Steemit – We have a Problem
A lack of development? Or micromanaging into obscurity? Why not both?
I want to talk to our friends at Steemit, Inc. for a moment.
In my previous post about Steemit a few weeks ago, I talked about the identity of the platform and the lack of investment in it. What is Steemit? Where are the influx of new users? Why do people not stick around? Where are the investors and the currency seekers/users? What can we do to make things better?
A little over a week later, we received word of some changes that may be coming to Steemit on the economics side. These ideas were overwhelmingly welcomed by the community. It felt like there was a celebratory atmosphere around here for several days. However, I think too many people may be thinking that the problems with Steemit will now be solved by the next fork.
They won’t.
The problem we’re having with users and investors is not an economic one. Yes, the fundamental economics of Steemit play a large role in investor confidence and eventual buy-ins, but it’s not what will add value to the platform that bootstraps the Steem currency. The value of Steemit – and consequently, Steem – relies on a vibrant social media community that can attract and retain users.
We don’t have that.
Steemit is floundering, not because of inflation rates or market cap. Those are merely effects. So, what is the cause?
We’re trying to solve the wrong problems
A lot of the discussions on this platform have been centered around Steem prices and post rewards.
“How can we raise the price of Steem?”
“How can we keep users happy by spreading the rewards around?”
“Let’s create another curation guild to give rewards to users who aren’t getting votes and comments!”
“Let’s burn Steem Dollars so that we can fix the debt and market cap ratios!”
These aren’t solutions that will fix the problems we’re having. The biggest problem – by far – is the lack of user interest and the inability to retain most of those who join.
So, why aren’t people interested in joining Steemit? Is it because they don’t think they’ll be able to make money? Is it because they joined and weren’t able to consistently make the trending pages? Is it because they don’t like where the price of Steem is currently sitting? Is it because they see the platform rewards as grossly unfair?
It’s possible that many users see these as a huge problem. However, I don’t think that’s the case. Why don’t I believe that? Because I see millions (billions?) of people using other sites where they don’t earn a single penny and they don’t follow the stock prices of the companies running them. So, how can rewards and Steem prices be such a huge barrier to joining or be such an infuriating issue on Steemit?
Honestly, I don’t think they are. The reason that people use a site like Facebook or an app like Instagram is the ease of use. It’s the functionality of the site and apps. It’s the simplicity involved in communication. It’s the features and customization.
Steemit is lacking in all of these areas to varying degrees.
Another curation guild isn’t going to get us profile pages. Tweaking the inflation rate isn’t going to get us an on-platform messaging system. Changing vesting periods isn’t going to get us a virtual store for the Steem currency and for customizing our blogs.
WE NEED DEVELOPMENT – AND WE NEED IT NOW.
I don’t know what’s happening inside the halls of Steemit, Inc., but the lack of development is concerning at this point. We just recently added a couple of new features – notifications and an actual avatar. Seven months into this project and we can finally add a tiny image to our “profiles.” Well, we can upload the images to a hosting site and then copy and paste the link here on Steemit. I suppose that can be celebrated...if this was 1996.
Prior to these last two features being added, what have been the big feature developments on Steemit? Re-blogging and promoted posts. The “Re-Steem” feature leaves things quite messy and hard to parse when trying to find content from the users that you follow. It needs a little more work. The promoted posts feature has so far left most users quite unimpressed and can’t really be called much of a success.
So, in seven months, we have seen two and a half minor, but useful features added to the platform. During that time, how many thousands upon thousands of dollars of Steem have been powered down and/or sold to allegedly fund this meager development?
Again, I must ask – where is the leadership from Steemit, Inc.? What is your plan for developing this site? Where is the roadmap for development? Do you have one?
Forget about powering down, investors, Steem prices, and all of the economics of the site for a moment. The fact of the matter is this: Steemit is not very user-friendly!
Sometimes the promise of money just isn’t enough.
What do I mean when I say that this site isn’t user-friendly? Well, first of all – the design is boring and it’s not the least bit customizable for users. As cryptocurrency-focused miners and developers, you may not think that this is very important or that it should be a priority for development. If that’s what you believe, then you couldn’t be more wrong. A blogging or social media platform needs to at least have basic profile features and customization options for its users. There’s absolutely no excuse for overlooking this or for not developing even minimal features for seven months.
I get that the design was to be somewhat modeled on the Reddit design – but Reddit isn’t exactly the epitome of social media. Its design doesn’t attract a large number of new users. It has its user base because it has been around for a long time, but still, its numbers are dwarfed by other platforms. If widespread adoption is sought, then a much better design is what’s needed. If you’re not going to improve the design, then at least add the features that many users have been requesting – features that should be the bare minimum for a blogging/social media site. As mentioned already, here are two that we really should have by yesterday.
Profile images and biographical information
Users should be able to customize a profile page or tab on their blogs. It should include an option for at least two or three images. There should be adequate space for several paragraphs of personal information and a place for linking other social media profiles and pages to their Steemit profile page/tab. These should be the minimum features for a user profile.
On-site messaging/chats
Incorporate something like steemit.chat into Steemit’s UI. Messaging your friends and followers is one of the most important aspects to any social media website or app. If you can’t do that without leaving the site, then you have a serious social media problem.
There is no reason why these should not be the priority for developers. If a profile page or tab can’t be functional by next month, then the developers at Steemit, Inc. need to be fired. If users are what we want here, then you need to make this site appealing to average users. Some basic added features will help with that. Get it done. What are you waiting for? You have the money to do it. So do it.
While that’s being done, we need to have some of the functionality cleaned up.
“Re-Steeming” is a nightmare for many users. The Re-Steemed posts really need to be separated from user posts on their blog page. Create a new tab for it and send the Re-Steems there. Again – this is something that shouldn’t take long to code and implement. Why it hasn’t been done already is a complete mystery. This has been mentioned by many users since immediately after the function was implemented.
The Promoted Posts feature needs a reworking if it’s to be kept on the site. Having a separate tab for it doesn’t seem to be appealing to users and the way that one competes with other promoters quickly prices a large majority of users out of the market. This may be the intent of the function – I’m not really sure. If it is, then it’s just not a feature for the average user and it really means nothing as far as development goes. If it isn’t the intent, then it’s broken and needs to be restructured. (Right now, it actually appears to literally be broken. It’s not working.)
The notification feature should include when someone gains or loses a follower – and it should tell you who began following or stopped following. It’s an easy way to connect with each other and to recognize new users, or to simply know who you have gained or lost without searching through several pages of followers. This is something minor in the grand scheme of things, but it adds something that users would appreciate, as well as something that most other social media sites and apps currently have.
There are plenty of other features that can be added or improved. These are just some of the things that we should have at minimum. If these things can’t happen in a relatively short time, then the platform will continue to lose “steam.” Pun intended.
What happened to gamification?
Not only do we have a problem with a lack of development, but we also have a problem with a lack of gamification for user features. There’s no reason why we can’t make some new features part of the gamifying aspect of Steemit.
Do you want your own profile page or tab? Then you need to earn 1 M-vest.
Do you want to be able to Re-Steem more than five posts per day? Then you need to have a reputation over 50.
Do you want a custom avatar from the SteemStore? Then you need to develop the SteemStore and the custom avatars – because they don’t even exist.
If you want a few ideas about what can be done to help with both gamification and currency use, see this post.
Seriously Steemit, Inc. – you’re dropping the ball here. I’m looking at a @steemit account that’s sitting on over 100,000 Steem Dollars and almost eight million Steem. Another account – @steemit1 – is sitting on another 135,000 Steem Dollars. And you have all of your various personal accounts on top of that. That currency will be no good if it’s worthless because the website was never properly developed!
What’s the problem that Steemit has? A lack of user interest. Why aren’t people interested? Because the site isn’t attractive to social media users. Why isn’t it attractive? Because of a lack of development.
GET IT DEVELOPED!
Use that money to add value to the platform instead of throwing it away on billboards or by flying around the world for relatively small meet-and-greets. You want enthusiasm from the community? Then you need a community! We can all meet up and celebrate when the development has given us a site that at least has a somewhat sustainable user base.
Don’t get the wrong impression.
I’m not saying these things to be a jerk. It’s just frustrating for many users to see basic UI features consistently not being developed and implemented. That is the reason for nearly all of the problems with Steemit. We wouldn’t need to worry about curating guilds, interest rates, or placating everyone who’s threatening to leave if Steemit was attractive enough to bring in new users and keep them here. The only way that happens is if this site is a real, easy to adopt and use, and a somewhat aesthetically pleasing social media platform.
Users can learn about the currency and how to spend or withdraw it. Users can learn about curating groups and why some people like them. Users can learn about interest rates, arbitrage, curation trails, category tags, and anything else that they might not know about when they join. But if they don’t like how the platform looks and functions from the average social media user perspective, then none of the other stuff matters. They’ll go back to Facebook. They’ll go back to Snapchatting. They’ll go back to Medium.
That’s the truth. That’s how Steemit moves forward. Either we start making this place more attractive for Aunt Sally and her attention span-deprived millennial step-son, or we watch Steemit wither away as we try to micromanage votes and payouts. I would rather see Aunt Sally here posting cat memes than watch the entire platform crumble. Now that doesn’t mean we have to throw all of our money at Aunt Sally just because she’s posting. But having her and her step-son here, their friends, and the friends of their friends is the point of all of this, isn’t it? They are the ones who will be voting for our posts and spending their Steem – and ensuring that the site has value as a social media platform.
That’s what we need. That’s how Steemit lives on. Make it happen.
I truly hope others share my sentiments. Agree or disagree, or have ideas of your own? Let us know in the comments.
When considering things you think they should be doing that other sites are doing it is important to remember that the idea of steem is to be decentralized with steemit.com simply being one view into that chain. If someone took down steemit.com the data on the blockchain would still be there and someone else could bring it back up on another IP, another domain name, etc. It could not be killed.
This is cool but it also creates some interesting development considerations. When you speak of chat. You speak of it being easy. It IS easy if you are centralizing all of your data. You simply put your chat on the centralized server. Steem is decentralized. So where are you going to put that chat data? Do you think it should be spammed onto the blockchain?
It might be possible using what they refer to as side chains, yet one thing to keep in mind is that some things that are simple when we are speaking about centralized website design can be very complex when we are speaking about decentralized. So it is likely doable, but comparing the work required to do something on a centralized social media site to work required to do the same thing in a decentralized fashion is likely not accurate. So you, AND I often look and say X Y Z could do this easy, what's the hold up?
X Y Z were centralized. It is indeed easy to do centralized. That could be completely not the case when doing decentralized.
This is what I was considering as I was thinking about your chat system idea.
Steemit.chat, slack, etc all of those are centralized. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are all centralized.
Steemit is centralized at its domain only as the window into the block chain.
So for chat to work it would need to either be centralized on steemit.com and have nothing to do with the blockchain which means it COULD be taken down forcefully, it could be censored, and it would not be accessible to others making alternative views. OR it would require creating a decentralized chat and deciding how to store that data on the blockchain which NONE of the social media sites you compare steemit to had to deal with.
Advantage of decentralized... can't be killed... and other people can create sites that access the same data an present it in new ways.
Disadvantage of decentralized is that things that seem simple on centralized platforms are likely significantly more complex to implement.
I don't really think a messaging system needs to be "decentralized." The blockchain is what's important here for the currency and for censorship of information. Chatting - in my opinion - would be more like a luxury in this regard, but a necessary one for the social aspects of the platform. I don't care if it's on a blockchain or not. It just needs to be incorporated somehow into the Steemit.com website.
I would like to see a decentralized chat. The problem is that it hasn't really been done before.
Maybe someone will come up with a wonderful solution to the problems of routing user to user. Or maybe someone will come up with an entire new internet that is peer to peer from the ground up.
Otherwise putting steemit.chat in a widget inside steemit.com will be really easy, or really hard. There is either already a widget for that, or there isn't, and they have it locked down to their interface.
One thing I like about steemit.com is that it doesn't have all those sidebars. Reading the blogs is distraction free. All of the suggestions above start cluttering things up. I do not have a good balance to recommend.
As it is right now is really only enjoyable to read if your resolution is not too high. It doesn't scale very well to other resolutions.
Thanks for the explanation. Is it possible to have chat as a sort of widget that remains centralized, but attached to Steemit? Well, everything within reason is possible. Is the challenge worthwhile?
I'm sure they could do a centralized chat on steemit.com or any other site. Then if steemit.com were taken down so would the chat. It only becomes more interesting and challenging if they are creating a decentralized chat that would theoretically span any site viewing the blockchain.
@dwinblood, Thank you for taking the time to thoroughly explain the differences between centralized and decentralized websites and the challenges that go into developing some of the suggestions in this post. Your comments have been very helpful for me.
I was kind of stream of consciousness working through it as I wrote it myself. I tend to focus on other kinds of development than web development and I found myself realizing that if I were making a decentralized feature that might be more challenging than a centralized one. The fact of the matter is most of the features that @ats-david is talking about don't need to be decentralized so it is a bit of a mystery as to what the hold up is with them.
Great post. On top of this, I would like to add feedback from my community. Many people are disappointed by bot curation (voting bots), although the influence on payout is quite small, but because they are impressed that Steemit is bot's realm not human's.
Why are bots so active? Because they easily can earn more curation rewards than average users given 40 times max vote per day and up to 25% of curation reward.
IMHO, just my coarse opinion, gamification of curation reward should be reconsidered. People are willingly spend their money for whom create awesome contents and give them pleasure. An exemplar is AfreecaTV, a Korean broadcasting platform like Youtube live. People pay for contents providers from their pocket (related article), and the amount is tens of thousand dollars per day.
Most people desire to be influential, and Steem Power is a good and cheap way to do it, even though it is diluted about 7% a year (still it's more cheaper than use their pocket money). It should be debatable topic, but I think it should be considerable. Economically and financially this sounds stupid, but psychologically and humanistically it is still valuable.
Yes. I've written about this problem in the past - I think I mentioned it in my last post about this. The automated voting becomes more of a problem for manual curators as the automated trails grow longer. I'm seeing posts a few minutes old getting a quick 40-50 votes from a single trail. A few minutes later, the post can easily be over 150-200 votes, all from two or three voting trails. This is not only "lazy" curation, in my opinion, but it also skews what people are seeing as quality. As an added negative consequence, it causes manual curators to lose voting shares because of the sheer volume of automated votes coming in before them. It's discouraging for such curators, to say the least.
Just in the last couple of weeks, the bot trails have started doing this. Just prior to that, I was able to acquire better curation rewards by finding good content, even with a lower number of vests - prices of Steem being in the same general area as they are now. Currently, I have twice as much SP, but I'm struggling to get the same number of rewards. My votes are crowded out, so my choice is to either vote early before I read the posts - and lose shares of the curation as well because I'm voting before the 30-minute mark - or I come in behind the large bot trails and take the hit anyway.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think automated voting is the best way to go for a majority of users. Things like Streemian can be useful to an extent, but I think it has a net negative impact at a certain point. Steemvoter is another one that people like to use, but I don't think automatically upvoting someone's content without seeing it is how curating ought to be done.
There's a trade-off when you automate voting that's supposed to be based on subjective assessments of quality. I would like to see no automated voting, but I also know that this would severely cut down on voting overall. It seems to me that there are a lot of users that like being entirely absent from the platform for long periods of time, but still want to benefit from it. There isn't anything necessarily wrong with that from the standpoint of an investor, but it does have an effect on other users who remain on the site and regularly engage. Finding the right balance is no easy task.
I cannot agree more. Currently Steemit is dominated by two entities: whales and bots. The former (whales, including me) mostly decide payouts, and the latter (bots) has influences on voting counts (and some portion of payouts by like @wang). As a result, average users have no room to show their influences, until they become whales or bots. Many users already turned to be bots, at least partially. As majority of accounts became bot-driven, and the bots are more likely to follow whales (since it gives them more curation rewards with higher possibilities), the problem is getting worse now.
I am not totally against automated bots, by the way. It sometimes makes users life easier, especially when they want to be in favor of certain other people (e.g. within community vote, a huge fan-ship for celebrities). However, it shouldn't significantly influence payouts, which is a measurement of "perceived value from the community". Bots have no perception at the moment (I don't think AI tech hasn't reached to recognize contents' value from the perspective of a community), so bot-dominated system is not desirable now.
My position is to remove curation rewards. While it makes the system less gamific, people (not bots) still have motivations to be influential in the community and to be favorable towards others who give satisfaction for them.
A upvote system that considers the amout of followers (subscribers) to a pertiular blog, and not just to a pertiular post, should be considered. I think this will crate a far more stable, equitable and consistent reward distribution.
Just use your votes for people youactually like and don't stress the content thing. It's more about solidarity than financial rewards at this point anyways.
Bravo! You had the courage to say exactly what thousands of people have been demanding for months but that the "crypto" sphere does not seem to understand. It looks in another direction: blockchain, steem and promotion of certain ideology not shared by the majority. Steemit.com (with Steem) is a business, not a religion. Steemit is a product and will be adopted if it is attractive, convivial, a true community of exchange and a better balance in the award of rewards
I hope your post will be well rewarded, better than three photos without text for $ 71!
I agree with you. When i hear people talking about creating campaigns to attract new users when we can barely engage the users who have already started an account, it makes me wonder if anyone else sees the elephant in the room. I love the site, but the average person is not going to stick around to possibly one day build enough steem power to earn some money.
They will stick around if it's fun and connects them with people through good features.
Only 1% of internet users create content. The other 99% consume it. Pretending the masses are suddenly going to become content creators for a few bucks is delusional and even if they did, it would have to be easier to do so than it currently is.
Steemit is an interesting experiment I'm happy to be involved in, but it's nowhere near ready for mass adoption in it's current form.
It really seems quite clear once you say it yourself, doesn't it? We've all been there before...using a social media site and making no money. We didn't do it for the hopes of becoming a millionaire. People didn't leave MySpace for Facebook because they were earning money. They left because it was just a better experience overall. That's how Steemit needs to be. The money issue will mostly take care of itself.
Wow, @ats-david - what an insightful article, Thank You!
I'm here on Steemit primarily to write, and I would love to become widely read, but the problems you elucidate are really obvious to me. Even a problem as (presumably) simple as separating original writing from the "re-steemed" has been an obstacle for me. This fine article of yours is a perfect example; allow me to explain in a block below!
All this to say, I am "in violent agreement" with the development priorities that you've discussed here. I'd like to think that I'm here for the long run. I also agree with what @dwinblood has added to the conversation and will be checking out his profile for sure. I too am a coder (most of my life) who would have to "do some learning" to contribute directly to this platform in a technical way, so I also probably will not jump in and code at this time.
However, as an author who believes I have some unique content to bring to the table, I am excited about the apparent potential of Steemit and dearly hope that it will be improved and have a long and successful run. I think your suggestions are spot-on, and hope that many of them will be implemented sooner rather than later. Perhaps I'll "chime in" with a few items on my wish-list in a separate comment, but for now, THANKS AGAIN!
Kindest regards from @creatr ...
It's not easy finding good authors sometimes, but when you do find them, you feel like you just won the lottery (not the Powerball, but maybe the pick-three). I can also vouch for @dwinblood. He's a good writer and seems like a good guy as well. So you were able to find two good users in one click. Sounds like you're having a pretty good night!
The economic model has to get fixed before cashing out tons of steem to btc for development, or else the token will crash severly
I don't think they necessarily need to cash everything out in order to pay developers. If they have an account, they can just transfer the funds to their wallet. It doesn't even have to leave the platform unless the developer actually needs the money. So there's no reason for Steemit, Inc. to power down one of their large accounts and sell Steem on the external market just to make a payment to a developer, especially when they have available liquid Steem and Steem Dollars. That kind of defeats the entire purpose of the wallets and transfer functions, doesn't it?
I'm not saying that the Steemit dev team doesn't have a large role to play in developing the main functionality for the site - but one thing that would really help is if we got a big push from all the community developers that have been developing their own stand-alone websites and apps, to start working on pull requests to Steemit.com.
Attention: Calling All Developers - Let's Polish The Steemit.com Mothership!
I take a look on github and will clone repositories to understand how steemit works. You are also right Tim, to increase development speed we need more people voluntarily coding!
Awesome!
What concerns me most is indeed the lack of vision and development of this platform but also how the founders handled the language barrier by selling their tech to someone so it can clone the whole thing instead of adding a simple translation functionality on the site. This to me indicates that they don't want steemit to become this social media powerhouse, they just want their patented blockchain to be used by every social media.
What they fail to understand is that this strategy is doomed for failure, social media is all about network effect, the more sites you create the less chances these sites will gain any kind of momentum. My first post on steemit was how to retain user base and get a network effect going by creating a very interactive environment . https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/steem-vision-short-introduction
Also I totally agree with your post, the gaming and fun aspect of earning money and using this site is completely missing. There is millions of dollar in the steemit account, it would cost them less than 50k to hire a team of UI designers for a couple weeks to add all functionalities and redesign the interface into something modern and catchy. Why they don't do it is the question...
It makes no sense to want to have every feature ( chat, messaging,etc..) decentralized, what matters is that the code is open source and communication end to end encrypted. As long as you have that you can transport all functionnalities on a tor site ( someone already does this) or soon on maidsafe.
I agree completely! Especially with the Steemit chat... It's so annoying leaving the site to respond to stuff, I actually don't really bother anymore. Maybe Steemit could make something that attaches to our emails, Or just a messenger like facebook.
@kaylinart The chat section is the first place I visited when starting here on steemit and I immediately vanished from it! I don't like to hear too many opinions, it drives me nutz! and as for emails, this is what I believe is needed - email notification from whom you choose to be notified by AND P.M. messaging unless they feel nothing should be private....
True! I would like that.