I’ve been introduced to Steemit a little over a week ago by @wadepeterson, in one of his famous 20 questions interviews. I confess that I didn’t expect too much out of it, although the questions were surprisingly (and pleasantly) well thought (Wade really took the time to dig into my blog and into my social media presence).
I get about 2-3 interview requests per month, most of them from bloggers on productivity or personal development. All interviews are published on their blogs.
So, when Wade gave me the link for the published interview, I initially thought this was his blog. It took me a few good minutes to realize this was kind of a social media website. When I saw the dollar numbers underneath the post, I was like: “Oh, well, another Tsu clone, probably backed by a MLM”.
But as I was browsing, I discovered a link called “White Paper”. These things appear on projects like Bitcoin or Ethereum and its presence in what I thought it was just a sugar coated MLM was very unusual.
So, I slowed down, I started to explore the site and to read all the introductory stuff. And then I read the White Paper. And then I read it again. I think I read it at least 3 times.
Now let me tell you a bit more about myself: although I graduated from the Faculty of Letters from the University of Bucharest, (where I thoroughly studied French and Romanian literature), I am also a self-taught programmer. I code in several languages, I have a productivity app published in the AppStore and written completely in Objective C. On top of that, I installed and tested a few times a private Ethereum network just because I was curious. Ever since the explosion of bitcoin, I was fascinated by the potential of the blockchain technology.
So when all the pieces of the puzzle came together (namely: my blogging, my coding skills and my interest in cryptocurrencies) I decided to give Steemit a try.
The first level I wanted to try was the author activity. I was really curious how this authorship thing goes, from many points of view: time spent, community reaction, reward, promotion strategies and so on.
So I set up the goal to write a 30 days challenge, on one of the topics that I feel comfortable with: business. Until today I wrote 8 articles in that series.
What follow is my opinion after 8 days spent on writing, curating and lurking on Steemit.
Writing Output And Rewards
Here are the articles I wrote so far on Steemit:
I wrote a total of 10 posts out of which 6 made under $1 (combined!) and the rest of 4 made each above $20, with the introductory post making almost $340 (but the entire merit goes to @wadepeterson for reaching out and promoting the post in his network). The posts that made more than $20 were all promoted by @curie.
I think these numbers are neither good or bad. So far, these are just numbers.
Access To Profit
An important metric in business is liquidity. Meaning how fast you have access to money. You may have a lot of value, but if that value is locked in dry assets (real estate properties, shares in other companies, you name it) it will take some time to use it.
From this point of view, Steemit tries to play the long game. Basically, Steem Power is a value holding instrument from which you can access less than 1% each week, hence, you’re “forced” to play the long game. The total amount of time over which you will dry the Steem Power reserve is 2 years, which means, in theory, you should stay in the platform at least 2 years.
The upside is that SP gives you influence in the community and it helps you grow faster. I think SP is the most important part of Steemit economy.
The other two options for accessing funds are Steem and SBD. I tested a transaction circuit: Steemit.com -> Poloniex.com -> Exchangemycoins.com -> PayPal and it worked like a charm. The amount was under $10, just to understand how fast money is moving, so I didn’t take into account the commissions, but my first impression is that, using this route, they were huge. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, but since I don’t intend to take out the liquidity soon, I have time to do a more thorough research. (If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments).
Political Advance
I soon realized that politics, in the sense of distributing power through the means of Steem Power, is an important part of Steemit. The "senate" of witnesses looks like a promising idea.
At this point I’m not at all interested in becoming a witness, but I do want to join more people in the community, in order to have a better idea about the plans, the speed of growing and a few other metrics like: user engagement, user acquisition, user retention and churn rate.
I already offered my services for the newly launched SteemGuild project, as a curator for the “business” tag and I’m awaiting instructions.
Partial Conclusions
- the platform is incredibly young and I take this as a very good thing, there’s a lot of room to grow. It’s like Facebook in 2005, when it was still thefacebook.com.
- the “automation surface” in the implementation is very large at this moment, meaning that you can engineer relatively easy a process to increase your earnings by curating (using bots, for instance) and that will adversely impact the value of content, both in terms of promotion (good content can be obfuscated by garbage content) and associated value (good content can be easily downvoted). I take this as a moderately big issue, but I see that some people in the community are actively working towards alleviating the effects.
- the initial bubble is calming down and the price of Steem is slowly coming down where it’s supposed to be. This will filter out the speculators and - hopefully - will attract people willing to build something sustainable long-term.
- I still didn’t have the time to explore the promotion side of it (I suspect a lot of the promotion is done in the chat) but I intend to spend more time on that in the following weeks.
- I played only briefly with the command line tools and I see they are still in development (Piston seems very nice, though) and I intend to explore that area as well, to see what is the potential for the Steem blockchain to host other types of decentralized apps.
Personally, in terms of time / reward I consider myself very satisfied with this first week. I learned a lot and what I see so far is very promising.
But then again, keep in mind that I’m not a speculator by nature. I spent 8 years building a blog that is constantly ranked among the top 100 self-help blogs in the world, just by sticking to it and going step by step, so I’m used to playing the long game.
Let’s hope Steemit plays the same game too. :)
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