RE: Instagram-like App on Steem - Testing Steepshot and My Early Review of the App
Thank you for your review.
I was able to post my first edited photo with Steepshot this morning.
In general I like the idea of the service. BUT, what will go miserably wrong is how it eats from the same reward pool as all the other posts and voting and curation on Steemit is totally different then what we will gonna see at Steepshot. Sharing photos will be seen by the Steemit curators as simple posts and may even get downvotes when SteepShot users give a lot of upvotes.
SteepShot does not have any special corner in Steemit, as SteepShot does not make a difference between 'normal' posts and photo only posts. The later means that a SteepShot user 'like' (vote) a post for its first image; That has nothing to do with voting for the post itself, since this is not visible in SteepShot. I think this is a MAJOR flaw in SteepShot. I left a comment to the latest Android SteepShot post at @steepshot already. SteepShot content shall have it dedicated channel and shall be the only content available in SteepShot.
Steemit users shall know which post is a SteepShot post so it can adopt a different way of curating. Either a special channel, starting with a Steepshot tag or something, but in my view shall be dedicated channel, like NEW, or HOT is. Separate from the other posts.
Stepshot can only choose which post to display on its app, it cannot decide whether or not to display on steemit.com(only steemit.com can do that) - there are plenty of steepshot like post already on steemit.com in #photography.
Also, the UI of steemit.com might be radically different soon because of the community feature. Steepshot might end up in a single community for example.
I know :) Unfortunately a 'like' in SteepShot App is always with 100% power! Steemit INC + witnesses + community may need to think how combined services on Steem blockchain will work when competing over the same funds from the same reward pool. We shall not run into a situation where we get even more wars within the community over reward distribution. Quality is one of the statements made to what posts needs to comply to for rewards (I think this was even mentioned in the Whitepaper). Quality is to some extend subjective, but I'll tell you, with SteepShot we will potentially see a lot of everyday photos but the way SteepShot is created these photos could get high rewards. With SteepShot people give rewards for the images they see, but the give rewards to antire posts that are invisible at SteepShot; That is not though through very well IMHO. The same is likely to happen when Zappl launches their Twitter like service.
I'm looking forward to it, but to me it is still very unclear what we will get when and indeed how Steemit UI will look like. The 'might' and 'for example' part of your statements do not give me a good picture. I actually miss the function product management, in Steemit Inc and Steepshot.
Reward distribution is a very important topic at Steemit and reason for many wars amongst members of the community, and I do not think Steem blockchain owners have a good and solid thought through story, strategy wrt multiple services using it and how the prevent the wars being brought to the various sister services in the future (ie wars not only on Steemit, but bridged to SteepShot and Zappl and who knows what other services).
I also think the Steepshot owners should have focused on Pictures only, not displaying images of any post, and at least the possibility to adjust power on a vote. They even decided to name 'vote' different, namely 'like'. It took me at least 5 likes to understand I was casting votes and rewarding images that were part of posts.... Now I need to go to steemd.com to check which posts I voted for, then go to each post to check if I'm ok with my vote...the image at SteepShot I may like, but the post maybe not.
I know we are in Beta, and Steepshot is in Alpha, but to me we are not in Beta/Alpha modus when we are competing and distributing financial rewards.