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RE: Open Letter to all Steemians - Hardfork 21: Culture Change
What is completely wrong? That I claimed that users love those platforms despite them not paying anything to them? That statement is precisely correct. You don't get paid for using Facebook, YouTube or any of the big mainstream social media platforms. And yes, those platforms are hugely profitable - to their owners. The users use them and do not expect to get paid a single cent. The whole concept is so alien to them that when you talk about earning crypto by blogging on Steem to YouTube users or other mainstream people, their eyes will go completely blank - or they'll assume it's a scam.
This is completely wrong. It remains completely wrong even if you moderate it by adding monetary rewards. Steem was but the first social media platform that potentiated monetary rewards, but it is not the only one anymore. The monetization of content by users has just begun.
I already specified that I meant content that gets paid to any meaningful extent.
Why do we have to repeat this?
Monetization of content by users is nothing new. It's been going on centralized platforms for a decade and a half. It's just that on Steem users have benefited from being early adopters in a cryptocurrency project. Bring aboard a couple of hundred million users and you can rest assured very few authors will be pocketing any kind of meaningful income. The math simply won't work any other way.
Facebook is worth about $500 billion. It has about two billion users. The uppermost bound to how much the average Facebook account could be worth is about $500. Take away the value of the infrastructure and you'll be left somewhat less. But that's a very top heavy distribution. The value of an account is probably heavily dependent on how connected it is to a network of other well-connected accounts. What that means is that the accounts of celebrities and major corporations can be extremely valuable whereas the ordinary person posting about his/her lunch and cat will be vastly less valuable. Yes, even something like $100 would be something but it wouldn't allow the average person to generate any kind of meaningful income.