Paid VS Free

People have connected with great content since the cave paintings of long ago. With the invention of the printing press that content became accessible to many. Books came free of advertising because the reader was willing to pay for the book and cover the cost of production. Newspapers and magazines generally come into being distributed for free until the cost of production requires a subsidy to maintain as wide a reach as possible. This is where the advertiser steps in and creates an interruption in the flow of content.

From Books To Radio To TV to the Internet

Each time content finds a means to express itself without interruption it finds itself in the quandary of catering to the "we want it for free" masses or the paying appreciators of quality content.

First radio and TV found their content wedged between the bookends of advertisements. The normal 3 act play became 7 acts for TV so that advertisers could interrupt the content without losing the listeners or viewers interest completely. New channels within radio and TV provided new means for content to be free of interruption. Cable TV at first restored the continuity of a good story . Movies provided a similar experience for the paying consumer.

YouTube, Facebook and blogging once again provided a means for delivering content without ads in their earliest incarnations. To deliver this content now requires mega data centers and these don't come cheap.

Steemit Liberates Us From Being Products

Steemit is the new place for content to be free of spammers and advertising pollution. The spammers, in the form of bots, have been relegated to the bottom of posts to keep from interrupting the quality content. A reputation system along with steem powered voting keeps excellent content at the forefront. The steem dollar is used to reward those content creators for their effort. The blockchain is the mechanism that drives this new media channel. The predecessors of YouTube and Facebook turned us into products. Steemit is liberating us into paid contributors?

Is It Sustainable?

Is steemit sustainable when the critical mass of people arrive to consume Steemit content. What happens when the need for massive data centers develops? Well thats when this new social experiment will face the same question as it's predecessors - to advertise or not.

Blockchain Forks

We've seen the original bitcoin blockchain clone itself into Litecoin to preserve the ideology of CPU mining when faced with ASICS consolidation power. Most recently the Ethereum protocol has split to preserve the concept of immutability from the mentality of bail ins. Will we see the same happening to steem and steemit when it comes to the right of content to remain free of advertisement?