.
I'm glad that I am not the only one worried about this.
#Promo-Steem was set up to address this exact problem.
Over the last +18 months I have been banging my head against a brickwall about Marketing and Promoting the #Steem Blockchain.
Like you have quite rightly pointed out, most people still think that #Steemit and the #Steem Blockchain is all there is and totally oblivious to the fact that there are countless other amazing #Dapps.
Stephen
We need to get serious about fixing the rewards, curation, and treasury system. There is marketing, promotion, and public education that is sorely needed and Steem in theory has a funding mechanism to support that (and I'm quite confident that many investors/stakeholders would support rewards going to fund this) but in practice the funding mechanism has been corrupted into a bunch of useless nonsense.
Even at current depressed prices, millions of dollars per year could be going to help raise (correct!) awareness about Steem, support more dynamic development efforts, or a variety of other powerful uses. Instead we get nothing and Steem is spiraling the drain.
The thing is, we probably should have done this for quite some time - using the reward pool to incentivize effective and relevant work on Steem. On the one hand, we have utopian-io, but it can only do so much and it's very broad in the thing it supports.
Don't get me wrong, open source work, in general, is important, but work focused on Steem should be n°1. So maybe what we need right now is a more direct approach in the things we (stakeholders and investors) would like to see build on Steem/for Steem/with Steem.
But in any way - the curation and reward system needs an overhaul. While it does work somehow, it could be so much more. It might be counter-intuitive at first for the very basic users, but it can and probably will attract more skilled users, who might be more valuable for the platform. (I know, it sounds mean, but we can't have a system for everyone)
We did in the early days. I'm not going to claim it was the main or only use of rewards but there were very significant marketing initiatives, third party integration projects, etc. that were funded by rewards. There were a number of Steem apps proposed and received significant funding (although unfortunately some were scams or simply did not have credible roadmaps; the community needed to develop a bit more sophistication and skepticism).
Things went downhill from there.
Damn right. For the millionth time I've said this, investors are paying for rewards. This only makes sense one of two ways: 1) Investors see it as a way to generate personal ROI and siphon rewards back to themselves via self-enrichment, spamming the chain in the process and ultimately everyone chasing their tail and getting nowhere; or 2) rewards are allocated to purposes which add value back to Steem increasing the value of ones investment. Everything else is inefficient leakage which discourages (and should discourage) people from investing.
There is a lot of room within 'add value back to Steem'. That can include sponsoring pure content such as art, writing, etc., or even donating to charity, but only when calibrated to the level where it helps promote the Steem brand (and, here too, curation quality is so important because sponsoring generic crap content and/or scams hurts the Steem brand). It can also include a faucet type functionality where new users are able to earn some rewards as an incentive to join. It can include sponsoring app developers, but only to the extent that those apps are successful in bringing users, investors and growth back to Steem.
If we can't get any of this to actually work we should turn off rewards, pivot to a different model, and at least stop chasing investors away with useless inflation.
I think I saw 1 or 2 of them, but even if things went downhill from there, the community behind Steem has matured quite a bit, including the projects and we're getting more and more really great projects (skipping dlive ..)
Exactly. Investors are paying for a growing investment. Supporting individuals is great, but from an investors point of view: what good is it if it doesn't increase the value/growth of the investment.
So yeah, honestly, for me there is actually no better way than putting the focus on individuals & projects that make Steem more valuable.
However, is this possible with the current distributed stake or should be a part of the reward pool be exclusively for it?
(For example: @steemtank is supporting exclusively Steemians who are known to bring value to Steem, but the amount of rewards being able to be given out is quite limited)
What would be another model? I'm quite intrigued by the idea, even if it is very radical and not something that should be taken lightly.
From a blockchain perspective it would certainly all work if content/curation rewards were simply set to zero and nothing else changed. Even some bloggers would still post (due to censorship resistance, possibility of getting easy tips via transfer, etc.) I'm quite certain and comments would continue as most comments don't get or expect to get rewards anyway but people still do them. Apps such as steemmonsters which do not rely on blogging/rewards would work just fine, in fact they would get cheaper since more RC would be available (I'm assuming that blogging/spamming activity would dramatically reduce).
That would have immediate positive benefit in terms of investors not seeing scary 8+% inflation (with just witness rewards it would be more like 1%, some offset by vesting if you power up., a more reasonable price to maintain the security of the chain) and many feeling they need to milk the reward pool just to avoid losing money.
What would be lost:
If the model isn't working to grow the community and increase the value of Steem then there is no reason to continue it. That's the definition of insanity.
Personally I would rather leverage Steems head start and already positioned model in terms of curation-allocated inflation rewards by getting it working better and start becoming the rocket fuel for growth that it was supposed to be. But if we can't come up with something that works, we can't. Best to move on and just focus on being a solid, efficient, and scaleable blockchain with innovations elsewhere. Plodding along in this zombie-like state is nuts.
There are other models we could think about as well to try to be a direct replacement for the blog/voting/reward model such as something a bit more patreon- or twitch-like with automatic subscriber payments and such. Nothing I know of is well developed even at the idea stage but it isn't impossible we could make a big pivot like that. Again, if what you are doing isn't working, try something else.
Thanks smooth... I agree, will this fall on deaf ears?
And also kill SBD on external markets or totally get rid of SBD, let them trade it into steem on the internal market or convert it... we have no real price discovery, steem is a currency right... not an utility token.
When SMT's are paired to steem, it should also not be possible to move those SMT's to external markets. Let them first go to steem as currency and exit to fiat.
To be clear I am not advocating turning off rewards (though it wouldn't bother me really as I think they are mostly worthless in their present form) and I doubt there is much support for it right now. I would prefer to improve the curation system so it can channel rewards to more value adding activities.
At some point if we conclude that we can't make it work then it would be better to pivot. One way to do that may be to have STEEM decline from competing with SMTs in the reward-voting game and let SMTs experiment with their own solutions. STEEM can instead focus on being a native coin (including as reserve and bridge asset for SMTs) and access and governance token for the network with much lower inflation.
I don't agree with your view on SBD, I view it as a complementary asset. Regarding SMTs, I don't think it is possible to prevent external trading. No one needs permission to do it.
Well, I'm sure your head is harder than the wall. I hope this post can get some stones rolling.
I would disagree that there are countless other amazing apps/dapps. That is a bunch of cheerleading nonsense which does not hold up to scrutiny. None of them are lighting the world in fire in terms of adoption any better than Steemit is. Most of them only exist because they are milking the free steemit delegation and would fold like a cheap suit in about five minutes if that went away.
Steemmonsters is the most promising I know about, and the only one that I would say still has real hope of making a major difference, although it is too early to know whether it actually will. That is not countless. It is one.
Steem is a very powerful blockchain and has some good to great capabilities but we still need new blood coming in and coming up with creative ideas for using it because what we have so far has not found the magic formula at all.
This ultimately comes down to the same issue of awareness and marketing though.