Keeping Our Priorities Straight
Is right now the best time to ask questions? I believe so.
It comes down to patience. I honestly believe 10 million DAU on Steem is one the worst thing we can do right now. I'm an investor in Steem, but I will be the first one to say we have a long way to go before we start onboarding the masses of normies. Set the economy aside (I think the economy is broken it incentives bad behavior while disincentivizing good behavior, but let's set that apart) - we don't have RC delegation pools or enough accounts to sign up even 5% of Facebook, let alone go for the throat. So, let's say you make a killer app on Steem, you have 10million people beating down your door for accounts and RCs. Are you going to tell your grandma to go to Binance and buy some Steem, or are you going to delegate 15 SP to 10 million people? If we had a foundation in place where people can lease RCs to apps, like Chintai or REX on EOS, then apps could handle the traffic.
I'll tell you a little story about NLC. I invested in NLC when it was 10 Satoshi, and had 0 - 24vol. The site was old and beat up, but I noticed it had a legal license for fantasy sports in more than half the USA, so I reached out to the CEO. I liked Rafael as a CEO, so I helped rebuild the website. I funded the work and brought in the workers. The site went from having words misspelled to rivaling Fan Duel with the features and UI. I went HAM on advertising, did all I could and before I knew it the price was over 10,000 Satoshi! There were tons of players, and we were getting shout outs from everywhere. Life was good, but I knew there was a big flaw I saw and knew it was going to bite NLC in the ass, and that was that there was no dollar peg. So, as a player, I was forced to be at the whim of the crypto market. On the way up, as you imagine it was great, but as soon as the market turned, and players logged in the next day to see they have less USD, that wasn't good. All the work I put into advertising NLC backfired because every player we had started to lose USD values during the bear market. Every player we brought basically hurt NLC at that point, gave a lousy user experience. The dollar peg I envisioned would require a hardfork to add a inflationary/deflationary wallet (sorta took the idea from Bitshares/SBD but tweaked it) so it got pushed off. I learned from this, now NLC is building out a robust dollar peg for players, and next time they kick advertising into high gear, with the dollar peg, it should be able to get players but most importantly keep them.
Now, getting everything as close to right before we blow up should be the goal. We have community members that go up and beyond, look at the work with Steem Engine and how it stood up and made an SMT like protocol; before this, we didn’t even have a way to scale rewards. Imagine 10 thousand sites with millions of users all using just the inflation from Steem to reward new content? Ya, you may get one upvote a year if you are lucky.
My point is, I invested a lot of $$ into Steem, and I did it fully aware of all the issues we currently face. If you never invest in something because it isn't fully grown, while a safer bet, don't expect to achieve great things in investing. I like taking the risk, I love it when my vision pays off, and I believe Steem will be a top 3 crypto, despite any flaws.
I do believe this is the best time to make changes and experiment when we have 10-20k DAU across the board. Look at what happened to Bitcoin; it became so big that no one could even agree on a block size limit without causing billions of dollars in drama. Changes to Steem, esp. the base layer, will become much hard to get passed as Steem grows up. When you have millions, even billions using the platform the weight of every change is magnified much greater and the politics start to take over. Before we get to that point, I believe we should be keeping everything on the table and really taking the time to get the base layer right. Am said the base layer is broken? No. I'm not even saying the distribution of 25/75 is broken, I am saying I think it is broken, but this is just my opinion.
I also believe the core groups of 5-10k Steemains we have here are the lifeblood. For every Steemian we have that is 10-100 FB users. Your avg Steemian uses exchanges, knows proper private key protection and most importantly are on Steem already and have stayed here. Early investors that HODL and don't dump Steem to 1 cent are heroes IMO, it takes balls to power up a lot of Steem, plan and simple. Look around at other blockchains, and you would be hard pressed to find what we have on Steem. And we are only getting better, so let's not neglect our own in the pursuit of 10million future normies. Let's build something we as a community like to use and we will be beating normies away with a broom because they will takeover and our small town will turn into NYC before you can realize.
While I have high self-confidence, it isn't nearly high enough for me to think I have all the answers, that is why I spend my time focusing on me, not others. Now, you are free to do whatever you want; you want 10 million people here? Go post some twitter ADs, go hire the next PewDiePie, go do whatever you think it takes. I could easily do that, shift my focus from building to deploying, but I don't think we are ready yet. I not asking for anyone to do anything, I am too busy building infrastructure and using countless hours to brainstorm ways to help Steem. So, you do you, and I'll do me, and at the end of the day, the chips are going to fall where they fall anyway.
And this is to all the buidlers, do you, don't listen to the noise that will only slow you down.
"If it's not broke, don't fix it" - I dislike that line...
Replace it with: "If it can be better then it currently is, then it's as good as broken."
Keep challenging ideas, keep asking questions but most importantly always speak your mind!
This is the reason I focus on minnow tips and have since I got here two years ago. We need more people. Not the zillions right now - as you say - but we still need worker bees who can negotiate this place, learn and test dapps, create a presence, create examples, and be future leaders.
I help new people to try to cut our 95% kill rate. 35 whales does not an ecosystem make. We can't all be investors, but someone has to be here to make the wheels turn.
EVERY ONE of the maybe 25 content creators who came here in two years because of my example on social media is gone now. My posts look great, I'm doing well and like it here, so my friends think they can do it too. But they can't. It takes a certain kind of drive/lunacy/commitment/passion to make it on steem right now and most people do not have that.
But during the same two years I have helped I do not know how many more "strangers" to succeed. If someone is posting here with 7+ posts a week - they want to succeed, and can succeed. I can give you lists of promising redfish and small minnows in various niches who are trying hard and not giving up. They just need to learn 500 things as they go. The people I work with down here are willing to learn all of it - or at least targeted parts of it.
We have so much good here. The development in the infrastructure is far ahead of when I got here. Babies now have curation support from people like you as well as curation projects. But we sure cannot handle a flood. A little better trickle of enthusiastic newbies would be good though.
I'm so glad to see this post today. You are a real bright spot here for me and for others in so many ways, Dan.
How does one delegate to minnow tips if one was so inclined?
Wow. Well, it's me, myself and I. You can see what I'm doing on the bottom of any of my posts like this one:
https://steemit.com/esteem/@fitinfun/enter-contests-on-steem-and-win
That post is Part Six of the "Minnow Tips Updates" I've been writing for April 2019, but will now spill into May. Soon I will give a recap and just keep going, since this is just such a vast vastness of "Things you need to know on STEEM."
At the bottom of the post, you can see all the rest of the Minnow Tips I give people as needed, when they ask me, or when I find them. It's what I've been doing since I got here and will keep doing no matter what.
I'm an accountant and had to do these tips for myself to stay same, so I started publishing them about a month after I got here. People still find some of the old ones or get referred to me or...
I too think steem has great potential to bring in huge returns
RC pools will be a big thing going forward,
but at the same time, so will second-layer / off-chain scaling solutions.
There are a lot of projects here that put information on the blockchain for no reason.
Take the games Drugwars and NextColony for example. Neither of these projects needs to be putting database information on the blockchain. If RCs were actually worth something they'd move off chain in a heartbeat.
Imagine playing a game with someone on Steem but never passing the information through Steem. Imagine signing transactions with your posting key but instead of sending it to the blockchain you send it directly to your opponent to avoid RC costs.
If anyone tries to cheat you can prove cheating occurred by bringing it back to the main chain. This is the same concept as Plasma (ETH) and the Lightning Network. Because there is a penalty associated with cheating and it can be proven that you cheated... no one will do it.
This is what makes Steem the best prototyping platform. We have a built in community willing to try out new dapps. These dapps piggyback off the main chain and the full nodes. if the dapp becomes popular enough they can move off chain with the bulk of transactions and only use the blockchain for value transfer and security/logins.
@Theycallmedan, am awed at your passion in pursuing vision. The above excerpt really shows how much you prioritize investing in little beginnings and helping each grow.
With this, I think its time we all ask "WHAT CAN I DO TO GROW STEEM?" If we all get sincere at our wish, then the below quote of yours be true.
I'm glad we have people like you to push us up the game.
But one thing really keeps me curious:
What's the actual problem of STEEM?
I hope the #crypto gurus would come share here so we have a direction on where to go.
If it's onboarding then, I think @blocktrades could create a market to purchase RCs.
Personally, I need such a market withe the volume of the tiny promotion am engaging on. At a personal level, I onboard at least one steem user daily with the help of @steemhunt.
I think we can achieve more!
Replace it with: "If it can be better then it currently is, then it's as good as broken."
I like this! I just want to add to it...
Fix the most broken parts first.
I believe in building, but sometimes people don't really know what to fix about steem and the truth is we're too decentralized to understand where it's ailing steem, it's more than bull and bear we can say steem may not be broken, but it's definitely not up to par as well, at the end it all boils down to individual building, when can we be perfect?
I agree that while we have a small number of people it’s a good time to debug the platform.
I would suggest that those interested in increasing the reward for curation consider a different path to accomplishing their goal. I understand the desire to change the author/curator split across the board and I usually see posts responses which are pro and con. I suggest that instead of pursuing a global change in which every one is forced to change to 50/50 split, that you pursue individual choice to modify the split post by post, by modifying the existing code which allows reward sharing between collaborative authors. I think this code change is consistent with the desire of people who invest in cryptocurrency to be in control and it will allow those who seek to change the economic system a mechanism to change the split on their posts and not elicit resistance from others who wish to retain the 75:25 split.
Shortsegments
I think many are calling to fix something the owners don't think is broken in the way they are. Decentralization goes out the window in stake based structures when one enters into the structure that is owned. This seems something many would understand, yet I see a disconnect by so many here.
Steemit is a centralized corporation, and one can ascertain quite a bit by not only what they do, but by what they don't do. I don't see any indication that their vision for this chain was for this demo site to be the point of strength sending the chain to the moon. It had the potential to be, if enough who came invested something (even a little). But most who come here want something for nothing. Based not only on what hasn't been worked on by the corporation that brought us the chain, but by tactics being revealed by those who have ended up on certain whale shit lists, it seems logical to conclude they see the conundrum they are in.
Until someone(s) understand what Steem could do for their already cash positive structure, or structure that has enough financial backing not to need Steem as the primary source of revenue, I think at best we can hope for somehow treading where we are. Onboarding more will only exasperate things.
A lot of anger continues to be created by the cultivated misconception of what Steemit is and wants to be and many who come here. I believe that is why a chain with such application possibility compared to others finds itself slipping behind other projects that offer less. The dis-ease grows, and sadly, the future forward will only be prosperous if other applications come. Onboarding waves of new people to come to this centralized, privately owned application will only create more FUD and rage. When people have it good, they are rarely as vocal as when they are pissed off.
To end on a positive note, for those who want their own version of a social site that isn't counter to their own views, there is a project in testing called SCOT that would allow for you to create your own tokenized website that would be free from what you may be considering censorship. All it would require is your funding to build and maintain it, and enough others who agree with your views to come who feel it is a worthy investment. Just don't forget that as Steemit has discovered, many want their free speech to be free from out of pocket investment.
Good to hear some bullish talk, I been in a lull along with many recently.
Thinking ahead of the stuff that might need a fix, this is a fair point.
Claims so far, 422367, creates from those claims, 117157. That's 300,000 accounts that could appear quite quickly, if we had a decent mechanism in place to offer them out, which I don't think we do at present.
It's just taking a while, I'm tired man!
That's why I focus on myself now and stopped inviting people here. A year ago, I spent so much time and effort helping these people get board on Steem and I had to baby sit them, make sure they know everything that I know but 99% of them are gone now.
I remember when my upvote was $10, I barely make blogs but am sure helped a lot Steemians . I focused on helping the red fish and minnows, but now they're in graveyard and I look at their wallet, it's empty. I was hoping that they might saved a little bit of their earnings. It's so sad and upsetting at the time! 😞 I only see few swimming around which makes me proud of them. I know I can't blame those who left, maybe they don't see Steem avaluable asset but am done baby sitting, it's time to focus on myself.
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The geek is strong in you.