Part 2 of Our Plan to Onboard the Masses
In our first post about our plan for onboarding the masses to the blockchain we explored, on a very high level, how we think about solving the problems that blockchain still faces, and the important role that both Communities and SMTs play in our proposed solutions. In today’s post we want to dive a bit deeper into one of these solutions: Communities.
When Communities launch on Steem, for the first time ever people will be able to create communities, on the internet, that they own. We think that’s a very big deal, and a value proposition that will excite community leaders all over the world.
Priority #1: Blockchain Onboarding
As we pointed out in our previous post, our #1 priority has always been onboarding the masses to the blockchain and we think that in objective terms, we have done more than any other team to further that goal. No other blockchain has even a fraction of the poets, artists, musicians, and of course, writers, that Steem does.
Finding Like-Minded People
But how do we take this to the next level? When Steem and steemit.com were first released, growth was explosive because for the first time it was possible for a community of like-minded people to congregate on the Internet on a platform that they could earn a stake in. We bonded over our shared passion for Steem which lead to a strong and rapidly growing community.
Diverse Interests
When we’re talking about onboarding the masses, what we’re really talking about is onboarding people who aren’t into crypto or blockchain at all. They are, by definition, into something else. Our passion is what drew us to Steem, but if we want to attract even more people to Steem we have to offer them a home for their passions. That’s why we believe Communities are such an important part of the future of Steem, and we believe, the future of blockchain generally.
Aligning Incentives
We know that we can use this technology to align the incentives of the members of a community. Our “beta test” of this technology was “version 1” of the Steem protocol which could store usernames, stake, content, votes, etc. Steemit.com was the beta interface we used to run this experiment.
From these experiments we learned that, yes, a blockchain could be used to store social information, distribute tokens among community members by leveraging crowdsourced stake-weighted voting (a/k/a Proof-of-Brain), and this could be done in a way that supports the bootstrapping of a digital currency. Over one million accounts created, 50,000 daily active users, and a token featured on many exchanges is proof that a community-backed token can deliver a ton of value.
Steem: Leaving Beta (Metaphorically)
Communities are about leaving that first phase. We’re taking the knowledge we’ve gained as a community and using it to build new tools that can be used by any community that is interested in retaining ownership over their social information and rewarding their most valuable community members.
When Communities launch on Steem, for the first time ever people will be able to create communities on the internet that they own. We are leveraging the same cryptographic technologies that enable the ownership of digital tokens, to deliver ownership of digital communities. And because Communities are a “2nd Layer” solution, changes can be pushed as they are ready, instead of having to wait for hardforks. Enabling these capabilities is why Hivemind is such a critical (and we believe undervalued) piece of software.
Although the changes for Communities will roll out in phases, the end result will be every bit as disruptive as the original release of the Steem blockchain.
Incentives
One of the keys to Steem’s success is the fact that it has the unique capability to autonomously align the incentives of community members. We are all so passionate about Steem, because we have all worked so hard to add value to this ecosystem, and have received some amount of stake for our efforts. But again, not everyone is interested in Steem, let alone capable of adding value to it.
In order to really scale Steem, we have to not just create features that allow communities to form around non-Steem interests, we need to enable those Communities to determine for themselves who is adding value, and reward those people with stake in that community. That’s where Smart Media Tokens come in, which we will discuss in a future post.
Communities Feedback
At Steemit we are 100% committed to building open source tools that benefit every project that leverages the Steem blockchain. We want Communities on Steem to be part of every Steem app, not just steemit.com. That’s why we have already released a Communities design document that lays out how we are building Communities on a high level, so that other developers can understand why we are making the decisions we are, provide feedback on those decisions, and suggest additional features.
We are still eager to integrate feedback from 3rd party developers on Communities. We invite anyone with ideas, suggestions, or questions about how we can make Communities work for all Steem developers, to share their thoughts in the comment section below.
The Steemit Team
As a guy that was already leading / owning communities on pre blockchain platforms that rewarded people for the content they contributed I was eagerly awaiting this BUT this is now too late. We have communities by the tribes / tokens on steem-engine. I do not see any need anymore. Not that I am fan of the @aggroed clan but they handled this already.
The issue we face is the Steem prize even this Blockchain has great Apps and is awesome as a Blockchain.
Question is: Who needs the social media content rewarding part as "steemit"? It is per design never fair! Get rid of that and focus on DApps running on steem. We do need investors NOT masses. We need masses for DApps on the chain but not to create content. The content platform is fine but stop the reward part of it. The niches / tribes can cover that content rewarding part.
Just my #2cents
It would be so much simpler if dApps and businesses demanded STEEM to have their product on-chain and then could reward that in tokens that they themselves need to sustain the value of, rather than just printing STEEM and hope that somehow it attracts more value than it dilutes (it doesn't).
Tribes and communities/SMTs are one way of doing it, but honestly you could do it with just liquid STEEM too with a model somewhat similar to what drugwars did except that one has a sustainable revenue model for bringing in STEEM that grows with the userbase (selling ad space for STEEM, letting people buy unique pro-features, etc, etc) which becomes the reward pool.
At least I've been trying to share the idea that what actually works on Steem can be done (imo better) without inflation-dervied rewards (communities should be able to distribute rewards however they like, but they should have to sustain its value themselves).
Honestly, this would not only remove the biggest value-leak in Steem. And the biggest turn-off point for investors (hign inflation going to rather meaningless things). It would also improve the actual social media and content discovery part, as people could finally vote more "normal" instead of based on what they hope will result in rewards. Looking back at the last 3 years and how much time was spent by clever people figuring out how to min max their returns from inflation through bots, rather than building attractive products... The time spent by author sucking up to whales rather than sharing their content and Steem externally to create a network effect. To me, this is perhaps the main issue with the stake-based reard model, that it only incentivizes people to share to those who know the most about Steem, rather than to those who have not yet heard iof it. This is how any other blog or social media has grown in the past, users doing the marketing and onboarding other users themselves.
That's how free markets work, you're right, that pumping more in didn't fix Venezuela, etc, and it's dangerous but better to let the users invest into it and reap the rewards. Well, technically, people have put money into Steem. But like you said, the automatic pool system might be a bit like welfare, Universal Social Income, socialism communism, Obama Robin Hood Bernie Sanders Redistribution of the original oatmeal or I mean the wealth, etc, etc.
I think you are completely forgetting one big point. All these Dapps are not going to help anyone if there are no consumers. So you need to onboard masses to use those Dapps and bring FIAT to those Dapps which then reflects in a higher Steem price. People buying Steem to speculate on the price (investors) are not what we need to create a stable ecosystem. We need apps and we need users.
True, but I see the investor part is more important right now. The masses will come if they see fun or added value in DApps but as long as the price goes down and no one invests many will see it as a useless scam - the thing is we have great DApps, we also have a good bunch of users - another cooperation with corporates that could be part of this blockchain would be cool, say a Samsung incoporates a "Steem account" when selling their hardware.
Users don't care about the value of Steem, they care about the apps, and care about maybe getting paid in USD or Euro from the apps. As long as the blockchain is not abstracted people won't use the DApps. (Similarly, do you care about the value in games which add micro transactions via gems?).
Investors is what makes it look like a scam since they bring strong volatility.
some good points I ignored since i am maybe too long here lol!
I mean for the short term, investors is what we need if we want to sell off our Steem for a decent price. On the long term we want users and apps to sustain the eco system.
what. no. wtf
Opening a new store on a desert town (hyperbole) is a shitty idea.
Sorry, without masses, no investors, it's that easy...
Steem needs mass adoption.
Have a great day
Tom
Is there an ETA on when the first version will be rolled out?
Soon since 2017
It sounds different this time.
It sounds different because it is different this time. There is a new team running point at Steemit.com and they are slaying it, daily. We need to rally around their efforts. Communities will be a huge development... ETA = ASAP.
Agreed.
It looks like Steem will not be listed on Binance US as of now:
https://www.coindesk.com/binances-us-subsidiary-is-weighing-30-different-cryptos-for-listing
Is there anything we can do about that?
It was also possible to get curated by humans instead of bots, whales even! People would actually read your posts and vote for them if they liked them. Lots of people would see it and upvote it if they liked it. There was real interaction. It was beautiful! I loved it so much. Then came the bidbots. Now the beauty is gone. It is replaced by greed. Votes are sold to the highest bidder. The crowdsourced content discovery mechanism has been completely undermined and it could have been prevented. A culture against vote selling could have been and could still be established, but not while Steemit Inc. endorses it.
This is not what happens anymore. It's not about PoB anymore.
Except for the thing that was disruptive in the beginning is now gone. How can you even still pay homage to PoB when you have allowed bid bots to completely undermine that system?
Some have worked hard to extract value from the system and have been greatly rewarded for their efforts.
That's all well and good, but why do we want to try to add value while others extract it? Even if we have communities that don't have delegation and have a culture against vote selling, it will still dominate Steem and be counter productive to what those communities are trying to do.
You could help to establish a culture that downvotes bid bots. It's probably too late to get rid of delegation now that it's the main way to earn here. You could make a return to PoB on steemit.com - the fire hose for all the communities. You could quit programmatically selling STEEM and crashing the price. You could make the trending page actually posts that are trending instead of just posts that have just paid their way to get there which are basically just a weird form of ads. But I'm guessing this isn't the type of feedback you're looking for and won't even give me a meaningful reply to my comment.
I suspect a big reason bid bots are attractive is because other forms of curation are difficult. Even altruistic voting (e.g. no benefit expected, other than improved system health) is time consuming. Content is disorganized; tags are noisy, and there are no content standards.
By "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism" do you mean votes and trending? Votes and trending should reflect what the community believes are the most valuable contributions, but it's not an effective way to discover under-rewarded (or just undiscovered) content.
In my view, Steem has never had a "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism". The most effective mechanisms were (and still are) manual labor -- digging through feeds, following new users, establishing curation guilds. In the beginning, there were less posts (it was possible to read every single new post), they were higher quality on average, and time spent curating was subsidized by the excitement of it all. Now we need to scale.
Well said, I couldn't agree more!
"I suspect a big reason bid bots are attractive is because other forms of curation are difficult"
Stop lying ! bid-bots are run by steemit inc and blocktrades
I think this is the type of thing communities CAN help with. Even altruistic voting gives curation rewards especially if it ends up trending. That was the original design right? It encouraged people to add value which brings more and more value to the platform.
Yes. I agree.
I agree, I think that is still the best way, but now there is no chance for it to "trend" once you have done that work. Does scaling mean that we leave all that work to the bots? If there isn't a chance to trend organically or real human interaction, I don't see the point.
We need tools that make it easy and rewarding to curate. Say you have 1M SP and can make 50 impactful votes per day... how would you most effectively distribute them? To find 50 good but undervalued posts on steemit.com every day might take quite a while. And the modest bump to each one would not provide much exposure (e.g., on trending), which means it's unlikely for others to find it and place more votes on top (and increase your curation return). This discourages cooperation at the social layer and creates a negative feedback loop.
To me, scaling means giving users the tools to solve this dilemma.
Make a list of 100 interesting authors and check their blogs manually on a regular basis. That way you can make 40 of your 50 "impactful votes".
For the 10 remaining "impactful votes" try to find good posts from authors you have never read before to give new users a chance and some motivation to keep writing.
I don't understand why investors always talk about their ROI (here in this special case "curation return")? Their main aim should be to increase the value of STEEM. Voting for 'quality content' (and flagging bid bot supported posts) would be a contribution to a higher value ... (with or without much curation reward).
The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
So lets make sure that as many as possible users are having a pleasant user experience (for example also because they might get some impactful manual upvotes from time to time) and thus stay here. Lets do that as investors to save our investment.
If you have one million STEEM it's not most important to get even more STEEM, it's important to increase the value of these STEEM you already own.
For example I have much more STEEM than a year ago, but my account value has decreased significantly.
Did I need 'ROI' when I bought BTC some years ago? Or am I happy about the high value of my BTC nowadays? :)
Nothing against ROI, but I think we shouldn't be that focused on it ...
Making LISTS has actually really helped with this. I have a few different lists I use and i find my voting is EASIER and I actually do it way more often. So I think that is one really solid solution.
I have a list of my friends, I have a list of splinterlands type accounts, a list of accounts that seem to influence a lot of the conversation about steem itself, then i have a list of almost 100 photographers that's the one that has the most action.
All that was made possible thanks to Hivemind. Aka i'm talking about lists on steempeak if people didn't know. But that's not the important part it's the idea that LISTS really have done what you said.
Exactly! Well said! I guess maybe they don't use the platform, so they don't see the issue. But c'mon, how short sighted can they be. How can they not listen to so many people who use the platform. I hope you get a reply. Your point is spot on.
We do use the platform, but we also have to build the solutions necessary to fix the problems, and that simply takes time. I don't see your comment disagreeing with our views very much at and feel like we are simply talking past one another. We agree that there are problems with the system. What system doesn't have problems? We're trying to lay out very clearly how we are developing and conceptualizing the solutions we have developed and continue to develop at every layer of the stack.
If we were just front end developers, or just blockchain developers, or just middleware developers, as many in the space are, we would be able to move much faster in any one of those domains. But because no one else is doing what we're doing, we have to develop in all of these domains and the consequence is that if one has too narrow of a focus, the progress appears to be slow when in reality it is quite fast, which is why no other blockchain rivals Steem in its core value propositions, and steemit.com remains by far the most used Steem interface in the world.
I like all the things that y'all have done recently, but they don't fix the bid bot problem and I don't believe communities will either. I think they are great steps in the right direction, but why would people want to build communities in a place where vote selling dominates? I'm not talking past you. I'm replying specifically to what was said with my honest thoughts.
I'm not complaining about your pace. I'm saying that y'all could start a culture against bid bots and you haven't. You have endorsed it. What is Steem's core value proposition? My position is that Steem's core value proposition is undermined by bid bots and you aren't doing what is needed to fix it.
Thanks for your support. :)
By the way, I am looking forward for the communities to come. They should be a step into the right direction ...
Yeah, definitely. Me too.
Could it be because they are investors?
That would be like working hard for a whole day and sharing the pay with thousands of other people...
You can't expect most people sacrifice their time and effort mostly for the benefit of others like that. The fact that it is fruitless to expect that caused socialism to fall.
The problem here is misaligned incentives.
I don't think PoB can even theoretically work very well except in communities where most of the stake is controlled by a single app that rewards content creators strictly according to quality. Under that scenario, the main stakeholder has enough power and an incentive to curb abuse and reward commensurately to value created.
Steem with its fast block processing time and free transactions is well suited to serve as the base layer powering an archipelago of such token economies. EIP+WP is a step toward Steem becoming a non-PoB base layer and that's a good thing. Those things will help Steem limp onwards, hopefully for a few years more, to spread stake further before content rewards can be discontinued for good.
Unfortunately, Steemit, Inc still controls too large a stake for Steem to be sufficiently decentralized to be secure against external threats. As long as a form of PoB is practiced with STEEM, SBD and Vests, it would be in the best interests of Steemit, Inc as the largest stakeholder to help the community fight abusive maximisers and non-economic abusers who harass community members for their personal gratification. That would also help. Doing it correctly is easier said than done but it's an issue that should be on the table.
I would prefer to share a huge cake with others instead to have a very small cake for myself alone.
Again, if their behaviour contributed to a higher STEEM price, and if they have a lot of STEEM, I couldn't see a sacrifice at all.
As I said, I consider myself as investor, as well, I have earned quite some STEEM within the last one and a half year ... and the value of my account has decreased a lot at the same time: the size of the cake matters, not one's percentage of the cake.
I plead for a committee of elected users with some delegated Steem power from Steemit, Inc., which could decide which stuff to flag and also (in case someone complains) if flags are justified or not, and if "yes" just counter them with upvotes.
In addition, accounts who repeatedly misuse flags in an abusive way (instead using them against spam, plagiarism etc.) could be flagged, as well, after a decision of that committee.
I don't know what you'd consider good but stuff like this deserves to go undiscovered not earning nearly $150.00 using bidbots to go trending.
https://steemit.com/art/@jellenmark/thanos-reimagined-with-infinity-2019-7-1-16-59-28
You guys actually think that people are going to downvote crap like this after the hardfolk to keep folks like this in line but the reality is when brought out into the spotlight in a post not even SFR would touch it because of who was behind paying the bidbots on it. This post was at the most worth about as much as the paper it was written on. This is one of the major reason Steem can't get out of it slump and attract new users.
I wouldn't neccesarily decide that I had to give an equal vote to 50 post for one thing. I would give votes at different percentages based on what I thought they deserved. I do see this dilemna and that's why I'm not railing against delegation or curation guilds. My points were mainly about bidbots. How do bidbots help to scale?
Or a better way to put that question: why not just use delegation and curation guilds instead of bid bots? Bid bots are what undermines the trending page. So shouldn't we focus on solutions that don't undermine the trending page and the whole idea of curation in the first place?
Before bidbots were selfvoters and circle jerks. @haejin and @ranchorelaxo, for example. @berniesanders for another. Bots aren't the source of evil, they just automate it.
@berniesanders actually made the first bid bot. But yes circle jerking is another seperate problem. Because there are other problems, does that mean it's not worth trying stop this problem?
I definitely see how delegation and curation guilds can be justified for the reasons you mentioned. And I see the use in projects like @curie and @tribesteemup, but those don't make the entire trending page sold to the highest bidder like bid bots do.
It isn't social media when bots are the voters. Society isn't even involved in curation then. It's just mining with automated tools. I've no interest in mining. I'm here for the ideas people exchange.
That's where the actual value of Steem is: the social interaction.
Well yes, but the original design was for curation rewards to be 50%, and they also did not have the penalty for the first 30-, 15- or soon to be 5-minutes. The changes that were made later, largely impulsively and without good rationale, undermined a lot of that balance to the point that curation rewards became almost meaningless, and the incentives to just sell votes became overwhelmingly strong.
The hope is that HF21 is going to re-balance those incentives somewhat back toward what you describe, where altruistic or at least non-agnostic voting isn't so heavily penalized relative to vote selling. We'll see how it works out but it's certainly a step toward what you describe.
Oh really, I didn't even realize it was originally 50/50. I hit 3 years here the other day and as far as I'm aware it's always been 75/25 during that time. I could be wrong about that as I'm just going off of memory.
I do think HF21 is a step in the right direction towards rebalancing those incentives. I'll be paying close attention to see the effects. I like the idea of incentivizing that altruistic behavior and I might even prefer that to instilling it as a culture, but I'm open to both routes to moving away from vote selling completely.
The change from 50/50 was made in mid 2016 so it is quite possible you weren't around for it.
@schoolofminnows is the solution to all your problems.
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No it's not.
Yes it is
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Somewhere, along the way, I lost the spark, to say the things you said here today.
It is, quite literally, the shittiest feeling in the world, as I work on that next post, knowing hours in advance, no matter what I do, that post will fail and not get anywhere on Steemit, after nearly three years of being here, 786 posts under my belt, and my blog is consistently one of the most active on the entire platform.
Tribes are helping.
I don't blame anyone here, old or new, for being frustrated with those damn bidbots. The Darwin Award winners two years in a row.
Agreed 100% @richardcrill and your comment supported 100% with the full weight of the @ecotrain community behind it. I speak with confidence on behalf of @eco-alex who is currently in seclusion, and ob behalf of a diverse and growing part of the steem community.
Thank you for awesome leadership, as always
Thank you @artemislives! I really appreciate it. I know a lot of the people who feel this way left a long time ago, but I really wish the people behind Steemit Inc. and @steemitblog will listen to the people who are still here. It seems people want to earn as much STEEM as possible without adding value and even devaluing the platform and the coin. It seems very short sighted to me. I hope they consider their users input.
They never do, different day same bull crap, the answer is as simple as the nose of their faces but what they've built here is exclusive community of wealth abusers whom they themselves are afraid of.
That's what people do.
Cannot agree more @richardcrill - and I am sure the entire @naturalmedicine community would agree too, as well as many communities here that are just getting by and trying to manually create to reward users, with great members doing their best to comment and be good Steemplayers but getting disheartened. I see so many great quality posts going nowhere, and no incentive for people to write great posts. So a wonderful post about perimenopause can get a less of a payout than a blurry photo of a mango smoothie someone has used a bidbot on.
Your response is clear, concise, measured and deserves a reply. xxx
Thank you @riverflows. It was nice to get a couple replies from @roadscape, but he didn't really address what I said. I don't think he has any thing to say to my last replies to him.
This is such important insight Richard. I agree with you 100%. I hope what you’ve said here is genuinely considered by anyone who wants to see this blockchain reach its potential. The SCOT communities have already done much to address these issues. I think it’s a great direction.
Thank you for saying so @choosefreedom. Sadly the people that had a lot of stake that saw this problem have mostly left. The people that are here now with significant stake don't seem to see the bid bots as a problem. Not sure why @acidyo doesn't seem to see it. @ned must be for the bidbots. I know @heimindanger sees this and he is still here. Maybe if someone forks his DTube code to make a blogging platform it could work. @dan saw the problem and couldn't get enough of the other people with significant stake to see it so he left. I know @ats-david and @krnel were vocal about it too, but I think they have realized that it's not going to change.
@ned has fled the battlefield. :)
Lol, apparently he has.
@acidyo has been consistently against bid bots for long time. He even founded @ocdb as a form of lesser evil to mitigate the effect of the post quality agnostic majority of bid bots.
I knew I had a favorable impression of him in my mind. But I guess like many, myself included, we gave up. After realizing the biggest stake holders weren't going to fix it. I guess after I made my tribe, I realized that communities won't fix this problem. It's a step in the right direction and I am all for it, but it doesn't fix this glaring problem. I don't blame @acidyo for giving up, but I just can't sit with it anymore. Something has to change. So many things in this world have been over taken by short sighted greed. I will no longer accept it. I will always point it out in places where I know there are people and possibilities for change. I'm not gonna fight against Steemit Inc. forever though. I've learned that fighting against something is often not the way to go. We will probably just have to create something better that isn't controlled by greed. But I had to try to save something I loved. Quality standards are an improvement to bid bots, but selling votes to the highest bidder, even with standards, ruins the whole idea. If we could start a culture against bid bots and get communities going, I believe we can save this thing. If we don't get rid of bid bots, somebody will and I will go there and support it. If no one does it soon, maybe I will try to do it myself.
Crowdsourced and stake-based content discovery and rewarding, also known as Proof-of-Brain, has been proven a failure, at least in its ideal form. It is, however, better than just wasting power like PoW. I think what the network and all its participants have generated in the three years of Steem's existence is much better than entropy which is the only thing PoW leaves in its wake.
At the very least, having been a participant has taught me many lessons about human nature. The difficulty of getting anyone to join has also been an eye opener.
By the way, I don't think bid bots are the crux of the matter. Vote farming is. Bid bots are but one of the many ways to accomplish ROI maximization at the cost of putting in the effort to curate altruistically.
Then again does that matter? I think Steem is still a shitload of fun and the money is vastly better than on any mainstream platform in spite of everything.
What's great about communities is that each community has an opportunity to create their own variant of PoB, some of which may actually work. What I think has the best possibility of working is an app owning the vast majority of stake in a community token and treating content creators like freelancers and keeping other curators in line by negating any abusive voting done by them.
Proof-of-brain is not an alternative to proof of work, delegated proof of stake (DPoS) is.
Proof-of-brain and content voting generally could be turned off entirely and the Steem blockchain would continue to run, apps which don't rely on the voting for rewards such as SteemMonsters and others would still be working fine, etc.
Proof-of-brain was one feature added to the Steem blockchain intended to help it attract users and grow. It worked to some extent but its effectiveness to date has been fairly limited.
I'm fully aware of that. However, Steem allots some of the token inflation to content creators and curators.
I know. I've actually been saying for quite some time that I wouldn't mind if PoB were discontinued at the base layer at some point but not any time soon (meaning a few years).
It has made also made the stake distribution somewhat more decentralized. Even if it didn't add too much value otherwise in terms of driving traffic, it has furthered the decentralization of stake.
well said Richard!
Thanks man.
^^^^ All of this
Letting bidbots do their thing was really a bad choice in hindsight.
It seems pretty clear to a lot of us. A lot of us also called it out when they first started, but I guess Steemit Inc. disagrees.
I was there at Steemfest 2 when Ned vocally expressed his opinion on bidbots: "interesting to see how such businesses can flourish within the Steem ecosystem"
Haven't seen the new Steemit Inc team make a radical change on this as of yet.
I wish @ned wasn't so short sighted and greedy. He is killing one of the coolest experiments I've ever seen. Maybe he is naive, maybe he is corrupted by money and power. Maybe he's taken a position that his ego won't let him go back on. Whatever it is, I'm tired of not getting an answer from him. He has lead this thing down the drain. Grow a pair @ned. Reply to me.
This is a superbly worded reply.
@richardcrill you have at least one new fan
The ownership of our own community is a massively important step and hopefully the solutions you create make the process easy.
There are already many established communities online, are there going to be ways to integrate them into a Steem community or, easily tokenize their existing platform with an SMT?
That makes a lot of sense. Good idea.
And how Stem Engine communities and tokens will be integrated into all of this?
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I think @aggroed wrote something about this the other day.
@tarazkp could please post the link to @aggroed post related to steem-engine and SMT token integration. I searched his profile but could not find any.
https://steemit.com/steem-engine/@aggroed/on-the-imminent-death-of-steem-engine-overpriced-tokens-of-steem-engine-and-the-fate-of-steem-engine-in-a-post-smt-world
Thanks for the link. But it is a broken link. Maybe the post was deleted.
Deleted? Lol, no - this can't really happen here :)
Steemit links aren't working at times it seems. Try on Palnet, here:
https://www.palnet.io/steem-engine/@aggroed/on-the-imminent-death-of-steem-engine-overpriced-tokens-of-steem-engine-and-the-fate-of-steem-engine-in-a-post-smt-world
When I first came here, I came because as a content creator, a writer, I saw a great opportunity to share my thoughts and get noticed for them. Communicate with the people that share the same values, meet new people. Enjoy good content. I felt really amazing at the time, writing blog posts and seeing people comment on it, while also making some money from the time I put into the posts.
I agree that it was taken over by all sorts of bots, memers etc and I started to lose my motivation. I wasn't noticed anymore for my effort to the platform - instead people with random and effortless people were gaining more than those who worked hard on good quality content.
It would be hard to make the bad times and memories go away and build this up all again. Steem is full with trash posts from people who gain profit by buying votes. It could only bring on 9gag masses, but not quality people.
True. Hopefully, communities will counter the problems, like bid bots, etc.
I'm curious to see how this plays out in reality. Will there be a rush to essentially "squat" popular communities/categories/tags? If so, what can anyone do about a completely mismanaged category/tag? For instance, what if someone were to "buy" the cryptocurrency and cryptos communities and then proceeded to post their own referral links and shill their favorite tokens, then "moderated" everyone else's posts to make them invisible or sent them to the bottom of the "hot" or "trending" lists?
What do you do then, other than create a new community like "real-cryptos-community," or some stupid crap? Will there be any built-in protection to mitigate or prevent the above?
Naming is a bit of a "of 3 pick 2" situation. Zooko's Triangle illustrates it well ("security" can be swapped with "complexity"). The current approach is that every community will start with just an id number, so there's nothing to squat. A naming system will most likely be a 2nd layer solution.
OK, cool. That makes sense. Thank you for the response.
Donald Trump
Hopefully, competition can push people regardless. Maybe somebody created DonaldTrump on Twitter. So, maybe the real Trump created @RealDonaldTrump, for example. Well, so, with your example, if somebody creates a cryptocurrencies community and mutes people talking about Monero, then maybe, through the art of supply and demand, they could try to band together to create their own cryptocurrencies community.
Competition
Then, they could make videos and talk about how retarded that other community was. That creates peer pressure on the original community. Meaning that either that guy reforms his ways or his members may migrate to the new community. That's competition. That's supply and demand. I hope things like that happens as a mechanism that seeks after balance or competition.
Stop talking about onboarding the masses, it's a nonsense when it takes a lot of skill to use and understand Steem. Stop lying to yourself.
Steem is and will remain a niche product unless you make it really usable and valuable to the masses. Simplifying account creation (who wants to pay to create an account? Stop living 15 years ago. And please don't talk about the discount account joke), do you think it's normal to need to make tricks to have a language management, seriously? And stop stupid things like needing to make a claim to get rewards (an example among many others that clearly shows the willingness to complicate the user's life).
Steem must be able to manage a normal user not just a crypto and technology expert. Do you think a normal user is willing to waste a lot of time accessing the information they want or like? Do you really think you can reach the majority of each of the Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and new Gen Z categories when everyone has their own specificities? I don't think, sorry. Non-core members do more than you to try to make Steem more accessible despite all the constraints you have imposed on them that make their attempt complicated.
50,000 active users per day Ok and how many are real and not a bot? 50,000 active users daily for 3 years of activity, wake up we are on the internet, are you sure it's a big deal you should be proud of? If Steem has more than a million accounts created, it is mainly due to the hype period of the blockchain and crypto technology and in the hope of high profitability. Look at the activity on Steem when its value was 40 times higher and today, don't you think there is a correlation?
Steem has potential so stop wasting it, settle down, do your introspection and bring real solutions. Thank you.
There is one huge elephant in the room: the open wallets.
There are many reasons most people wouldn't want their financial transactions on Steem to be exposed to the whole world. The number one reason is probably taxes. I'm guessing most Steemians are not paying taxes on their Steem income. Whether or not any taxes should be paid on Steem income until cashed out into fiat, until used for buying goods or services or cryptocurrencies external to the platform may be unclear, depending on jurisdiction. In any case, there is a great deal of uncertainty to this which is one reason most Steemians use a pseudonym and/or employ a number of alts that cannot be proven to be theirs. People join social media networks when they are invited to join by friends and family. This is not taking place very much among Steemians as they wish to keep their Steem identity and their walking world identity separate.
Because it is too late the redesign Steem as privacy blockchain using protocols similar to those used by Monero or Zerocoin to keep all financial transactions secret, second-tier solutions are the only possibility. It would be entirely possible to use anonymous voting accounts and placeholder posts posted by placeholder accounts and privacy chains as intermediaries to make the financial layer entirely private. The other possibility is demonetizing the Steem experience for the masses. I actually think they might prefer it that way.
IMO anonymity is already an illusion in the modern world. Data-collecting corporations know just about everything about us already. If for some reason CIA/FBI/MI3 etc. takes an interest in you, they can find out every single detail about you. The only reason they may not have the information ready at hand is that anyone who's not at least a billionaire is somewhat irrelevant for them.
Anonymity is not a binary thing. It is very, very far from it. Have you heard of the letters the IRS has been sending to crypto traders lately? Only about 10,000 Americans have received a letter from the IRS asking about their unpaid taxes. Only 10,000! And those people are probably Coinbase customers who have large volumes of trades. There are millions of Americans who own crypto. 10,000 sounds like a very low number. I'm betting a small fraction of crypto-owning Americans have reported all of their taxable crypto income to the IRS.
The internet is a vast ocean of data. Going after one person with the tools available to the likes of NSA/CIA/whaterver is expensive. I seriously doubt data collecting companies know every bit of our online behavior. Throwing care completely out of the window because "anonymity is already an illusion in the modern world" is overreacting. Not everyone potentially interested in what we do with malicious intent is as powerful as one of the alphabet organizations.
To each their own; you certainly make some good points.
True.
completely agree but hey psst (always check claims about numbers ;) ) https://steemapps.com/?time=last_day or here: https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings/platform/steem 50k lel
I am very supportive of SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities), the vision I heard @ned describe a while back when he was in Korea. Since then some network issues have revealed that censorship is a larger problem than a platform can solve.
No, they won't. As long as ISPs, Domain registrars, and other entities can sever their connections, delete or edit their communications, or otherwise control their access to those communities, they will not own those communities. Possession is necessary for ownership, and possession will be a privilege granted by those controlling the network.
More will be necessary to enable ownership, and that is possession of the network itself. Don't get me wrong. Implementing communities will be a good thing. But, those communities will be vulnerable to censors, just like Alex Jones, Mike Adams, and Julian Assange have proved to be. One lesson you seem to have not grasped from the Steem beta is that censorship is far more than just complete eradication of all forms of some particular information. Ask @skeptic, or @kawaiicrush, or @fulltimegeek, if you can be censored on Steem.
A lot of people have been censored by a couple of bullets to the back of the head. Steem can't do anything to prevent that kind of censorship, so it's correct to note that Steem is but censorship resistant, but it's also obvious that taking out the nodes is all it takes to censor everyone on Steem. Anonymous has been fighting to keep it's community as multiple vectors of censorship have cut their lines of communication. The Daily Stormer can't even get a domain. No New Zealand citizen can (legally) access the chans today because the government ordered ISPs to not resolve their domain names. No community is possible when censors prevent their communications, and you've not presented a mechanism that potentially enables secure communications despite the internet demonstrably being censored to destroy communities.
There's even more to it than that, such as editing it, misrepresenting it, and of course just shooting people to shut them up, but you'll note that nowhere does any authoritative definition of censorship limit it to complete eradication. Even though Andrew Breitbart is dead, statements he made regarding John Podesta are still available. I actually don't think information can be completely eradicated, so such a definition is unreasonable. The point is that communities will be dependent on censorship resistance, and not possessions, but privileges just like Steem.
Until those problems are resolved, actual ownership of communities will not be possible. It will be like title to acreage on the Moon: without value unless you can get there and use it.
I'm not even saying you have to solve those problems. I'm pointing out that you're overpromising, again. I'll also note that Goodwill is your only real asset. Everything else Steemit, Inc. possesses is without value if no community uses it, and they'll only use what you can provide if you have Goodwill. HF21 is going to cost you a lot of Goodwill, and particularly the downvote pool that increases the VP of whales by 25% to flag rewards back to the pool where they can use the weight of their stakes to have a second try at extracting it to their wallets.
EIP is extremely unfriendly to new users, and I reckon you're jumping the shark talking about communities before that disaster is initiated. Let's see what @berniesanders does with 25% of his VP in free flags before you offer people things that cannot be delivered. After we have a gander at the aftermath of HF21, I'll be interested in your plans to create a mechanism that enables folks to build communities, but if downvoters can devalue the communications between members of those communities, extracting the rewards they'd otherwise allocate each other, there's not much point.
No matter what you can do, you can't offer people ownership of anything you can't grant them possession of. This is why I have been very encouraged by Mira, as it made many more nodes potential, and greatly reduces the risk of censoring Steem by taking down nodes. Communities will be a great advance, and so will SMTs, but they won't be possessions. They'll be privileges allowed by those than control the networks they reside on, just like @fulltimegeek's account is on Steem. Dial it down a bit, and stick to facts, please.
True, we are not there yet, but it is a step in the right direction. However, at the same time, there are projects out there seeking to find ways around ISPs, DNSes, government servers, GoDaddy, Comcast, maybe even some of the data centers, the backbone of the Internet, the Internet mega highways where most web traffic flows through assuming they are too centralized, etc. Steem is only part of the bigger puzzle of creating a decentralized blockchain Internet 3.0 which will be rising in the 2020's like never ever before.
I've been looking about a bit, and note things like zeronet, blockchan, IPFS and other outfits that limit dependency on centralized services. However, as long as we are dependent on ISPs we are surfing at privilege, and New Zealand has directed ISPs there to not resolve the chans, censoring all it's population at once. We need mesh networks in order to become uncensorable, or some mechanism that routes around ISPs.
What do you think about Substratum?
I began to think that the steem token is a non-competitor in the modern world. Sorry. Only big test.