RE: The Sustainability of Steem - Is Freemium Broken?
I spent over a year trying to push the discussion and offer solutions about curation being broken. The best response I got was that SMTs and Oracles could actually fix a lot of the issues I have and I believe they can still. The problem is that for STEEM to be the utility token that holds value to run all of these dapps we either need much smarter projects here on the chain or we need much simpler ways to do the things that need to be done (SMTs and Oracles). As long as STEEM as seen as the reward and not the fuel or oil that makes the machine go, we will always be living on a speculation bubble with no real value. The people and the communities are the value, but when most of them don't even know how the chain works and have no incentive to power up, they just see it as free magic internet money to throw away for fiat or other crypto. Hopefully SMTs and Oracles doesn't get completely derailed by these layoffs, but as of right now the best functional use case I see for our chain is Steem Monsters as they actually created a tokenized economy with a burn mechanism. It is what it is, I've already placed my bet there, but I really do hope this current situation is a wake up call to raise awareness of some of the glaring issues we have with our economic model.
Oh I agree Steem Monsters are a genious idea and they may point to the direction where SMTs will take us. But I think they are quite tangential to what Steem has been trying to do for authors and curators.
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It's not like I completely understand how SMTs and Oracles are going to change the game, but I have a feeling it is not the wisest thing to just bet everything on these to solve all our problems. I can tell you that usually when you are like, yay, this is going to happen in the future and change everything, you are then unpleasantly surprised that things didn't exactly go the pink planned way :-)
It's not like I am trying to be a pessimist, though ;-)
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I agree. Banking on theoretical developments that haven't been implemented isn't really my style, but the fundamentals of what they are doing will help address the biggest issues. We need price discovery for content that isn't completely broken. We need incentives for curators to actually promote quality content and have an organic "trending" feed. We need actual burn cases for the tokens to counter inflation and create some kind of scarcity. There have been so many suggestions that ways to go about doing these things that just get completely ignored that it's unreal. SMTs should in theory make it easier to tokenize value and create price discovery for the content by not paying people in STEEM. Dapps need users and will have to use their STEEM to create accounts and give RC to "normies." Oracles allows for content moderation to get rid of all the spammy bullshit and keep the DAPPs or Communities clean. All of this can already be done with some top notch coding, but we either don't have that many devs that can actually code these dapps that well or they have no incentive to actually do it as they are simply in it to make the most fast cash as possible. Probably some combination of the two. These are just my thoughts on the situation and no I don't think SMTs and Oracles are a silver bullet to all of our problems, I just think they will give better resources to make creating communities with tokenized value and content price discovery easier.
@steeveapp is totally planning to address these issues. You can read more about it a post that is a followup to this article actually:
https://www.steeve.app/@steeveapp/steeves-business-plan
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Awesome I'll check it out!
Ok, I read up a bit on SMTs and Oracles. Sounds pretty much like "We messed up, but we will give you a mechanism to fix it, but it's super complicated and you will need a rocket scientist to get it right" :-)
I am really wondering who will get enough funds and brains to pull this out...
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