May 30 Days Writing Challenge - Day 11: What’s More Important For Steemit Right Now: Smart Media Tokens or Hivemind?

30 Days of Writing Challenge by @dragosroua

Well, this is actually easier than the question would seem.

Smart Media Tokens (SMT)

What are Smart Media Tokens? A Smart Media Token (SMT) is a native digital asset on the Steem blockchain that can be quickly launched by anyone to help monetize online content and create incentives to encourage desired user behavior.

~ https://smt.steem.io/

SMT's are meant to show the power of the Steem blockchain. They will help blog owners and other content providers monitize their site by providing a token to exchange for either content provide or reaction to the content provided. If SMT were to be important for Steemit, then we would get rid of reward payout sin SBD/Steem POWER/STEEM and replace them with a SMT. Frankly, with the issues we have had with SBD, I would be all for only getting Steem POWER/STEEM and some chosen SMT from the rewards pool. Or, just get rid of SBD.

Anyway, SMT's are great for other sites out side of Steemit to start using a cryptocurrency to monetize their content and such.

Steemit Hivemind

Hive is a "consensus interpretation" layer for the Steem blockchain, maintaining the state of social features such as post feeds, follows, and communities. Written in Python, it synchronizes an SQL database with chain state, providing developers with a more flexible/extensible alternative to the raw steemd API.

~ https://github.com/steemit/hivemind

...the goal is to completely remove the follow and tags plugins, as well as get_state from the backend node itself, and re-implement them in hive. In doing so, we form the foundational infrastructure on which to implement communities and more.

Basically, the hivemind is a new way to organize the blog articles on Steemit and provide better control over content by allowing the community to decide what belongs in what area by creating a community based on what is posted.

Hive tracks posts, relationships, social actions, custom operations, and derived states.

• discussions: by blog, trending, hot, created, etc
• communities: mod roles/actions, members, feeds (in 1.5; spec)
• accounts: normalized profile data, reputation
• feeds: un/follows and un/reblogs

The question is, would you rather look for articles based on who you have already decided to follow or by the content that you think belongs to a particular community?

In a way, hivemind could be good for Steemit, because new Steemians to a hive will have a better chance of their articles being seen compared to the overall Trending/Hot/New feeds and those attached to a tag. There would also be more of a community to that discussion and it would be easier to see who is just a comment spam robot.

However, it is possible that by using the hivemind, Steemians will be so focused on their own community hive, that they would miss great articles in other hive communities. And, it would be possible that a Steemians preferences are so vast, that they don't fit into any particular hive.

But, the big thing is, anything that can improve the way articles are found so that they can be upvoted is better than adding a new functionality to the Steem blockchain to allow people outside of Steemit to monetize their content.

Hivemind wins.

---

Let the positive energy sing!

More Power to the Minnows!!

Trading on Bittrex and Binance
Claim Your Stake with a Stake Box
HODLin’
Stellar Lumen(XLM) -- Cardano (ADA) -- Digibyte(DGB)
Get your old school text-based gaming on.