RE: Steemit is an Incredible Success
Your premise is "Steemit is at least better than its competition". Not exactly reaching for the stars, but ok.
Even then, is Steemit better than its competition? I wouldn't be the one to measure that, since I've never used its competition. But I know one thing about Steemit: It's costly and difficult to get started here. To me, that's a huge drawback. Charging new users to make their first post? Very sad indeed. And they just announced that the site is broke and needs to start advertising to us. On traditional blogs, the users have ads up, and they make an income from it. On Steemit, the website has the ads up on your blog, and you are the target of that advertising. If you fall for it, Steemit gets paid.
I don't need to have used Steemit's competition to know that it's possible to do much better.
Crypto isn't a "good" solution.
It is a "good enough" solution.
Good things come to those who wait.
Patience is a virtue and all that.
Nobody here thinks we've done everything we can do.
Everyone wants a better platform.
Luckily, unlike a centralized service like Facebook, we don't have to sit around to make this place the best it can be. Hundreds of developers are trying to create useful applications. Steemit will eventually fade into obscurity in the face of all the other products being built here.
I think patience for good things is a virtue. Patience for everything is silly.
Your long term futuristic vision is cool, and perhaps even right. But that's not today, and today is what counts. People need somewhere to blog and to vlog and to dispense their news and showcase their creations. Content-creators are looking for somewhere to do their thing. If I were Steemit (or anyone like them) I would be getting my basic site backbone in order and providing somewhere for all that valuable content to exist. Whoever manages to provide for the content-creators will prosper. Content is what adds value here. Without continued influx of fresh unique high quality content, the site is an empty shell of code (and advertising).
Agree.
This is only true about Steemit itself, and does not apply to the underlying asset (Steem) or any of the other possible front-ends, games, and other digital assets.
Steem as a pure cryptocurrency with no social media element still has lot of value by itself. The power for anyone with coins to distribute 90% of the inflation generated is pretty awesome. Steem is the hardest cryptocurrency to steal (that I know of) and the easiest one to control the keys directly. Putting tunnel-vision on Steemit.com is an oversight.