I saw a video by Louis Thomas (@louisthomas) recently where he talked about a comment he got. Here it is, which is from this video:
Louis, you need to investigate Steemit more. There are lots of problems with it which I think leave it open for big trouble or collapse: 1) The payouts are too high for certain content (example: a prominent Steemit user named Jerry Banfield posted a photoshopped image of himself standing in front of a restaurant and it received a $600+ payout (that's nearly 3000 in US dollars). I've seen memes being posted that make 500-1000 us dollars. Memes that the user posting it didn't even make. 2) The first adopters of Steem have all the power, and can perpetually create money out of nothing with things like Steem bots and steem power delegation. 3) Bots. Bots are the only way you can get your content noticed, by paying ones with a ton of Steem power to upvote your content, making it extremely hard to get started as a minnow with no money, and also very undemocratic and not in line with the free market. It's the equivalent of pay-to-win in video games. There is so much high-quality content on Steemit that's making no money, and tons of shitty content that makes a lot of money. There are many posts where the user has simply used bots to upvote themselves to the trending or hot page. Bro, there are some fundamental problems with this platform that need to be addressed.
Basically, the comment brings up three main problems with Steemit:
- some posts get disproportionately high payouts
- the first adopters of Steem (whales) have all the power
- bots are the only way to get content noticed
What is content really worth?
I think Louis’s response was really interesting. One of the things he talked about was how it’s hard to say what content on Steem is really worth because value is being assigned in such a new way. Up until now free content has pretty much always earned money through ad dollars. It’s weird to see a meme earn $3,000, but who knows what that meme is really worth. Where’s the value even come from?
On this video, Louis got a well thought out comment from @full-measure, which is where I got the idea for this post:
I think Steem should be thought of as a game more than a mechanism of deciding what each piece of content is worth.
Some of the reasons to upvote are they're a known author and you think you can get good curation rewards or they have SP and you hope maybe they'll vote you back or you just want to support them in general so you'd support any post.
And it's all rational and what you should expect people will do, and it won't correlate too perfectly with how "good" the piece of content was. So it just shouldn't be thought of as a way to gauge how good content is.
What's important is whether the rules and incentives in play generally encourage good behavior and what you want in a social media platform, and at least make it more advantageous to create good content rather than bad content.
Getting big bucks for a simple post is nothing new anyways. PewDiePie can put up a cat vid and make a bunch. But we recognize that it's within the context of the following he's built and that YouTube isn't necessarily gauging what each piece of content brings to the world.
I have a tendency to focus on the good things when I’m excited about something new, so please leave a comment if you disagree with these arguments, but I agree with @full-measure here. I think most of the behavior on Steemit right now is about what you’d expect.
It’s clear from watching some interviews with the Steem Team that their main goal is Steem and not Steemit. Steemit seems to mostly be a proof of concept, which probably helps to explain why the site is still in beta and missing some features that one would expect it to have at this point (a native app, notifications, etc.).
It seems like their goal is to create an awesome blockchain, and encourage entrepreneurs to build on it. Sites like DTube are a great example, and support of this project can be seen in the huge SP delegation that @dtube has.
Steem is a Game
I agree that Steem is a game still. Most of us ended up here because we’d like to try making some money and right now we’re just taking part in an experiment. This platform is still so new. There’s so much room for growth, and this is still a completely new approach to content creation.
I can totally understand the frustration of people who are creating great content and not earning any money, though. I’m lucky to be a part of @sndbox, so I’ve had support from the beginning. But keep in mind how cool it is that something like @sndbox can exist. It’s an incubator to support new creators using Steem, and it’s rewarding these new creators through Steem that has been delegated to it from other big accounts. This isn’t something that could exist anywhere else.
There are also big curation projects like @curie and @minnowsupport to help new Steemians get visibility and upvotes. It’s cool to see how people are self regulating to fix things in the community and add value. It’s a totally different type of system so I think it’s a mistake to assume it should behave the same as more traditional social media platforms.
Keep in mind the power that developers have to create new websites on the Steem blockchain and tinker with what works best for their community. Steemit.com is still an experiment, but (as far as I know) there’s nothing to stop someone from creating a Steem front end that attempts to ban bots (by not showing posts upvoted by them), or gives more visibility to smaller accounts, or fixes something else that they think needs to be fixed.
Just My Thoughts
This is 100% just my rambling thoughts recently and I’d love to hear what you think about all this. It's basically my logic as to why it's still worthwhile to invest my time and energy into the platform. It has some flaws that need to be sorted out over time, but I still see a lot of potential.
What do you think? Are the problems listed above important to address immediately? Let me know in the comments! 🙂
