RE: Lets Make A Steemit Function For Image-Based Content
Thank you for your input. I think there are enough images on Steemit, in almost every post to make it blockchain relevant. I don't know much about the technical issues but perhaps the images could be decoded and compressed in a different way.
Right now Steemit needs audience. Writing things or curating is still not a great way to go by social media. Many other succesful platforms demonstrate this. Twitter has short texts and images, facebook focuses on viewing material, instagram and imgur are also massive.
People want to consume more and more. Images are a great way to do this. All it takes is a photograph and some text and you are in the game. Writing something though requires skills. Most people simply don't have the skills or are too embarrased to compose something beyong 3-4 lines.
Steemit needs natural virality. Images are an excellent way to do this.
I don't doubt the relevance - I just think we may be ahead of our time, in terms of bandwidth and storage. It takes money to host high-bandwidth applications and the blockchain multiplies these costs. And then you have to face the issue of not having revenues to pay for these costs.
The blockchain must have multiple copies of the same data in every node (=inefficient), while a popular image host may need just one data center. (centralized = much more efficient).
Then you have issues like malicious spam, where uploading large photos may be done on purpose to fill the blockchain and make it unusable in terms of size. And these images can be crafted in such a way where they may not even take 5% compression. Now at that point you'll have to ...charge fees to even host one image in order to prevent abuse, and when you do that, you may have lost the game entirely to the centralized & free competition.
Now all these will be solved as technology evolves and the sizes of images become trivial compared to technological capabilities.
I can envision a hybrid model working right now, with a small parallel blockchain for images, but only on a somewhat expensive fee-basis (which is unattractive), otherwise I don't think it would work.
it can still happen under Steemit. it makes no difference
It will multiply blockchain size in no time, making life hard for nodes. There may be other technical obstacles as well (because the system is tuned right now to synchronize small texts between nodes, instead of large images). The change may not be trivial and it may adversely affect scaling as well.