All the marketing in the world won't make a lick of difference as long as the blogging platform is so paleolithic.
Steemit can't do 1/10th what an ordinary Wordpress blog can do. There is absolutely no way to compete in this space. For that matter, it can't even do 1/10th of what Facebook and Twitter do (I can't even find out how many people have resteemed my posts, and the site has been up for a year!).
Basic features such as CSS integration and user analytics should have been day-1 features. All the marketing in the world isn't going to remedy that.
Steemit has a long way to go before it's going to challenge any of the established players. And if updates keep coming at such a glacial pace, then the war is already lost.
We don't need to waste time and energy trying to tell the world how great Steemit is, because Steemit is not great---not yet. Not unless it gets its act together. And that means creating a blogging platform that can do EVERYTHING that other platforms already do, PLUS pay content creators. Until such time as you have that, any attempt at marketing is counterproductive.
wait...fb and twitter give you stake in their network for getting large followings to support and upvote you?...
And they also have something equivalent to the world class market pegged asset to give there users a safe bank account?
Ohhh wait...that is Steem. The first Scalable, Self-Governing Social Media blockchain...ever.
Oh wait...i almost forgot. The blockchain makes it unsensorable (unless you call flagging censorship...but flagging often just makes people want to see a post more(it does for me). Please dont b silly.. i'm cool with people putting it down but when they are wrong i'll tell them. You sir are overlooking so much and it is so obvious to everyone who pays attention.
Facebook and Twitter are also multi-billion dollar companies. Owning a stake in those platforms is actually worth something.
Being censorship-free is a wonderful thing. But it doesn't mean a thing unless the platform itself is user-friendly enough to draw in, you know, users. And tens of millions of them, at that.
you mean as user friendly as....hm.... reddit?
Well this is as user friendly as reddit (another multi-billion dollar---Censoring platform). And to be honest we don't need millions of people to blog here...we just need millions to use steem's IMMUTABLE database. If you would have stopped and read what I posted you would realize there is more than just censorship free (though yes...that IS enough for mass adoption).
I feel bad for you if you are not in when this launches for real. And it will..
Steemit is currently undergoing rebranding, and still growing. In the above post I am not talking about marketing Steemit, but marketing Steem as a currency, and the Steem blockchain.
You want to market the Steem currency? Which is currently competing with the 700+ altcoins in existence?
That's not Steemit's hedgehog concept.
The only thing that makes Steem unique, the only thing that gives it a market advantage (from a general consumer's perspective) is the fact that it is tied to a social media platform as a reward system. Outside of that, Steem is nothing. If it were better than other altcoins it would be beating other altcoins.
Now, if the quality of the Steemit platform were to increase, that would be a different story, because the only real way to evangelize Steem as a currency is to increase the value of the property that the token represents; namely, the Steemit platform. The currency is backed by the value of the platform. If the platform lacks value, the currency lacks a purpose.
So you will understand why I mistook "Steem Marketing" for "Steemit Marketing", since, after all, they are one and the same thing in every possible situation and every possible context.
You're going to object to that statement, of course. But you'll never disprove it.
In terms of alt-coins we already have more capability than Dash. Why are they doing so good? Marketing.
Which statement will I object to? I think that it is important for people to understand the currencies and the technology behind the Steem blockchain as well as the social media platform plugged into the blockchain.
As a digital currency we have more intrinsic value than other alt-coins (due to Steemit), plus we have the steem dollar which gives stability in trade.
I'm not suggesting to ignore the steem blockchain's social media platform, but to develop media showing the technology behind the blockchain, the superiority of its currency, and how this ties into the social media platform, and after the rebranding (new logos, more development etc) of Steemit is finished then create media for it. The Steem blockchain started out with the idea of being plugged into a social media platform to bootstrap the currency into wider use. It has evolved though, and will continue to do so. Blockchain technology is massive and has infinite potential. The direction of apps such as busy show that we are taking the all in one philosophy.
While I understand this point from the real and active blogger perspective, you need to remember that Steem is just a backend for a blogging platform. The most important thing is that the backend can actually support all the features and a huge userbase. That's why developers are still prioritizing it. There hasn't been anything like it before, so the devs are creating something totally unique and the problems they are facing are also completely new.
Steem is only valuable if people actually buy it. And people (by which I mean consumers, not backroom programmers) couldn't care less what is happening inside the black box. They only care about the thing they interface with.
All this insistence that the back end has to be perfected before the user experience can be worked on is frighteningly reminiscent of a Word Perfect mentality. The people around here are putting the cart light years in front of the horse. But no matter how many times I raise the warning cry, the lesson is not learned.
Others may be content to let Steemit become the Word Perfect of the 2010s, but I'm not going to stick my head in the sand on this issue.
When the Steemit community finally gets tired of failing, I'll be here for you. Until then, I'm going to keep being as blunt as possible. And yeah, I know it makes me look like the bad guy. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
Isn't it the the other way around? The horse in this case is the blockchain. It's the engine that runs the whole system. If it sucks, it's impossible to build a great service on top of it. In the case of social media system, we need to have really scalable blockchain so it can actually serve all the millions of people who are our potential users. If the blockchain doesn't scale, we end up in a situation like Bitcoin is now. Blocks are full and people can't use it anymore. Then it doesn't matter how beautiful the website is: it's still unusable.
You are not a bad guy, you just have a different perspective on this.