June 2017 will probably go down in history as one of the best months for Steemit growth. I think the entire population of active Steemit users doubled. The rough numbers will probably tell you an even more appealing story, but I don't follow the rough numbers, because, in this specific use case, they can be misleading. In the early days of Steemit, one person could use the cli_wallet to create literally thousands of accounts. If I'm not mistaken, I think that one of those persons is still alive and playing around the blockchain these days and those thousands of accounts are still lingering around.
So what counts is the number of active accounts. And we went from roughly 9k monthly users to over 21k (on a bad day).
This is wonderful news. It really is.
But as in every growth situations, if you grow too fast, you will experience what is known as "growth pains". There are at least 5 types of growth pains Steemit is experiencing at this time and I felt compelled to write a post about them.
I do believe that if we don't address them, they could drag the whole ecosystem into a stale.
1 Follow for Follow
This was seen before in other social media platforms, more prominently in Twitter. I still remember the early days of Twitter, when you would get a "Please follow me back, I just followed you" direct message, almost every hour. Ok, so one may ask: "What's wrong with that? Why wouldn't I return the favor if someone was so nice to follow me?"
Well, because, if you don't assess your potential of interaction, you will not bode well in the future. As time consuming as it is, and as boring as it can get, a minimal due diligence is required. Following blindly each and every person clicks the "Follow" link in your profile will not create you an audience. It will inflate the number of followers in your profile, and that's it.
If you don't know the difference between an audience and just a number, well, maybe you shouldn't be on Steemit at all.
2 Meaningless, Polluting Comments
This is by far the most annoying growth pain of Steemit thus far. Sometimes it doesn't even take one minute and my posts are displaying a nice(?) string of comments, all pretty much with the same message: "Please, pretty please, upvote this comment and give me some money", sometimes not even disguised in something completely meaningless, like "Oh, nice post, you are a nice person" etc.
For all of you who are hoping to get rich by that, stop. Go get a job at McDonalds, if you qualify, or do whatever you can do for a minimal wage in your country, because you won't make even that with this approach. Believe me, it doesn't work like that. So, if you don't want to experience frustration, poverty and despair, stop posting automated comments with no contribution.
You will be soon filtered out and you won't even realize that.
3 Extensive Self-Upvoting
With this, we get to a more delicate level of growth pains. If the first two are generated by a specific demographic - namely people attracted by a quick buck - this one is a bit more nuanced.
After HardFork 19, many people realized their vote power increased significantly. And they started to just post stuff (short posts or meaningless comments) and then upsteem the shit out of them. What happened was that the reward pool was emptied individually, without an interaction.
At first sight, this may seem like a legit way to get rich: gather Steem Power, upsteem yourself, power up and cash in profits. Rinse and repeat. Wrong. Deadly wrong. If you don't engage and if you don't allocate parts of the rewards pool to other people, the system will collapse. And by that I mean that your rewards will literally be less than a thousands of a cent. The blockchain will continue to work, but the value associated with Steem will go down the toilet.
Nobody will buy Steem if the entire ecosystem is made of thousands of isolated chambers in which every individual is voting for himself. Nobody.
But plenty of people will buy if the ecosystem will boast interaction, foster ideas, create and implement collaborative projects and so on.
4 The Deadly "Minnows Squeeze"
As more and more minnows will join the platform, there will be more and more Steem allocated to those accounts. At this moment, the account creation fee is probably 1 Steem. It doesn't look that much, now.
In an ideal world, this fee should be paid by the ones who want to join. But in an initial effort to attract users, Steemit Inc decided to pay this fee, for the user. That's how you explain the "join and get X free Steem" marketing stuff you see floating around about Steemit.
But this supply of Steem is not endless. At some point it will end. Try to think what will happen if there will be 100,000 millions users joining Steem tomorrow. There will be 100,000 Steem allocated to those people.
And here comes the funny part. Out of those 100,000 people, I think less than 1% will become power users of the platform. The rest will try it for a few weeks and then leave. But, the vast majority of them will leave their Steem in their account. So we will end up with dozens of millions of lost Steem in unused accounts, lingering around the ecosystem. This will act as a pressure on the price, not because of the amount of it, but because of the uncertainty. Nobody can predict when these dozens of people will remember they had 2-3 Steem in their wallet and start dumping all, thus dragging the price down.
I know it sounds Sci-Fi, but we've already seen a lot of Sci-Fi already unfolding in the crypto-universe.
I really think Steemit should do something about the account fee creation. At least secure its value somehow. As strange as it may sound now, making people pay to join might be a good idea. I'm not sure how many will start the "follow for follow" thing or how many will post meaningless comments, if they are already invested.
5 Chronic Lack of Education About the Platform
By far the most dangerous growth pain of all. I think less than 1% of the newcomers know how the platform works. They come with a Facebook/Twitter/My Space/Hi5 bias (or, even worse, a Tsu bias) and they expect thing to "just work". They have no idea about the reward pool, about witnesses and their role, about the role of SBD in the platform and so on.
In more than 45 years of wandering on this Earth I learned that the most frightening, dangerous and deadly peril for the human race is stupidity. Or ignorance. Or confusion. Name it as you wish, but the deliberate act of ignoring the mechanisms of the world never ended well. On the contrary.
I cannot stress enough the importance of education, with regard to Steem. If one in 2 people will actually understand how things are working around here, then we will never see "follow for follow", polluting comments, extensive upvoting.
And even the "minnows squeeze" could be transformed into a "minnows explosion" that could bring the price of Steem to the moon.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):