This is post is aimed at people who talk about RPGs on Google+, fans of indie RPGs, old Forgies, people from the Forge diaspora, post-Forgies, storygamers, fans of weird or obscure RPGs, or whatever the right category is for the people I normally talk to and engage with about the kind of tabletop RPGs I like. As far as I'm aware there aren't a ton of people like that on Steemit (yet!), but I want to make the case that Steemit can be a good platform for supporting our hobby.

Rewards don't cost upvoters anything permanent

Here's the way classical economics explains trade: The butcher has a lot of meat. The baker has a lot of bread. More meat isn't worth much to the butcher, since they already have so much. More bread isn't worth much to the baker, since they already have so much. But if the butcher can get some bread and the baker can get some meat then they can both have sandwiches and both be better off than they were before. So they trade! The butcher gives the baker some meat in exchange for some of the butcher's bread. Everybody wins and the world is a better place. That's also great for things like finished RPG books: some people think the book is worth more than some of their dollars so they exchange their dollars for the book. The publisher is happier with dollars than with the N+1th copy of the book in their inventory, and the RPG fan is happier with their book than with their dollars (well, at least they are in the ideal world).

But finished, polished, ready-for-retail books aren't the only creative thing produced by this community. What about blog posts? What about interesting musings about RPGs that inspire new ideas? What about cool art? What about the drafts of games that have exciting ideas in them but aren't yet playtested and developed, like ones created for design contests? I'm comfortable saying these things are valuable in the abstract, and I think it would be awesome if people got rewarded for creating them, but it's hard to say that they're worth more to any individual person than the dollars which they can spend on other things, like rent, or games that have been playtested and polished up to a final state. The Steemit reward model breaks the relationship between you benefiting from my tip and the tip having a permanent cost to me. When I upvote a post on Steemit that makes the post eligible to receive a corresponding amount of reward. But that reward doesn't come from my account, it comes from the system itself (it's a form on intentional inflation, basically) as an acknowledgment that you putting the post up on Steemit increased the overall value of Steemit (because now it's the kind of place that people can find your cool thing). It's a lot easier to justify giving someone an upvote (“is this a good post?”) than it is to engage in a conventional transaction (“is this post worth $X to me?”).

[Note for sticklers: Theoretically it “costs” you 2% of your current voting power to upvote something, but that refreshes back up to 100% over time. Upvoting is more like a magic rod that has N uses per day, not like a wand that has a number of charges that get depleted until they're gone.]

No transaction fees

Most conventional electronic payments have transaction fees associated with them, which are used to maintain the infrastructure of the payment system, like the credit card processing that banks do. But per-transaction charges tend to be pretty terrible for small denomination transactions (as Patreon users are finding out to their dismay, based on the most recent policy change there). The Steem blockchain doesn't charge fees per transaction, it pays to maintain the infrastructure by creating more Steem. Think of it as analogous to getting free checking for maintaining a minimum balance in your bank account: the bank can make more money when people leave a lot of money in their accounts so they're happy to not nickel-and-dime you on each check. Transactions like putting up a post, upvoting, or even transferring a quantity of SBD (steem-backed-dollars) to another user don't have any transaction costs. (The rate at which you can issue transactions is limited, to keep spammers from ruining it for everybody, but the limit rarely impacts normal human use). For the small amounts of money involved in the indie RPG scene a nontrivial amount gets lost to transaction costs in the traditional systems (even many of the “big name” people on Patreon have a lot of $1 pledges).

But isn't Steemit weird and scammy?

Yeah, maybe? But if an alien came to Earth today and you explained the job / health insurance / rent / etc. system you already participate in, wouldn't they conclude it was weird and scammy, too? How about any of the crowdfunding platforms? Maybe Steemit is especially sketchy, I can't really tell. I've been trying Steemit for a couple of months, I still don't know whether the site or the community will make sense in the long term (especially since my interests are so niche), but it seems to me that the idea behind Steemit is worth experimenting with. My suggestion is to not put any of your “real” money into Steem or Steemit, so the most you stand to lose is however much time and energy you're willing to put in. I started from just the default amount that the system gives you in your account and built up to what I have now by getting rewards on my posts and winning a few contests. We're RPG people, grinding up from a humble beginning is something we should be familiar with. (Obviously I'd like to have more, but I think it's pretty cool that my upvotes are worth a few cents each now, that's much more tangible than the +1s I can give out on Google+).

Let me know if you have questions (or counterarguments)

Feel free to ask me questions or talk about the topic here or in any of the places I've shared this. If I'm wrong about something, or there's a factor I haven't considered, I'd like to know. But if I'm right I think we'd all benefit if some more people tried the platform.