What I learned over the past months on Steemit
I just wrote a lengthy comment on one of @exyles posts and felt, that it deserved an own article.
Beware that this is not a hype post that blindly endorses the Steem blockchain like most others you'll find here.
The reasons for that are, that my own enthusiasm for this blockchain has diminished and even though it could be correlated with the price decrease, it is not the main reason.
What I liked about Steem
What I really liked when I came here was, that Steem has its own blockchain and not some random ERC20 token running on the slow Ethereum blockchain, like most other crypto social media sites do. This is crucial for me, since it determines the future success of any project in my opinion.
I liked the focus of Steemit on "proof-of-brain" and reward sharing through valuable content. This was a game changer and still is - although it's just a concept and not a reality anymore.
More on that later...
Most of all, I fell in love with the community here and I still am.
Unfortunately most of the users I had meaningful conversations with over the past months are gone now, but a few are still left and so I'll keep on posting.
What seriously went wrong
Many things have changed for me over the past months.
First I saw, that people like Bernie Sanders, who have not contributed one intelligent thing to the blockchain are gaining a huge following and through power plays mobbing other users to their exit.
This new level of cyber bullying was a huge turnoff for me and I even more was annoyed by all the people rewarding this behaviour with their votes.
How could anyone with a reasonable IQ vote for hate speech and mobbing?
Then came the change in business decisions by Steemit to head into the direction of providing a platform for tokens instead of focus on the "proof of brain" part.
The thing is, that SMTs are nothing new and there are other blockchains who already do that as their main business (and are at least 1-2 years ahead of Steem in this endeavor), like Ether, EOS or especially my favorite TRON (and many "smaller" ones like Waves etc.).
This is a wrong business decision from my perspective, since you should focus on what you can do best and not copy other business models.
Lastly I realized, that having your funds being frozen for at least 13 weeks is a killer - especially in a bear market, where you have to go into Tether or Fiat really fast when everything is crashing and wait until the markets recover to go back into crypto again.
I lost most of my investments over the past months due to them being kept hostage by Steem. I will never do that again and only invest in projects where I can decide what to do with my money and when.
These 3 main points have made me retreat from Steem more and more - I'll keep on posting here because of the community that I really like, but not for monetary reasons.
That's the summary of my journey and learnings over the past months as I'm exploring other options in the blockchain space.
All of my investments are now in TRON and projects based on the TRON blockchain and as soon as there is one reasonable social media project that runs on the TRON blockchain, I will have my main focus there. I believe in the whole ecosystem that comes with this blockchain.
In the meantime I'm trying out other crypto social media sites like Sapien and Minds, although they are running on Ether, which is a huge turnoff for me. We'll see, where this fast paced industry is heading...
Much Love,
Atmos 🕊
Also this post is written in dclick, just to see if this makes any (ad-)sense... ;)
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Only recently I got to know in the theta-Dream state that "Steemit is going to be the biggest blogging platform on the world".
Of course I don't know whether this means next week, next month, next year or next decade, but considering the fact that it was dreams leading me here with the words"that this platform will bring you all the freedom you want one day", I stick to it no matter what.
What is important from my perspective is that we don't mistake a mass adoption of Steemit or cryptocurrencies in general as a move toward "higher collective Consciousness expression" (even though there surely are some very positive advancements coming along with the blockchain technology). Yes, there are many people living from the Heart who found their way onto that platform at an early stage, opening for the abundance to come in on all levels once mass adoption takes hold, but if very mass adoption should take place Steemit will most probably not be known as a "Heart Consciousness platform" but just taking social media onto the next level where most people will post the same kind of stuff they did on facebook for example only with the monetary incentive involved. So it might very well be that one day there will be selfie contests where people vote for the best Selfie.
So I guess it is VERY VERY good that many spiritual people living from the Heart have found this platform at an early stage to build their rocksolid foundation, because if that wasn't the case and the collective consciousness masses were the first ones to flock in, this SURELY would have become a platform especially spiritual people would strongly detest because of the monetization of social media garbage.
This way we have the unique chance to silently build our space. :)
Yes, it is indeed a good sign that many spiritual and heart centered beings hang out here - that's why I said, that I will keep hanging out here. The community is awesome, but I really do miss some people who were here, when prices were higher.
Thanks for sharing your dream. I'm generally more happy here on Steemit, since I decided that I forget about the money part and with that, my focus changed too.
Don't get me wrong - I was always in for the community and the new possibilities and not for money per se, but I can't deny, that it was a factor. That dropped away and now since none of "my money/investment" is anymore here, I just use it for all the reasons you said. 🙏
Please do keep us posted on the alternatives. I will check out Tron.
Ironically since the downturn I now find steem a much more pleasant place to be! Less shit going on.
Although I'm sticking here for now - I just don't have the energy to explore yet more platforms.
Steeminc should have been clearer about abandoning the proof of brain model. It's obvious they have, but a statement clarifying that would have been nice!
I'll give this a resteem. I am also sick to death of positive steem posts.
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I totally understand that you won't take the time to explore other options. At the moment there are not really ones. Tron is more of a blockchain OS that works pretty well and fast - but projects developed on it are still in a very early phase, but they do work in real life scenarios and use-cases - Tron has acquired Bittorrent this years and this protocol is still responsible for about 50% of worldwide internet traffic and the figurehead for a real decentralized internet. I use their tipping and trading bot in Telegram and Twitter daily, play games on the Tron blockchain and chat with likeminded people on a Tron-based dApp. So it's all in its childhood and very early, but the promised SMTs here are already a reality there and there is generated value.
Still no social media site, but it's only a matter of time...
Until then, I'll keep hanging out here for sure... 🙏
Thanks for the insight it actually sounds extremely interesting. I owe half my music collection to the torrrents so that bodes well!
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He was part of the early mining phase where he got his massive stake through mining (I think using Amazon's AWS) before STEEM discontinued PoW.
It's not copying. It's specialization. EOS is a general purpose model like a car. STEEM is becoming an off-road vehicle which does one thing (social media blockchain) extremely well. It's basically allowing anyone to make their own social media product. Imagine Snapchat and twitter were apps built on top of FB. That's what STEEM is doing.
This is to make sure that those who vote has a stake on the platform. If the restriction wasn't there, anybody can do something malicious and simply cash out.
Nice to see that you are using @dclick
Thanks for your view on this! 🙏
Regarding the Sanders bully: I don't mind how exactly he came to his stake, but how he behaved afterwards and how much following he gained who support his hate speech and flaming/mobbing. That really concerns me...
I'm not sure about the specialization part of Steem. This is pure speculation and why should a blockchain specialized on social media be better for dApps than EOS? Especially since any dApp will need to prove on its own, that they can deliver? The technology behind it doesn't make it automatically a successful dApp...
I do get your points though - I just doubt that will happen...
And about staking: Yes, I don't have problems with long term investments in general, but staking on other blockchains does grant me a guaranteed ROI, while staking on Steem just gives me a /potential/ ROI. This makes a huge difference. When I stake and freeze my funds with Tron or EOS for a certain period of time and use my Tronpower to vote on certain projects, I get daily rewards for sure for - well - doing nothing. (and the staking requirement is just 3 days!)
Here I am forced to stake for at least 13 weeks and all I get is the possibility to /maybe/ earn Steem, if people like my content. This simply doesn't add up for me...
Thanks for your perspective again - very much appreciated and unless there is a better alternative I will stay here anyway! 🙏
When I think about Berinie, I think about the works of Eric Hoffer Bernie is a big account. So people come around for upvotes. Some people are just miserable and want to see the world burn. Bernie is always complaining and for some people that hate the platform Bernie sounds like a great guy. Bernie doesn't produce anything but he is always attacking. It's like a typical commie or tyrant. It's easy to rally behind complains that trying to have a discussion and create something.
Transisto and grumpycat/madpuppy tried to pull of some arbitrary policing on the platform too. But they bought their stake and eventually gave up. grumpycat/madpuppy pretty much just powered down. I think Transisto is now running a bidbot. They were forced to act in a certain way because they had more skin (funds) in the game.
Think of EOS as a car and STEEM as an armored vehicle or an off-road vehicle. The scaling also gets easier because of the limit of the kind of DAPPs. @dlike @steemhunt @steemmonsters and even @dlive got most of their promotion and adoption through simply being on STEEM. It's easier to promote your product on STEEM. It's like releasing your video game on Steam or GOG.com The DAPP will hae to prove itself. Bu on STEEM it's easier.
I haven't used TRON. But none of the other projects are based around stake based voting on content creation. Even with the 13 week limit people like bernie just self-vote on single sentence posts. Now imagine if everyone started doing that. the overall quality of content would go down. So either we'll have to go for a system like @steemhunt ABV or simply make it risky to be able to vote. STEEM is making the investment riskier hoping that people would vote responsibly to improve the platform and take at least mid-term decisions. It doesn't work perfectly. but it does have a positive effect.
@dan says he will eventual build a social media DAPP on EOS. But at least until then we are at the best place to be.
It was nice taking to you :-)
You are a asset to this community. Loved your article and specially those lines where you written that you are doing work for the community not for money. That's great. you are honestly enjoying what you are doing. and mind me ... money is not worth it.... keep patient sir... you will be huge here ... all the very best from the core of my heart.
Thank you so much for your kind words! ❤️
I don't think you're going to like Minds. I started on there last Spring and all I see is that it is even worse now that they are an ERC-20 token. (They used to just be a points system.) It is very much a pro-Trump environment. Which isn't to say everyone on there is like that, but trending tags pretty much always include that puerile viewpoint and worse, they have a feature like FB where people basically push their posts at you on the newsfeed. Since you earn tokens by loading your newsfeed, you're at a disadvantage if you don't want to visit that page to avoid all that negativity. Thankfully they have groups, so you could just skip the tokens for loading your feed and just go to groups on spiritual and other positive focus topics. But that brings me to the other issue, which is that now that the token is live and tradeable, the spam problem on there puts Steemit to shame. So now it is also 1000 times as hard to earn a single token. Literally, actions I used to take that earned me 1 token now earn me .001 token. The fact that people can cash out immediately pretty much means that they do. A token introduced at $1 just a month ago is now worth 10 cents. It will likely be a tenth of a cent in a year, though Overstock.com did just invest in the platform and send over one of their execs to help with things, so perhaps meaningful trajectory changes will be made.
Anyway, that's my take on Minds. I share with you disappointment in choices made by STINC about the emphasis on SMTs over new user experience. That's the choice they are making for their work, and that's certainly their right, but it lessens the value of the platform for my intentions. That's why I spend more and more time on Whaleshares these days, where I got my upvote up to $2 in just 2 weeks without investing a dime, while here on steemit I'm less than 50 cents after 8 months after investing $14k!
I don't necessarily recommend the platform to you though, because it is even more extreme than steem in the power down. It is a year!
That won't always be the case, but it is only 2 months old, so it is requiring you stay invested for at least a year to help the community get a base of people in it for the long haul. I pretty much have been posting to whaleshares, then later that day posting the same post here to steemit. Occasionally I make different posts for each, but I find even the markup works, because WLS is a fork of STEEM. (Like LTC is a fork of BTC)
Lastly, I was really invested in Tron until Justin Sun was caught in yet another lie. I finally decided to sell all my Tron and just hold that money as BTC, because I just can't know that anything that company says is true anymore. They may do very well, but it will have to be without me, because I just don't trust them. If you think STINC acts with total disregard for the welfare of its users, I can only imagine what such a lying company will be like as social platform host.
In the end, this may be the best of the lot for an idea that's difficult to execute on in the real world. Anyway, I'm glad you still post here! I would so miss you if you left entirely.
Thanks a lot for your perspective on this topic @indigooecean!
I guess you are right about Minds. I see it changed a lot over the past weeks and I really like their filter/sorting feature, but the content there is quite shallow. Also ERC20 is not my sauce anyway...
I haven't experienced Justin Sun as lying yet, maybe just exaggerating stuff for PR reasons - I was more astonished, that Tron is one of the few companies in cryptospace that has followed with real results on their promises - not only with the acquisition of Bittorrent, but also concerning speed and functionality of the blockchain. This and all the SEED projects really excite me. Maybe I was lucky and missed the lying part until now 😉
On the other hand, I have many experiences with way worse business behaviour in this space. When I think back a year ago, how excited I was about Substratum and they did 0 of what they promised. So my expectations may be very low... 😀
Yes, there may be no real alternative to Seemit at the moment - I'll give Sapien a chance, but it seems as if they are very slow in development.
Oh... and about the investment in a platform: I'm surely open to show my longterm investment, /but/ you have always to consider the space we are operating in and it is very fast paced. Staking for 13 weeks or even a year makes no sense to me, since chances are low, that most of these projects will even exist that long 😄
Thanks for writing your experiences - I really appreciate it very much! ❤️
I got fed up with SUB last Winter and sold it before the overall market contraction started. It became clear to me that not only had they not done anything, but the tech doesn't even exist yet for them to even begin building their solution upon!
With TRON I can't even remember all the lies. The most recent one that made me sell though was his announcing their partnership with some company whose name I forget (I think starts with a B). Turns out they had simply bought a bunch of their servers. That would be like my saying I have a partnership with Microsoft because I'm running Windows 10 on my business's computer. I don't know what they are really going to do, but I just can't hang in there with the lack of trustworthiness regardless. I don't have the nerves of steel needed for that.
Yes, it is very risky to stake locked coins for 13-52 weeks. It's a huge bet of faith in those platforms. I can only justify it by the fact that I enjoy writing and getting to discourse about my writing with the people in the communities MORE than I like doing so in places like Facebook. I won't be further investing my actual cash, but investing my time pays off immediately in relationships. If I also wind up having it pay big in money someday, so much the better.
I totally understand your frustration with Substratum - it was the same for me. I even got kicked from their Telegram chat by their "CEO" because I dared to question their roadmap and asked for real information instead of hype.
About the cooperation between Tron and Baidu (that's the chines ebay), I also read this metaphor about renting servers space being like buying a windows pc and saying you got a cooperation with Microsoft. It made me laugh though...
The truth is somewhere in the middle. It's not a huge cooperation, but it's actually more than just renting server space. AFAIK it is a cooperation about blockchain technology on the server level. Maybe Justin shouldn't have promoted it as a huge thing - on the other hand this whole industry is so loud, that you have to scream over it to be heard.
I didn't consider this a lie, but just a PR stunt with too much expectation attached to it.
Same with Oracle - there is a meeting between some Oracle reps and Tron and everyone is talking about a potential big thing behind it. It may not be big, but it is also not nothing behind it.
Maybe I got better nerves than you 😄Mine are made out of TRONSTEEL - I'm sure someone has already made a token out of it 😄
Nice point of view, I enjoy reading different opinions than my own to help me better guage the community's feelings.
I will admit, I can see why when the majority of the early-crowd you hung out with left, you'd wanna pull back to. I get that. I could sit here and preach to find new groups on Steem, but sometimes you just don't wanna fucking do that and you shouldn't have to. So, really, I get your frustrations there.
As for the SMT stuff: To be fair, from the beginning Steem was meant to be an application-based platform. It's not a "social-media-blockchain". It's a blockchain, which is made specifically for better dapp development. Steemit was just the first dapp to run on it, and Steemit Inc. chose to make it a social media type of blogging site.
SMTs may actually help out in the areas you dislike more than you think. But I don't wanna act like the crazy-crypto-cult type of guy, so I won't make any speculations about them. They're too far out to even think about in these types of contexts yet.
I hope you find the platform that makes you the happiest, I hope that Steem lives up to its potential, and I hope that blockchain technology innovates on how we operate in this world.
Time will surely tell haha, good luck with whatever you choose to do :)
Thanks for your perspective! 🙏
I'm not sure if Steemit was really meant to be an dApp based platform from the beginning. What you say is true, but this is nothing unique to Steemit. As I said, there are many blockchains that promise the same and some of them already do it very well. (it = tokenization etc)
What made Steemit so unique for me, was its "proof of brain" concept instead of PoW or PoS. So in my perspective they are moving away from something unique to something that is really mainstream. Doing so, they are suddenly swimming in dangerous territory with lots of competition they didn't have before...
Ok, so, I'm going to be one of those annoying correcting steemians you might have seen around and just clear up a slight semantics issue. When you're saying "Steemit", what you should be saying is "Steem".
Steem = the blockchain / protocol / underlying code base
Steemit = the blogging platform build on top of Steem
For more info, I recommend this great write-up by Steemit Inc. themselves regarding being a dapp focused platform first and foremost: https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-basics-why-steem-is-an-application-specific-blockchain
So, really, if you just don't like how Steemit is doing, then in theory SMTs could allow for a third-party to develop a new blogging structure on Steem and fix those issues. Apparently Ned is working on something "sorta" like this? Not much is known about it however.
I'm aware of this difference and I never used Steemit as an frontend - always preferred busy.org and other apps. My critique is actually on both or to be more concrete on Steemit Inc who is responsible for both. Some points like the 13 week power down concern also both at the moment. Since there is no way to clearly filter content from different apps, this is also an issue concerning both. SMTs may fix some of these issues, but again, this is only a fix needed already for a long time and no innovation.
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