Why do we see so many comic based box office hits? Out of several reasons I'll give you two.
1) Many people grew up with these comics
2) They are kid friendly and the kids drag parents in
The same can be said about Disney Animations. One thing about internet is that it's not safe for kids. There are kids like LtCorbis who are much smarter and matured than a college professor. But that's the minority.
A totally kid friendly social media experience is a market that hasn't been served yet. Making a totally kid friendly platform would require the F-Bombs removed and nudes out. We'll also need to promote good behavior. The more you think about it, more messy and mind boggling it becomes. Now I'm on steemit, a censorship free social media platform talking about a kid friendly social media experience that doesn't become boring or preachy garbage.
You may even think of the whole idea as something impossible or overly complicated. So let me present my case. Even before that, a little background.
A few weeks ago there was a certain heated discussion about flagging. My stance was that anything that isn't objectively without value or with negative value (Plagiarized content, spam, identity theft, scams, spreading false information, calling for genocide, infringing another persons privacy etc) should be the only candidate for flagging. And here I am calling to ban the F-Bombs and this:
So let me finished the story. Even at the very beginning I saw a clear lack of constitution in steemit as a major flaw in the system. When I evaluate any project what I look for is Vision, Team and Tech. A good Vision is like a good car. It won't make you win the race without being a great driver. But there is no driver on Earth who'd win an international championship with a Toyota Prius. Period. Steemit gets many of the basics really well. But so does Bitcoin and look what's happening in the community (https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7cyz5m/confessions_of_a_core_supporter/)
A constitution is a set of opt-in codes much like a contract which would operate much like the rules of an internet forum or a subreddit. It gives a clear image of how things are done, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable etc. My favorite currency coin is Dash and it has a clear vision of being Digital Cash. Everything it does is focused on that goal. Dash is the first Decentralized Autonomous Organisation.
https://www.dashforcenews.com/dash-first-dao/
https://www.dashforcenews.com/what-is-a-dao-and-why-is-it-revolutionary/
I didn't see that kind of committed direction form steemit. I saw @dan proposing a sort of constitution for EOS which made me love the project even more. While I was expressing my ideas on steemit I was introduced to Smart Media Tokens and I was told that SMTs should take care of most my concerns. From then on I've started to think of stemit as more like an infrastructure project than a full blown Social Media Platform. SMTs will finally make STEEM into something like ETH. The value of Ethereum is based on the kinds of projects that run on Ethereum and there are all sorts of projects and we'll see at least 5 of them hit 1 Billion USD mark before the end of 2018. All these different projects will be serving vastly different markets. They have their own communities and developers. Each ICO is like a company on it's own.
Such is the vision we can achieve with STEEM that has the advantage of being a specialized social media blockchain infrastructure with ability to scale to wipe out BTC unconfirmed Tx list in mere seconds. Steemit is the mere prototype much like BTC combined with the infrastructure features like Ethereum.
This all creates the elements of a perfect storm to pull of Kidsteem (make sure to give me credit if you use the term) So how do we even achieve this using technology that was made to keep things uncensored. Let the Decentralized Governance step in. I didn't bring up Dash simply for the tangentially relevant awesomeness of it. Dash is DAO. Dash is Decentralized Governance. Dash knows to use both centralization and decentralization to the full effect.
We all know how bad and evil and terrible bankers are. Look at the fees. Look at the speed, Look at the lack of privacy. Banks are spying for governments and they have so much barriers to entry etc etc. The entire blockchain community is pretty much an echo chamber of how terrible the bankers are.
Now take a look at Bitcoin. The bloody thing can't get anything done. Originally there were talks about expanding upto 20MB blocks. Then it ended in so much fighting and bickering over a $20 expense per year (to store the larger blocks) that would be caused by adopting 2MB blocks. Bitcoin has become a lost cause and the only major upgrade it had in over 2 year (possibly 3) is the SegWit "Upgrade".
I'll let Eric Sammons from DashForceNews do some talking.
Both decentralization and centralization can be good…or bad. For example, a family with young children is necessarily “centralized,” with the parents making decisions for the best of the family, without consulting the 4-year-old. Only an ideologue who’s never had kids will tell you that that form of centralization is bad. Likewise, volunteer associations might choose to have a centralized form of governance for efficiency’s sake. Consider the local youth baseball league. It would be a disaster if every parent were to have a say in every decision of the league. Instead, usually a few parents are elected to sit on the league’s board and make most of the decisions on behalf of all involved.Centralization can also be beneficial in business organizations. A successful business does not engage the entire employee base when making decisions. Most employees are not qualified to know what is best for the future of the company. So a CEO or President makes most of the major decisions, and bears the consequences of good or bad decisions.
See where I'm going at with Kidsteem and why STEEM and DPoS is very important to get the job done.
In the crypto world, there is no greater epithet than calling something centralized. Yet decentralization and centralization are more complex concepts than many cryptocurrency advocates seem to think. While there are certain things that should definitely not be centralized (such as the overall control and direction of a project), there are times when being centralized is fine.
We can have a kid friendly Kidsteem within the STEEM eco-system with Smart Media Tokens and let it operate as a pseudo-centralized platform for the young minds to do productive things without getting into trolling, bullying, cursing, hate speech (as in purely hateful speech with no valuable content/arguments). Kidsteem will be like a subreddit with it's own witness-esque group to uphold the constitution of Kidsteem. It'll be much like the 2 tier network of Dash which was later implemented on many other coins such as PIVX.
Many of you may have doubts about all this being manageable. For you I'd say: Take a look at Dogecoin community. It was started out as a friendly community and it was one of the major selling points of the project. If you go and explore the project and compare it to BTC or Monero it'll be a Heaven and Earth difference. (Also @haejin says that Dogecoin could skyrocket soon. Dogecoin deserve that)
Even steemit despite all it's differences is filled with capitalist, free market, anarchist groups that respect individuality and privacy. There is barely anybody asking for free lunch on steemit and communism and big government is frowned upon.
Dash is cheering for 400MB blocks and they see themselves as a professional company. I highly recommend you take a look at how Dash community responded to a little screw up in it's rip-off like competitor PIVX: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@vimukthi/lessons-from-dash-community-vs-pivx-how-to-act-like-the-adult-in-the-room-and-stop-the-pointless-hostility-to-embrace-the
Birds of a feather flock together. If you establish the right kind of initial users (and this will be relatively super easy with an opt-in constitution) you can have a sub-community (I'm in a good mood today so subSTEEM) that is vibrant and kid friendly and serve an audience that has been completely left out by modern vanity driven social media.
Kidsteem will be a 2 tier SMT platform where harmful content will be removed based on a constitution by an elected set of "Caretakers" who function like masternodes approving budget proposals. We could even make it 3 tiers using
1) Elected Block Producers (subWitness)
2) "Caretakers" who make sure everything runs according to the constitution who'd also have to make a STEEM deposit for their position (like Masternodes)
3) Kidsteemers who use the SMT platform filled with fun, creativity, critical thinking, information sharing and devoid of NSFW, trolling, bullying, cursing, excessive violance and brainwashing.
I think I've made a very good case here for Kidsteem (A name I came up while writing this). I'm not a developer and I don't even have much resources to build something like this. I'm practically a minnow with tiny bit of SP. But I really see the importance and value of a social media platform where we can put a bunch of kids and say "Go play and Learn stuff."
I really hope someone will make my vision come through with SMTs. Until then Happy Steeming and put your comments below and spread the discussion around steemit!