Try to read the title out loud, with a British accent. Yes. Pun intended, guys.
The "golden days" of Steemit are over for some time now. I wasn't there during that time and all I know about those days comes from posts filled with nostalgia and sadness.
How I Got Here
My involvement with the platform started less than 3 weeks ago. @wadepterson sent me and email a month ago, asking for an interview for a "20 Questions With..." project of him. Had no idea what was about, didn't know squat about Steemit, but I get around 2-3 interview requests each month. So I answered the questions and a few days later I got another email, with the link for the published interview. It was on Steemit and it has a box underneath it, with something that looked like a sum of money. 3-4 clicks later I understood that it was for real.
I wrote my introductory post and got more than $350. I was literally blown away.
So I took the time to read the white paper, to start mingling, to learn new tools (steemstats, steemwhales, etc). And I decided to give it a 30 days time window. I'm still in that 30 days time window. Things can go well or things can go bad after that, I don't know yet. But what's in the basket right now tilts the balance towards staying here.
Current Situation
I know there is a stark contrast between getting $2000 for a post and getting $350. But, with all honesty, I think $2000 for a post is unrealistic at best. It's simply not possible to generate in this specific market (number of people in the audience, maturity of the platform, etc) that amount of money.
In simpler words: what you got when you got $2000 for an article was not the actual value of that article, but a split. A split between the value of the article and marketing money. You got, let's say, around $50 for the article, and the remaining $1950 was "word of mouth advertising". It made you promote the network. And it was also an investment in you. And it was a good investment, as long as you still have enough patience to see which is the real price of an article. Because that's what's at stake here: how much your work is really worth of, once the marketing money is going away?
Finding that answers takes a lot of time. You need something around at least 1.000.000 people to form a coherent ecosystem, one in which real money will pour in (from investors, advertisers, market makers, etc).
Go Ahead. Hard-Fork Yourself
But instead of patience, I see a trend of hate and frustration. Why are you mad guys? Why? Because a bunch of people put some thousands in your pockets for some portion of your time? That's not healthy, you know. Hating people who rewarded you for your involvement. Generally speaking, hating people for giving you money, especially when all they ask from you is to write content - is not healthy. Write that down, on a piece of paper: "It's not healthy to hate people who are giving me money for writing content." It's important.
But you know what? It's a free world. If you don't enjoy staying here, go ahead and hard-fork. Start your own steemit. Code is open-source, just start a clone.
I think with al honesty that this will finally draw the real picture for many of you out there frustrated. If you want to build a decentralized social network you need, just at the highest level, without going into too many details:
- hosting resources (big hosting resources)
- very qualified blockchain developers (very expensive)
- qualified front-end developers (expensive)
- a community of crypto-savvy people which will act as witnesses, in the beginning
- a seed community of content providers which will (hopefully) bootstrap the whole thing in terms of blog posts and interaction
- a very, very good understanding of crypto-currency and the ability to push your new coin in at least one high profile exchange (otherwise adoption will be close to nothing)
Now, try to go into details and try to create a budget on this one. And after you make the budget on fixed costs (hosting, cost of developers) try building the budget for variable costs (influencers, content providers, lobby for exchanges).
Or you may as well read the title out loud, with a British accent.
Pun intended.
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.
