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So I just became aware of this concept of token-powered decentralized social networks tonight and am doing some research.  I see two main contenders: Synereo and Steem.  When all factors are considered: fairness to content creators, ease of use for lurkers, fairness of mining... which one do you think will win the impending war of decentralized social media?

Synereo

Go watch the videos on their YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU5CBbxAeFYnodf32w3ahOQ/videos) and tell me I'm wrong.

Why would you think either one has a chance of being remotely successful? Facebook has literally 33% or so of the world's inhabitants registered and using their service, making a good profit doing so, and the vast majority of people have no qualms about handing over their info to be a part of the network. Reddit is apparently barely profitable, but the mods and content creators of major subreddits can certainly monetize their moderating power or rep for producing content. Why would anyone invest or commit their time to some convoluted "social network" that relies on some third-party token that was completely premined or instamined and is lacking the content and connections of widely used services such as facebook or reddit? Call me jaded, but I'd say neither.

The Facebook comparison is not really valid. Other than sharing the word social there is little resemblance. Steem is somewhat like reddit, also somewhat like a blogging platform, maybe a bit like youtube (the channel organization and commenting features; Steem is not a video hosting service, although videos get linked there regularly). The functionality is nothing at all like Facebook. Whether or why anyone would use it I can't say. The token won't really matter and isn't even particularly visible to end users though, since the content rewards will be paid in a smart coin (USD pegged).

EDIT: The above is about Steem. I don't know enough about Synereo to comment on whether it might be more related to Facebook or whether its token has value.

Larimer says: Dumb holders fucked up Bitshares. But hey, lets make Steem  ;D

http://s32.postimg.org/r3csy2red/dumbp.png (http://postimage.org/)

https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@dan/is-the-dao-going-to-be-doa

Actually, Larimer independently re-discovered something that Wall Street (and top management!) have known about for decades. Most folks are passive with their investments.

If you want to limit the discussion to reddit, the point I was making is that there is already an entrenched and very widely used service that mods and popular accounts can monetize their activity on (not too mention the people pushing their arts, web video series, indie video games, etc., half advertisement and half how it was made or something). What does steem offer over voat (where users can get paid directly in bitcoin for their contributions) rather than some more convoluted steem dollar payout, besides some vague promise of decentralization that apparently 0.000001% of the world cares about? And voat is basically a ghost town. People generally use what is popular, and I don't see a great reason why people would prefer steem over something like voat, which has already been tried (and still exists as a simpler alternative to steem if you just want to get paid - bitcoins are simpler than steem dollars/vests/its/whatevers).

Reddit is very popular, and the network effect is powerful. If people just wanted to get paid, why not voat? Unless you think the magical decentralization fairy is what people are really craving, why would people use steem? (And I would argue that steem is really not very decentralized since the founders instamined 80% or whatever and can dominate the voting in their security model anyway.)

Who will win? Your landlord smooth, since we can see you have to pay him all your Steem since monthes
https://steemit.com/@americanpegasus/transfers

But regarding the "ease of use for lurkers" I have to confirm: Yes, ineed. And very entertaining, too.

More than likely neither of them.

Firstly, social media platforms emerge based on what people pick up almost randomly regardless of features and secondly we already have an abundance of social media platforms and the most populars are here to stay for years at least.
I think at this point in time investing in new social media platforms is basically putting all your money on a single number on the roulette table...

I haven't even had control of that account.  I assume if it's been mining those profits don't belong to me.  I'm just happy he'll turn the name over to me.

Exactly. When Steem first started none of us really know what we were doing. One of the few things we figured out is that you needed to mine with multiple accounts, and possibly using all different accounts on different computers. So I figured I would mine a bunch of well known forum names, etc. to protect them from squatters and then turn them over to the original owners. The coins I mined with them I transferred to my main account.

@ap, I contacted you about access to the account, let me know if not received.

@jwinterm, I agree with you to a large extent. It is a crowded space and all new platforms, ventures, etc. are risky and usually fail. My main quibble would be that there does seem to be a fair amount of churn, and even for reasons that are well addressed by a blockchain platform. Specifically, you mentioned voat, which I don't know a lot about but according to wikipedia, acquired a lot of users who left reddit in response to censorship and policy changes. Voat itself has faced outside pressure in the form of its Paypal being closed and being kicked off hosting. It is possible that users may churn between various platforms as they are pressured to adopt policies the users don't like, and then the users end up on a blockchain which is more resistant to such pressure. Or this may not happen, and it even if it does, it might be neither Steem nor Synereo that ends up benefiting. I'd also quibble that while mining, vests, etc. is interesting to those of us in the crypto space, it will be ignored and largely invisible to end users who will just see growing power (like karma) and rewards denominated in dollars.

@DecentralizeEconomics, I watched the Synereo youtube videos and I saw a very theoretical approach and major issues with lack of a core concern about time to market. I don't know what all the work on Ethereum/Casper has to do with Synereo at all or helping users in the social media space, other than Greg's interest in both. To me the project looks in danger of being unfocused on delivery and derailed into a vehicle to support Greg's math habit.

All visible at https://steemit.com/@smooth/transfers save bet one could exchange parts of that URL with "aaa" "bbb" "ccc" or all the other recognized names, draw a map of trust between them. Somebody trusts someone with Steem ranging into 968 USD in value, but regarding Bittrex only doing a test transfer about 1 Steem first  :D

So roundabout "Synereo vs Steem" the Monerians kinda voted for Steem, or am I mistaken?

Greg is working with Vitalik and Vlad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYhioXzWY0) to develop the Ethereum 2.0 Casper blockchain, because it will also be utilized as a separate chain for Synereo.

So we will see Synereo only after Ethereum 2.0 Casper blockchain will be released  ???

I like Synereo better, but their UI designs need work.

All of those accounts are mine (except those that have been transferred to the associated person). No Monerians other than me voted or did anything else with steem afaik. I wouldn't even say I "voted" either, I mined it. For all you know I could have bought Synereo tokens too, either at ICO or after (but I haven't). As far as which platform will be successful if any, I really don't know, as I said earlier.

That's basically my point. The project has been derailed so Greg can work on distributed algorithm math problems he finds more interesting. To me it looks like a misuse of ICO investor money, but I guess it is possible ICO investors were told about that. I don't really know. Ether way it looks like serious lack of focus and raises severe time to market issues.

Synereo is planning on launching way before the completion of Ethereum 2.0 Casper blockchain.  They were discussing using the Omni protocol layer or the current Ethereum PoW blockchain, and the majority consensus was to utilize the current Ethereum blockchain.


Here is Dor, the CEO of Synereo LTD, discussing the launch time-frame.  For those who are interested, Synereo LTD, the company, doesn't own or control the Synereo tech stack or the decentralized social media application built on top of it.  Synereo LTD is developing the tech stack and social media application gratis and releasing it as open source.

you're wrong. Greg is working on Casper because that's the blockchain that Synereo will ultimately use to be scalable and sustainable in the long run.
using the current ethereum blockchain will only be temporary for proof of concept.
the synereo team was given a grant to develop Casper which will benefit both Synereo and ethereum.
I've not looked at the Steem blockchain but if it's POW I know already it has no future.
Steem is going the reddit way while Synereo is more facebook/twitter like. so maybe there's space for both.
I must say I appreciate more the synereo team saying outright "we keeping most of the coins for development" rather than steem team claiming "no premine" only to discover 80% were basically cunningly premined by the dev.
apart from that good luck to both projects

Okay if given a grant for it makes a lot more sense. Still might be a distraction from the core product, but maybe not. It is the perception I had watching some of the videos. Maybe an incorrect one, but if so that is partially a fault of the videos.


Fair point.


Premine has a specific meaning. I can tell you with 100% certainty it wasn't premined since I was right there mining along side them and I have no connection with them. Ninja/unfair/stealthy/etc. mining are more applicable. I agree that the "no premine" claim is shady and misleading even if literally true and shouldn't be there.

The major difference is that Synereo is decentralized and Steem is centalized!

What does that word mean to you?

Control over my data. No censorship.

No one can censor your data on Steem (the blockchain). The Steemit web site is another matter, but there is already at least one other interface to the blockchain under development (not counting the cli that already exists).

Could you remove your data from Steem? If its on the blockchain no way. Synereo on the other hand needs the blockchain for its Currency the AMP. Data is kept on a database on your PC/server. You own your data!

No, data can't be removed from the blockchain. It's a fantasy to think you can reliably remove data once you have shared it on the internet though. Someone else could always copy it.

That said, it is entirely possible to post links to content on Steem, rather than posting the content itself. Linking to embedded media on IPFS is already supported I think, or will be soon.

To store such amount of data on blockchain is madness. Articles on blockchain? If you thought BTC and ETH blockchaines are big. Wait till you see Steems. For sure you will not have to wait long...

You may be right. That is one of my major concerns about the system, but the developers seem to think they have it under control with the ability to run nodes that don't store all the data, etc. I guess we will see.

BRB going to share embarassing nudes of myself on Steem.  
  
Also, what happens when someone shares illegal things on one of these blockchains?

https://steemit.com will filter it but it's still be accessible at blockchain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyaLZHiJJnE

More seriously, nobody knows. It's a lot like BTC back in 2010-2011 when there was a lot of discussion about how it might be banned altogether, etc.

Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)

Framing it this way, I'll say that Steem is not "crazy enough", meaning they do not change enough of the status quo to make a meaningful difference. (this does not mean they cannot have marginal success vs. Reddit)

Synereo as a technology is indeed "crazy enough".  The social App that sits on top of it incorporates fundamental changes in the current business models, content control & distribution, identity, reputation, and self-determination.

Someone above astutely asked about "decentralized": what does that mean to you?

When considering the answer to this question, you must know what the logical overlays are in the network topology.  All networks today have more than one layer, and this means (just like politics) that the true existence of of a definition can only be couched in terms like relativity.  There are no absolute terms here.  However, if all your layers are decentralized, then you can at least legitimately use this term.  For example, if there are 5 layers, and 3 are decentralized, is using that term to describe it ok?  Keep in mind that these words (de/central) are a duality, and the middle ground should be excluded; mix together black and white and you get neither.  This is not a perfect analogy here, but it makes the point: most people are using the term as a buzzword, without actually analyzing the validity or degree of accuracy.

All that said, the 2 platforms are so different as to make any comparisons very superficial, IMO.

How is this even a question?  One is vaporware (Synereo) and the other actually exists as advertised and is working (Steem).

Say what you will about Dan (and company,) but he is a smart guy and can spit out code like no other. Many other "promising" projects seem to be perpetual vaporware or exist but are mostly useless. Steem exists and functions as advertised in the whitepaper. Dan has written many smart contracts that actually work from Bitshares to Steem, with no "hacks" like Ethereum. He has a proven development track record.

Steem is now developing a decentralized market and private messaging to go along with its social media platform. I think this is one coin that could attract the masses.

I will revisit the question if/when Synereo releases something, but until then the answer is clear. Anyone that says otherwise is blinded by special interest (for the record I only own about $3 in SP/SD I earned from participating on Steemit.) As soon as I have some extra cash I will be purchasing some SP.

I think the question is impossible to answer because nothing that is out there now, even in terms of comprehensible plans that are vaporware, has a feature set or model that could become very popular. Well at least as far as I can see thus far (but I am not omniscient).

I did some initial analysis of Steem (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1505886.msg15217521#msg15217521) (read the entire thread).

Synereo reality check (read the linked threads):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1424386.msg14420001#msg14420001
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1344997.msg13713923#msg13713923
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1361721.msg13868758#msg13868758

Your (and Erlich Bachman's) conclusion that Steem is a bad investment is based on a generalization that shareholders will be debased.

While it is true that if you simply invest in Steem and do not participate in the ecosystem that you will be debased, your conclusion does not consider that Steem investors can participate in the ecosystem and negate that debasement.

Investors can earn rewards for content creation, content curation, and by providing liquidity in the Steem Dollar market.

Furthermore, since Steem dollars earn interest, if you didn't want to do any work, then you could simply buy up some Steem dollars and earn more interest than any legacy banking savings account or CD.

Even if someone were to invest in simply SP and not participate in the ecosystem, it is possible that the social network grows exponentially and it ends up being a good investment anyways. In fact, IMO, recent trends indicate that is more likely than simply possible: https://steemle.com/charts.php

In conclusion, your blanket assessment that Steem is a poor investment is faulty, because it depends on how you plan to invest (Steem, SD,or SP) and how much work you are willing to put in to earn rewards from participating in the ecosystem.

Business model: convert investors into social networking workers.

Doesn't seem viable to me.

Legacy social networks convert users into "social networking workers" without offering any compensation at all.

It is not much of a stretch to think that people can be incentivized to do so.

It is hard to say. But steem has a product out and synereo it is still in development. But steem has first mover advantage. Let's see if synereo can come after it.

The links in my first post in this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1480810.msg15538471#msg15538471), delve into the economics of paying people to do social networking. I am very skeptical about whether it is an economically viable model for social networking.

It is a zero sum game. You have to extract money from some users and hand it to others. Are readers of fluffypony's post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1548058.msg15568321#msg15568321) really getting $832 of value from reading that  ???

Once you return the actual equitable value, I think you will find that paying users to do social networking doesn't pay them enough to make it worth their time. In fact, people produce content for free for other reasons such as the marketing traffic and brand promotion.

There is very low informational value in clicks on Likes. Unlocking the real economic value in social networking, comes from the higher order information and interaction from the user's activities. You need to be facilitating some benefits for the users that are valuable to them. The content on Steemit is not different enough from Reddit nor worth $832 per post to myself and the others reading. Besides I can read it for free, leeching off everyone that is paying for the content. Thus we who read for free are parasitic on all those who hold Steemit tokens and are paying for the content via debasement. And if you don't let us read for free, then the project will die due to lack of promotion.

Western users of Facebook aren't going to use because they are paid $1 per day to use it, nor are talented artists/creators going to work for $10 per day. As for developing countries, the payouts to them will necessarily be lower because they represent collectively less wealth. People use social networks because they gain some feedback, experiences, and features they want, not because they are paid an insultingly low level of $. The very high payouts on Steemit right now are an illusion. First you can't cash out, except over a long period of time, creating a pyramid scheme. Second, the payout levels will decrease as more content is produced. Instead of allowing people to click "Like" and pretend they aren't paying for it (where those with higher standing get to spend more of other people's money), just deduct the money from the users' balance! But then of course you couldn't hide the pyramid scheme from the users.

Probably not. There is an early adopter dynamic where the reward pools is set as a percentage of capitalization, capitalization is being driven by expectations (right or wrong) of a future user base, but rewards are divided among the current user base. One the actual use base is more in line with the expected user base, rewards per post should be much smaller.

The could be self-fulfilling though, as users continue to be attracted by the large rewards and it becomes a form of promotion. Rewards will probably continue to increase dramatically over the next few days, since they are calculated based on a trailing average price.

Also, the customers here aren't really the readers. It is those who want influence. Being a passive reader you may benefit from a positive externality if you happen to like what is being produced and given exposure on the site, but you will have no say over what you get to read.

A pyramid is still a zero sum game, it is just the losses will fall on the greater fools who come in last. (because the very high payouts create an overvaluation, because when payouts fall then so will usership because Steemit only offered a privileged class of content curation and not actual degrees-of-freedom or anything innovative in terms of the network effects and economics of scaling usership)

Perhaps you didn't read what I added to my prior post:


Those who want influence over a permissioned system that can't scale are utter fools, unless they are just gaming it to extract the maximum income out of it before it implodes.

Steemit can't control what I read. The entropy of the Internet is unbounded. They can't put a wall around the Internet with their closed model social networking. Unlocking great value on the Internet is about enabling each user to control his/her filter for content, i.e. decentralization, and not enabling some privileged class to decide my content filter for me.

All the economic incentives of Steemit are misaligned. I suggest reading this:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/contracts-oracles-sidechains/#in-our-society

Incorrect. The usership of Reddit is not predicated on being paid. It is predicted on that anyone can start a new subforum and discuss. It is all about usership and not about any financial pyramid.

You are conflating the top-down ownership of the site, with the bottom-up usership model. Tsk. Tsk. You are a marketing neophyte when you make egregious errors like that.

The stock price of Facebook might (?) be a bubble, but that is orthogonal to the usership model. It is true that Facebook is top-down trying to siphon their users in certain directions and trying to maximize their income from the users, but Facebook is limited by what is popular. If Facebook doesn't align with what users want, they lose more users to other social networks. To maximize income, Facebook has to employ gamification.

What actual innovation does Steemit offer that increases what users can do and benefit? Nothing. It is a reasonably slick imitation of Reddit, but we already have Reddit.

Dumb speculators are good at driving a bubble like Ethereum. I have to presume that most of them lose money each time, because it is a zero sum game. The last fools in, are the losers every time. So they may be able to drive a bubble and it will appear that Steemit has unlocked some model for scaling up a social network, but unless they add some unique features that drive usership other than the financial pyramid, then it will implode on itself. We went through this with Ethereum and everybody said we were wrong and it was different this time.  ::)


DPOS is not secure and I am preparing to start a detailed thread about proof-of-stake. Just like when we said Ethereum was not secure, everyone told us to try to break it. We must wait until something is worth enough to break, then it is broken.

The extreme waste of resources in Satoshi's design disappears when all mining is financed only by transaction fees. It is all about scaling up transaction rate.

I will also explain why it is impossible to have 0 transaction fees and not break the Nash equilibrium that makes a block chain trustless (i.e. trustworthy because we don't need to trust anyone).

P.S. JAMBOX was a red herring that AnonyMint threw out there to get Steemit and Synereo to waste their time down wrong directions. Do you really think I will put my best ideas out in public before they are launched. I will continue to throw curve balls to get other projects to chase the wrong objectives, because the altcoin arena is cut throat competitive. There is no such thing as respect for intellectual property and thus altcoins are a chaotic bazaar of money-grabs and very little actual investment in technological advancement by the top engineers in the software industry. It is very, very difficult to achieve a significant innovation and also get paid for it. It is much easier to create some pyramid scheme.

And your retort to my points is what?

In theory (given the maturity on the exchanges), the major stakeholders of DPOS can also collude to muck with Steemit and short the tokens and cash out while destroying it.

One would think the shareholders of Facebook would have something to say about Facebook's directors tanking the company and shorting the stock (insider trading).

You are conflating orthogonal issues.

The scaling of the usership in Reddit is not a financial pyramid. Thus Reddit's usership isn't likely to implode when the pyramid does.

Reddit and Steemit (DPOS) will be controlled by major stake holders, but that is orthogonal to the usership adoption model.

You are bit slow minded. I already told you this.

synereo, the name is a fail, nobody know what it means and its hard for many to pronounce. steem is a better name but still bad, reminds me of steam gaming platform. none of the two will succeed. after the huge getgems scam i wont invest in any israeli crypto project trying to get into us, eu, asian markets.

Can someone tell me how money flows into the system for paying content providers in the long run?
Is it just speculators?
Please dont link to the white paper, I want the TL;DR.

And never be as good at it as Facebook, if they intend to remain "decentralized" (well the whales control DPOS any way). You still haven't explained why users will want to use it. I already explained the financial pyramid is not sustainable.

In my links, I had the calculations which show that ad revenue won't be enough to pay users to incentivize them.


Why do we need crypto for that? We already have an overdose of social networking sites for vanity.

It didn't see it, but it is inaccurate. Half the reward value can be cashed out immediately, and many authors have done so.

I'm not disagreeing about the longer term economic sustainability, btw. I don't really see it myself, but I'm willing to allow that things don't always play out the way they appear at first.

I know that because I read the white paper (a month or so ago). I didn't state anything inaccurate. I stated you can't cash out except over a long period of time. Cash out doesn't mean get only 50% of your money.

Also without sufficient liquidity, it may not be possible to cash out that 50% for those who have very high payouts, but I haven't been following whether the liquidity increased significantly since launch or not. In any case, it depends on greater fools coming in in order to provide liquidity for the early adopters to cash out and fuck over the new fools as is always the case with these pump and dumps.


Oh yeah it is I guess possible they would go create a really great social network with features that beat all the experts in Silicon valley who have created every variant of social network under the sun already.  ::)

But the problem is that even if they did that, it wouldn't have bearing whatsoever on the utility of the financial pyramid they created, unless they would argue that was necessary form of promotion to drive initial adoption of their world-class social networking insights. Who on their team has any experience whatsoever in creating a million user s/w product or doing anything relevant in the silicon valley?

Look they have some decent coders who copied Reddit (if healthy I can code that rudimentary Reddit clone in 3-4 months myself also, not including the block chain integration). But copying existing social networks isn't bringing home the bacon. It is the innovations that are rare. The superstars create them. We have enough experience already with the Larimers to know they are aerospace engineers and not s/w superstars. Good coders are reasonably rare (50,000 of them in the world?) and I credit them on apparently being good coders and getting s/w work done (when all that others such as myself have done is foruming). Good coders who are superstars and create million user s/w products are much rarer (which I've done twice already in my life, but not in the past 1.5 decades).

I been thinking that we have so little follow through in terms of adoption of altcoins and actual user interfaces that we can point to as been used and showing up on Google searches, the I can definitely understand the excitement about Steemit. It is a breath of fresh air, except when realizing that DPoS is not a trustless (scalable trustworthy) consensus algorithm (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1549494.0) (and otherwise they can't scale transaction rate with Satoshi's PoW) and the financial pyramid nature of their integration of a token with social reputation (so far via Likes) payouts.

The fundamentals are NOT there for them to grow this into something greater. They'd have to scrap DPoS, which they aren't prepared to do. If it reaches a large enough valuation, then the incentives to game DPoS should kick in, which looks like it would end up being a power vacuum battle over influence of the ecosystem and profit opportunities with that ecosystem.

50% of the rewards are promised as cash. 50% are promised as illiquid stake. The promised cash portion can be cashed out immediately. Nothing is an illusion.


There has been no issue with liquidity. The amount of rewards is actually quite tiny relative to the market cap (and scales along with it, so this will always be true). Rewards may not always be big though, if the market cap falls.

Didn't read the rest of your post yet. Too busy right now.

Can't cash out and financial pyramid are not an accusation that the promises are broken. Fact is you can't cash out. Everyone is incentivized to support the pyramid longer and make it worse. It even worked on you, to get you to stop criticizing (or go soft on) DPoS because you are vested in this shitcoin. Futures contracts are slavery (http://silverstockreport.com/2009/greenspan-misapplied.html) and the antithesis of degrees-of-freedom and thus truth. Even Proverbs speaks about that (http://biblehub.com/proverbs/22-26.htm).

The illusion is on the n00bs who don't fully grasp the ramifications of everything. Same as it was for Ethereum.

As a user you can ignore the illiquid portion entirely (treat it as having zero value), and still get paid for your posts. For bloggers that might well be a valid perspective since the vested portion doesn't really affect their blogging earnings (they gain a tiny amount of extra visibility by having more power to upvote their own posts, but it is negligible; talent matters more).

The pyramid argument here is no different from Bitcoin or any other token that depends on people wanting to buy it for other people to be able to sell. That doesn't make it a pyramid, just a scarce token that may or may not have significant value. Mostly it has value if people expect it to be useful in the future. If the Steem token develops a very large network of users comfortable using it, that will likely be useful.


I'm not a fan of DPoS. I agree with most if not all of your criticisms of it.

But why would you throw away your opportunity cost. It has clearly manifested in your support of a pyramid that you otherwise normally label as "xerox copy of Reddit" with a "shitty PoS consensus algorithm" and a "financial pyramid". You've been all over the threads for this project even in the ANN section.

Btw, I made a conscious decision to not blog on Steemit, because I didn't want to become incentivized to promote it because of having 50% of my payouts locked up for (is it 2 years?). I could see Dan was trying to buy off my objectivity. I reject that!

Then after the marvellous bottom barrel accomplishment (and Bitshares' past track record such as creating BitUSD which has no market use case (http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/bitusd/) and an Open Exchange that apparently has no market use case (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1513568.msg15390607#msg15390607)), you allow the possibility they might somehow morph it into greatness.


Unless the income can remain high, then bloggers will eventually lose the monetary incentive to blog there.

In order for the income to remain high, either the rate of appreciation of the token's market cap (and liquidity) has to outstrip the rate of increase of bloggers, or someone has to inject income into the funding. Since I don't think they can inject significant income (even by selling ads), then I see the thing imploding when the appreciation of the token reverses (on the dump). As more and more bloggers cash out, the down pressure on the price will increase.

One might argue that the curators (those who can award the highest money payouts with their higher rep power) will drive a blog site where quality is rewarded and this will cause it to stand out above Reddit and others. I argue that it will collapse into a power vacuum destruction of the Nash equilibrium gamed to hell by competing interests.

Btw I haven't seen any extremely interesting content on Steemit. It is everyone jumping on to get some payouts. I don't see a need for me to revisit the site. I load armstrongeconomics.com and bitcointalk.org often. I haven't loaded Steemit in weeks. See social networks have a demographics based on their common interest. The common interest on Steemit is payouts and I bet eventually gaming the system. The underlying design is driving the wrong and unsustainable demographics. Larimers suck at marketing, except if we are referring to marketing to speculators (which I presume is their objective any way).

One might argue they are bringing females and others into CC who weren't interested before. I think this might be the strongest marketing argument they can make. Can they capitalize on that with some unique demographic niche which scales up? I studied several of the female bloggers and they were dysfunctional, oddballs, and/or not mainstream types (well I guess they'd need to be that way to be jumping into some CC blog site dominated by men). Didn't do a large enough sample to get a feel for what sort of community they are building. My guess is it is males in CC who are inviting females they know, which again seems like prostitution (buying off the females instead of giving them something they want to join because of its community value which is the normal mode of females). I'd really need to study it more in depth and frankly I decided that is a poor use of my time.

I mean really $1000 payouts for blog posts. Of course that will incentivize people to blog on Steemit. But that isn't sustainable as the typical payout. It is quite an expensive way to bring people into crypto, unless somehow most only get a few $ yet are still incentivized by the $1000 cases.


Well we just handed more money to the people who keep promulgating stuff that is mostly a waste of our time. But anyway, I am not here to berate other coins.

So I will leave it at that, unless you want to debate further. Once again I will stand back with my popcorn and enjoy the fireworks when they eventually come...

If it is a pyramid scheme as you claim, and I do not think that it is, then these "n00bs" are going to make out like bandits.

Market Capitalizations:
Steem: $202 million

versus:

Facebook: $337 billion
YouTube: $80 billion
Twitter: $12.6 billion
LinkedIn: $25.4 billion
Instagram: $37.0 billion
Reddit: $4.0 billion

I don't believe it is a pyramid scheme, because new revenue streams pop up as the user base grows. Once you reach the levels of usership of the social networking behemoths, which is feasible considering the user incentives, the internet traffic alone can sustain the incentives indefinitely via paid advertising.


http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-revenue-soars-on-ad-growth-1461787856


This is another good point. It is no more a pyramid scheme than any other cryptocurrency in existence.

Your jealousy of Daniel Larimer has never ceased to amaze me. He has pioneered smart contract blockchain technology, and delivered on two cutting edge projects which are in the top 15 of cryptocurrency market capitalization. You have done nothing but troll the Bitcointalk forums (I feel your pain... I am in the same boat  :D). You perpetually claim to have solutions to all the "flawed" cryptocurrencies, which according to you all of them are flawed, but are never able to provide any evidence of the said solutions. You are the definition of FUD.

If Bitshares' bitUSD and the Decentralzied Exchange does not have a use case, then why are people using it?  ::)

https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bitshares-asset-exchange/

You can link to some FUD article if you wish to try and prove your point, but I prefer to link to cold hard facts recorded in immutable blockchains.

That is revenue, not profit. I provided links to you upthread where I had done the calculations. I think Facebook is generating something like $10 per user per year in profit (given they have nearly a billion users). Sorry the ad revenue is not sufficient. Why do you all continue to force me to repeat this over and over again.

Google has much higher profit per user, I think 10X higher. But Google has a near monopoly on Internet ads and search engine driven ads.



Smooth was being disingenuous.

I am sure he is smart enough to realize that the pyramid of investing is not what I am referring to. The financial pyramid here is the need to keep the growth of the market cap faster than the growth of new bloggers, else the payouts per blogger will decline.

I answer questions and respond to errors (including yours). I'm not promoting it, and I've made my skepticism well known about both the financial model and the daunting complexity that an investor faces in trying to be an informed investor (though many frankly don't).


That certainly won't happen. As I said earlier, some future increase is already capitalized. The only real question is whether the rewards will remain acceptable, not whether they will remain as high as they are now (though in the short term they may, and probably will, go even higher).


I agree, there is a lot of circle jerking and posting whatever fad style of post happens to get upvotes. There are some bloggers who post pretty much what they would post elsewhere anyway and get paid for it. Dan is even one of these, although he gets way more votes than anyone else would as the Steem developer (basically a subset of celebrity effect). I sometimes downvote his posts to try to offset that a bit.


I agree this seems to be going on. Whether it can sustain and become a useful critical mass remains to be seen.


We can't control what speculators want to throw money at. You are well aware of that.


Everybody knows the payouts will decline. What we don't know is how far they will decline and how much people will care. If people get a few token bucks instead of posting for free as they do on Facebook, Reddit, the "keeping score" aspect of it may still be more of an incentive than cashing out and buying refrigerators. By that time there may be a lot of users onboarded (including as you point out different demographics from traditional crypto) who could form a very large network of token users. None of this is guaranteed of course.

Is this any different than bitcoin? Did bitcoin had to grow its marketcap faster than the mining difficulty? why is it different with STEEM?

Agreed Dan has some accomplishments. I stand by my assessment that his ceiling has remained low because he has poor conceptualization of use cases and user marketing. Being in the top 15 isn't that difficult given the competition has been very weak. Nevertheless they have some productive coders and they have produced some serious projects with working block chains.

I don't know where you get the notion that I am jealous. I am just presenting how I see the facts objectively. That is one of the roles I play on this forum, and it is partially because I need to do it any way for my own ongoing evaluation of technologies, competitors, ideas, etc..


You have a conceptualization of the word 'troll' that many (50%?) people who read me disagree with. You'd also probably find some 50% of the readers who might agree with you because I pointed out some flaw in something they invested in.

You must not have read what I wrote a few minutes earlier:

---

You are welcome to go argue in the linked thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1549494.0) that I have not accurately described why PoS is not trustless. Until you successfuly do (which you can't because you will be incorrect), then your statement above is false.



How much BTC would you like to bet on the word 'never'?

I'd love to take some of your money from you. We can arrange an escrowed bet when you are ready to lose your money. Just let me know. I'll be waiting.


I linked in my above quote the thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1513568.msg15390607#msg15390607) (not even my thread) which discussed why the use has been disappointing.

Please try to stay on fact and stop the character assassination. Or put your BTC where you mouth is, so I can take it from you.

With a mostly autonomous solution, revenue would not be far off from profit. For instance, I posit the paid advertising proposal I designed will not have any expenses at all (other than ad duration): https://steemit.com/sip/@coinhoarder/steem-proposal-offsetting-steem-power-debasement-through-unobtrusive-advertisements

Even if it is as low as you claim, $10 per user per year is more than anyone is getting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Bloggers are not joining for $10 per year. They are joining for $100s per blog post. Either that remains the reality or they leave. Well that is my current assumption. Let's see if the site is sticky.

Why don't you try to see if Ethereum's community will exclusively move from Reddit to Steemit. I think your failure to get them to do so, will be indicative of the problem of copying Reddit.

Or maybe you can build some community that Reddit doesn't have. Any way, it seems like a small ecosystem like development, not a token level scale. A separate token for each social network is silly. Should Bitcointalk.org have its own token.

Edit: btw in April 2015, I improved on dateinasia.com by making a site that allowed more than one photo and larger photos. Problem was I couldn't scale up the usership because microtransactions for dating sites don't exist because my unique feature was going to be to pay the ladies to participate. Any way, Dateinasia.com has since copied my improvements in terms of the photos but kept their advertising funded model. Reddit will do the same if you seriously challenge them with better features.

Mining scales to the market cap. The ASIC manufacturers and ASIC farms can continue to cannibalize the marginal miners.

Yeah I think it is totally different. The usership of Bitcoin is not driven by an expectation (predicated on) that the market cap must grow faster than the adoption. I mean Bitcoin doesn't become totally non-viable if the price collapses from $1200 to $150. Whereas for Steemit if the price collapses then the users (bloggers) might leave. The token is too tightly coupled to the usership model of a single ecosystem use case.

Another potential problem is that once the Indians, Filipinos, and Nigerians figure out how to start gaming (blogging effectively to and other potential game theories) this system, they may be able to drive the marginal revenue per blog post down to something like say perhaps 25 cents. So this might drive away all the Western bloggers and you end up with some crap that nobody wants to participate in.

These Indians will surely figure out how to game the rep power system eventually. They are clever and especially when making a quick buck online. They totally destroyed the revenue from solving CAPTCHAs.

The problem is that downvoting for those Westerners with rep power (such as smooth) will become a pita. The Indians will figure out how to out effort and Sybil attack the Westerners and take control of the rep power.

To convert your most valuable assets into police who have to compete with 1.3 billion people who found it worthy to solve CAPTCHAs, it is a total misalignment of economic incentives.

They certainly won't join at the same rate for smaller rewards but they won't necessarily leave either, if it is a good platform for the posting and commenting they do anyway (fluffypony commented, for example, that he really likes the markdown formatter). You are right that we will have to see how sticky it is turns out to be. The answer is not clear.


I agree this aspect of the incentive structure is broken.

Not having a place to publish very good markdown with choices of markdown is something I have always lamented. But why would I invest my valuable postings to a site that I think might go defunct because it is a pyramid scheme.

I'll stick with Github.

As for discussion sites, I trust bitcointalk.org to keep years of archives around. I lament that bitcointalk.org doesn't have better markdown.

Yeah maybe they could find a niche, but again I argue this is for an ecosystem project, not for a token project. To get network effects, you need to not compete with others who want to use your token. The token needs to be independent of the ecosystem competitors built using the token.

Also my prior post mentions some of my other concerns about it being gamed into oblivion.

This argument is bunk. Mining scales with the market cap just as contribution rewards scales with the market cap. There is no difference.

The usership is not driven by the expectation that the market cap will grow faster than the usership. All it has to do is grow at a similar or slightly slower pace. The payouts are insanely high right now, therefore it is a silly statement to say market cap has to grow at a higher pace than usership, or that there is an expectation that it will do so.

Same with Bitcoin... The usership speculation is driven by the expectation usership and market cap will grow. Not necessarily that one will grow faster than the other.

You didn't pay attention to what I wrote. New ASIC mining farms can grow faster because they can cannabilize marginal miners (which is inexorable because newer ASICs are more efficient than older ones due to Moore's Law), so this investment sector is not dependent on what the price does.

My even stronger point though is that mining doesn't collapse to a disaster if the price drops by 1/10. Whereas for Steemit, it is possible that such a price drop could drive away all the Westerner bloggers and you might be left with Indians and Nigerians and them gaming the system into a cesspool. I know already that a globally computed reputation metric involved with payouts is the incorrect design for a social network. I thought about this carefully when I designed JAMBOX and I realized that any social network which tried to globally record the reputation that is involved with the payouts would be gamed to oblivion. My popcorn is ready for the Sybil attacks...

You are equating things which are not at all the same. So sorry your rebuttal is bunk.

Where is our escrowed BTC bet Mr. Know It All? I am very eager to take your BTC. Come on don't get cold feet.


Yes it is because the users have to also figure out that the high payout rates which initially excite them are not average. I studied the payouts for the Top 2000 users about a month ago. It was very concentrated at the top. Social networks should be about all users getting what they want, not just a few at the top. This design is so broken that I didn't really want to write down all my thoughts because it is just so fucking bad. But there you go again, inciting me with your habitual disrespect.

I wish I had access to all their data, so I could see repeat visits, and other sticky metrics. I bet I could show right now it is failing.

Marketing neophyte get off my lawn. Complete your college degree and get some real world experience making million user software projects as I did. Then you may justifiably disrespect me as you habitually do.


Bitcoin's market cap is not primarily driven by some need to not fall below a certain price otherwise cratering the usership. Geez. Stop wasting my time with asinine posts.

That perfectly indicative of why Steemit is doomed. A myopic set of devs and speculators who don't have a fucking clue about what it is important. Yeah you guys will go upvote some bravado which is worthless and actually entirely antithetical to what you need to achieve. Your own little boat of crypto zealots is precisely what you are going to always end up with.

Did you guys ever graduate from your pimple-faced fantasies about the way the world should work from when you were living in your parents' basement.

You've just chased away any women who might read that post.

And that isn't what SOCIAL networks are about.

Maybe you can make a little crypto zealots community. I won't be joining. I'll stay here at BCT.

What is important? the status quo?


and it seems that they are definetly a lot! https://steemit.com/steemit/@liondani/it-s-official-females-dominates-males-on-steemit

A viable technical, economic, and marketing design.


India already at 6.4% of site traffic. As I predicted, and I expect they will be coming to game it into oblivion...though note 5.9% Indians on Reddit, yet the huge difference in traffic from Westerners (USA) on Reddit. Steemit has Indians, Russians, etc.. Looks to me that it is incentivized by payouts, which are probably even more motivational to those in countries where income is lower.

Women can definitely be bought. That is why it is impossible to ban prostitution. But we have to see if these women find something other than the money driving their use of the site. Again I don't expect the very lucrative payouts to be sustainable.

As for what normally motivates women on SOCIAL networks, that bravado about we only need our small boat is going to drive them away. As you might know, prostituted women act differently than normal women. Women  typically want an inclusive SOCIAL experience without aggressiveness. They want harmony, not bravado and strife.

Minor point (maybe not relevant): also note the 42% bounce rate versus 27% for Reddit. This could improve if the site becomes more sticky with discussions that users want to return to. Thus far I haven't see multi-days/weeks ongoing discussions like I do on Reddit, but I haven't studied too many Steemit blog posts.

Profitability of mining (bitcoin) is indeed greatly influenced by market cap, just as profitability of contributing (steemit) is influenced by market cap. Have you ever even mined any cryptocurrency in your life? That is pretty basic...

This is not a stronger point. If price falls 90% then so does the profitability of mining (bitcoin). Similarly, if price falls 90% then so does contributing (steemit). They are very similar, yet you deny them being so.

Who are you to decide what people will be happy with? You are not omniscient. Legacy social networks pay them nothing. As long as they are getting paid something they may stay. If some leave, then contribution profits go up for everyone that does stay. Eventually equilibrium is reached. Think of it as being the same as mining difficulty going down on Bitcoin. See my point? The economics of mining with hardware (bitcoin) and mining with contributing (steemit) work in similar ways.

As to your other point, Eastern Europeans making crap posts will not get up voted by westerners that have easily a majority of Steen Power. I don't know how you expect them to take over unless they can somehow post better content, then they would deserve to.

I hate to break it to you, but there is certainly a "point of no return" that Bitcoin could fall to which would crater usership/interest/speculation.

And no, people are not using speculating on Bitcoin with the expectation the market cap or usership will decline.

You are comparing apples, but claiming you are comparing apples and oranges.

Incorrect. ASIC mining farms expand without worry about the price, because their costs are slow low. This only impacts how fast they can expand, but doesn't cause their prior investments to go bankrupt. It isn't thresholded the way payout incentives to blog are.


Incorrect. Below a certain threshold price, people are insulted to blog for that price and it drops to 0. Mining is never reduced to 0.

For example, no person on earth will write a blog post for 1 cents. And nor person on earth will write interesting content for 10 cents, probably not even 25 cents. And no Westerner will blog with high quality for probably less than a few $ per blog post on average.


If we assume that the reason people are using Steemit is because of the payouts (since that is basically the only unique feature of significance it has), then we can safely assume that if payouts are too low then users have no reason to use Steemit. They already have Reddit which has greater usership thus more interesting and thorough discussions. Moving to site with much less reach has to provide some benefit that Reddit does not.


There is actually research on why paying too low is worse than not paying. It is an insult. Besides you've focused your users on that expectation of being paid something worthwhile. You've created that demographic by the very fact of promoting $500+ payouts for blog posts.


There are probably Indians and Nigerians willing to lower that equilibrium much lower than anyone else is willing to work for. Which already happened with CAPTCHAs. They will just bleed all the value out of it, because they don't have any incentive to respect any Nash equilibrium due to the incorrect design of Steemit.

My popcorn is ready. Let's just watch. No need to argue, we will eventually see the outcome.


I have now explained to you why your analogy is bunk.


Probably so, but it isn't 1/10 of the current price. I doubt even 1/100 would implode it. And I am sure that price drop would implode Steemit.


We weren't discussing speculation. You just moved the goal posts. We were discussing whether mining was thresholded to drop to 0 at certain drop in the price of the token.

I am so tired of having a debate with a person who is not intellectual enough.

Can we please stop now?

You are still off base. I am also getting tired of debating someone who thinks he is omniscient yet off on so many factors, but I guess I am getting used to it by now because this is how all of our debates go. Whoever sits at the keyboard longest wins (you).

I will be back later.. I have a date tonight.  ;D

Get laid, so maybe you back off your aggressive 20-year old pimple-faced nonsense. You go on and on claiming I am off base, when I have rebutted every thing you written over numerous posts. You haven't gotten even one point correct.

You think you have, but you haven't. It's called being wrong. Don't get down on yourself... it happens to everyone every now and then!

20 year old. Can never admit when he hasn't presented a cogent argument.

Nonsense:

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@dantheman/can-bitcoin-scale-to-keep-up-with-demand-created-by-steem

Exchanges don't put every trade on the Bitcoin block chain.

You added this after I had replied to your post.

SP has to be used via voting in order to maintain its standing relative to other SP which is always voting at its quota (assuming the blocks of SP are voting for themselves collectively to increase their earnings and SP). This was my point to smooth which he agreed with, that if Indians have more free time on their hands, and the Westerners with huge SP find it a pita to vote with all their SP.

I'll be looking now more specifically how to game the system, since you've challenged me. I didn't expect to get this involved, but since you are such a nice guy, you incited me to.

Dan specifically designed it to create this pyramid gambling pyschology effect:


This purposefully fooling the users and will create a burnout effect once they realize their experience has been contrary to their emotional/motivational reason for joining.

Expect euphoria to change to depression and resentment. Expect users to look for ways to cheat and get what they expected.

Dan is using a variant of gamification in a very deleterious and unsustainable way.

I might be wrong in this but I think that there were some changes in the voting system, https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/changes-to-curation-reward-allocation I don't even know if this is the most updated version

That is the curation rewards paid to those who vote, not the payout reward for those who post was voted for. It doesn't change the R² quadratic reward scheme which is employed for both rewards (the curation is proposed to use a different modeling math, but still apparently roughly quadratic although I haven't yet digested the differential equations and such just taking his summary at face value).

So this means if someone has 10 times the rep power, then it requires 100 votes from the minions to equal that one vote both in terms of payout to whom was voted for and curation reward for those who voted.

At 100 times the rep power, then it require 10,000 minions. At 1000 rep power, then it requires 1 million minions.

So essentially Dan has probably handed himself and a few other insiders complete financial control over the reward system.

Does anyone know where we can view the distribution of the rep power?

I think you would gain instant access to all information from Dan himself if you opened a steemit thread and it would be really intresting.

I am considering doing this once I am done re-reading the white paper and make sure I understand the specifics of how this could or could not be gamed. Because I also have access to 1000 of people I could Sybil attack this with, so I am looking at my options now, because CoinHoarder pissed me off.

I am beginning to think that Dan has rigged this such that it is impossible for the minions to ever gain enough rep power to game the system. He has I think retained the control in his own hands. A permissioned block chain. That is what I would expect from him.

If that is the case, then I another bit of my respect for smooth will die because of his involvement in this scheme. But I need to confirm first the details...I understand making a profit but given how moralistic he has been about coins and knowing he is smart enough to have studied the details, then he should have been pointing out these matters long ago but apparently didn't because he was vested.

 :) :)

So who is claiming this is a decentralized social network for the minions?

This is worse than Facebook. We hand power from Suckerberg who only owns a minority share to @dantheman who owns a majority share.

If we just wanted a permissioned social network then we don't need a block chain for that.

What is the innovation here  ???

He apparently has enough rep power to make it sink to the last page of the archive and be effectively unseen?

In my design of a decentralized social network (and I think perhaps similarly for Synereo), no person has global rep power that can be used to control individual filters on content. Instead each user sets their own priorities on what content they see.

Dan seems to be allergic to the word decentralized even though he uses that word, none of his designs actually respect the concept. DPoS also disrespects decentralization (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1549494.msg15577720#msg15577720).

I repeat:

Dan relegating content to page 1001 of the listings is censored.

In a correct design of a decentralized social network, no person has the power to do that to content globally. Only each user can filter content with their own individual preferences that determine rep power for those they friend.

Steemit is a Frankenstein chain and everyone should disown it immediately if they have any ethics for decentralization goals.

Who goes to page 1001 if the first 1000 pages are supposed to have better value due to curation. Besides Dan can change the UI any time he wants to. And besides, do I click 1000 or 1001 or 599? Point is I am not going to read 1000 pages of blog posts.

Any way you are arguing at the fringes and have already lost the key point of the debate.

Steemit is not a decentralized social network.

No you can't. You have a very low math IQ:

How is Steemit going to deal with people posting copyrighted material and material that is illegal? Can't the people who run the webpage be held totally liable, civilly and criminally?

I think Stereo would be a better name than Synereo. Coincidentally, my autocorrect changes Synereo to Stereo.

In a properly design decentralized network such as my design for JAMBOX (and possibly also Synereo uses the correct design), the content is never held any any central repository and there is no computer in charge of the content. The content flows from user-to-user's node according to their own filter, and so users determine what they store, transmit, and view. Thus copyright compliance falls to the users.

Dan doesn't understand decentralization apparently.

I'm not sure that I want to invest in something that is going to go the way of the Silk Road. Also, I should be extra careful when I click on any links posted on Steemit, because I could end up with some Trojan from hell on my rig. :D


Then why did Limewire have to pull back? That was a P2P network, wasn't it?

Because apparently Limewire was not purely open source and instead had a paid version and thus was a commercial entity that the US government could regulate more easily.

I actually do agree that it is difficult to make open source software that facilitates copyright infringement, because it means users have a difficult time finding hosts to run this s/w on. I actually argued against the viability of the decentralized file systems on this basis, which was one of my complaints about the design of Synereo.

But even if you do something about this, it doesn't require that the power to censor content also empowers that person to amass as many tokens as they want by using their superior rep power to earn more tokens than everyone else.

Also the structure of the system should be that the user's s/w is in control, not some global setting on a global block chain.

My idea was to offer users a default content providers that censor (but have no ability to amass advantages in tokens which is my major complaint against what Dan has apparently done), but users are in control of the s/w they run, so they can swap out any content providers they choose if they are savvy enough. Making the default choices compliant with the RIAA means you are less likely to have problems. Meaning only savvy users change the defaults and they have to go find the s/w on other Githubs.

Edit: but if the protocol is open source, you can't stop others from offering variants of the s/w to users. That was also part of my strategy. Decentralize the sources of the s/w.

I don't condone theft of copyrighted material. Artists and creators should be paid fairly. If we steer clear of non-indie music and get indie creators into the concept of digital payments bypassing the major labels, then we can solve that legal problem. They may be attempting to do that with Peertracks and I also had an idea for that which may or may not have some similarities to Peertracks. But any way, I am working on more fundamental issues right now to fix PoW without resorting to DPoS which have stated is centralized and suffers scaling issues (e.g. anti-DDoS duplication costs if there are 100s of nodes). I think Dan is probably keeping the number of delegates low to keep these costs down or maybe they are not really prepared for DDoS attack or maybe all the nodes are controlled by Dan and he is reusing the same anti-DDoS for all his nodes. Again problem is DPoS is centralized.

Btw I don't think you can make Peertracks work as well as what I designed, because DPoS can't really do real-time microtractions at that volume. That is why Dan had to make the design of Steemit non-ideal. He discusses that in the white paper. I have solved that technical block chain problem.

There is no question that insiders have absolute control now. They have said so, and it is obvious from the transparent holdings on the blockchain.

What the future holds, nobody really knows. Where you and I differ is that I don't believe I have the ability to predict the outcome of extremely complex systems with many people involved. That said, most new businesses fail, most cryptocurrencies fail, so objectively speaking the odds for Steem are not good. I'm willing to let it play out though, and see where it goes. Nothing else I've seen here has made even a remotely credible effort to reach a mainstream audience. Steem has at least done that, even if flawed, and even if it fails.

Where can I view the holdings?

How can you rail against scams such as Dash instamine, and then you basically support a coin that is primarily held by Dan and other insiders (you apparently claiming at one point to be one of the larger 1% of supply holders) that doesn't have a mechanism for diluting whales and instead concentrates more and more tokens to the whales. So we can presume they are running trading bots on the exchanges driving the price by buying from themselves (or at least have the holdings to do so in the future), which is precisely what you told me to be wary of.

R² means if the insiders have 1000X the rep power of the minions, there would need to be 1 million minions before their voting could even begin to challenge the insiders. And the minions might not hold SP and instead hold regular tokens which are debased at 100% per annum, they would never likely challenge the insiders reputationally weighted stake.

Their chief math guy has admitted as I quoted that the R² is designed to fool those who have a risk seeking personality to strive for the $100 - $10,000 per post payouts, while in fact due to that math, most of them will only receive a couple of $ of payouts. Thus eventually they will lose the happy feeling they when started on the positive hope side of their risk seeking personality.

You don't build successful businesses by making users depressed. Facebook makes people happy. Reddit makes people engaged (because users were't recruited with high expectations of huge payouts, these users are contented with engagement). Steemit makes users blow steem out of their ears pissed as hell later (because the marketing lied to them thus attracting an insatiable demographic with higher expectations).

Perhaps they plan to try to transition some of this audience to Peertracks, which is apparently another pyramid scheme lie based around music. Instead of focusing on social experiences and matching music to fans, I think I remember reading that Peertracks will allow fans to become investors in a pyramid of the artist.

You are turning the s/w industry into lies and scams. I want nothing to do with you if you are going to on the one hand be so dogmatic even leading me entirely away from doing what Dan has done (I originally was talking ICOs and no no no don't you dare do anything but PoW distribution). I had more respect for you than this, that at least some consistency of your position.

I don't have a problem with Dan doing this. Everyone should be free. I just have a problem with feeling like I been jerked around, some people telling me to be idealistic, then telling me as long as you build adoption through lying to people's emotions, then that is positive.

I don't feel there is any consistency of anything. Everyone should do what ever in the hell they want.

But I don't think there is any way that Dan will be successful, because he doesn't love his users. These are real people. You can't abuse your customers and expect to build anything great. Facebook actually strives for user satisfaction, My gf loves facebook. She gets her daily happy social fix.

So Dan is giving users their risk taking gambling fix. Yeah I guess there is a market for that. I see that in the females who have blogged. They are risk takers.

Crypto is one big gambling fix and I doubt can't make the transition to mainstream software with these type of people at the helm, unless the world has become a gambling casino.

Steemit is taking money from new investors and redistributing it to those with the most rep power. And fooling bloggers to join by hyping payouts most of them will never receive. That doesn't sound to me like building a good long-term business model.

Bernie Madoff must be proud.

https://steemit.com/@steemit/transfers

That is the account that collected the "sneaky-mine" coins (originally about 80%, but less now). It does not post, does not vote, and does not receive rewards. It's purposes are to serve as a source of coins to fund free accounts for new users, to sell coins on exchanges to fund development, and to serve as an asset of Steemit Inc, allowing the company to profit from the success of the platform. The first two of these obviously redistribute stake, and do so in a reasonably transparent way.

The R^2 weighting does not work the way you suggest. Yes, posts are R^2 weighted, but users are not. i.e. two users with N stake both voting on a post have about the same total voting power as a single user with 2N stake.

It does indeed lead to a narrower distribution of rewards with most going to a relatively few "hit" posts. That's a marketing decision in part (big payouts attract attention and interest even if most users don't get them), but something superlinear is necessary to prevent the obvious failure mode where people just vote for their own posts (but no one else does) in order to continue to gain a proportionate share of the rewards. The way it has worked out, the most successful posts have far more stake voting for them then any single user or even any small group of whales. You can't just vote to grab rewards and prevent dilution.

In practice, most of the rewards are going to successful and talented bloggers who have joined the site since launch. I expect that as the site grows and pulls from an even larger talent pool of posters and bloggers, the current ones may be pushed aside, at last to an extent, in favor of the greater talent and stronger celebrity status. Maybe that is a bad thing, since talent and celebrity is somewhat narrowly distributed, but in any case it isn't going back to large early stakeholders. We're all being diluted, and at a pretty good clip too.

smooth i am too sleepy now to digest your last post. If what you say about 2N is correct, perhaps that will moderate my view on fairness. I will respond after I sleep. First day I had the energy to go 28 hours without sleep in a long time. I added to my prior post as usual.


So you mean that all votes stakes are summed, before the square to form R value? Instead of squaring each stake and adding the squares to form R sum value?


So @dantheman's personal stake is not the largest of the voting stakes?


You holding SP are receiving 9 new tokens for every 1 new STEEM, which is also the rate of payout of the posts. So I guess the dilution are these payouts?

The downward price will remind those who converted to SP, that they need 2 years to remove their investment.  :D

Those who invest and don't convert to SP, are losing 0.19% per day due to debasement.

The problem with Steemit is they have no income model, thus once the price is not going up, there is no valuation where it has an P/E ratio. And the system is designed to incentivize cashing out. I just don't see where the buying demand will come from except for a bubble while the price is moving up fast. There is no incentive to HODL this token.

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If one is holding SP, you are I suppose betting that Steemit will manage some transition either to be acquired by another social network at some valuation per signed up user, or that Steemit will be able to develop an income model. We've seen that estimates of revenue per user from advertising for Facebook average around $15 per user per year (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-are-you-worth-to-facebook).

So with a million signed up users, this will be $15 million annual income from advertising, so with a 20 P/E ratio then roughly a $300 million market cap (7.5% x $300m = $15 million divided by million users = $15 per user per year in payouts+curator rewards). At 3000 signups per day, they project a million signups (costing $10 per signup at least not including payouts) within 4 months.

But it is also not clear what the retention rate is given users on average won't earn that much from the site, and especially after the number of bloggers reach million users with only a $300 million market cap. In other words, at some realistic P/E ratio, then the payouts have to drop dramatically which means the usership might not be sticky, which then means the market cap valuation must be lower. And that begins the downward spiral because as market cap falls, then payouts fall, so usership should fall. Circling the toilet bowl all the way down.

Does anyone see any way this outcome can be averted? The math seems to show there is no way this can work out.


So $20 per day incentivizes you to spend some of your time on that site. How many minutes a day you spend to earn that $20? (Readers note that he is a college student)

Will you stay when that drops to $20 per year per my calculations above?

They are adding 3000 signups per day. These new bloggers dilute the available money for payout which is roughly 3.875% of the marketcap per year (actually less than that, was $2 million total recently). This 3.875% is shared amongst all bloggers, so as the number of bloggers increases, if the market cap doesn't increase proportionally, then the payouts decrease.

Also the payouts are mathematically structured such that the most popular get quadratically more payouts than the average ones. So there are some blog posts with $100s of payouts, but the average is only a few dollars each (many only $0 or pennies per blog). And these payouts will decline per the math I showed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1548369.msg15587681#msg15587681).

Eventually there will be many pissed off SP investors (who can't sell while the price is crashing) and many pissed off bloggers who don't earn what they expected to earn.

It is not suprising that 3000 bloggers per day are rushing to signup to get their free $10 of STEEM. Because blogging is not a very profitable job any more in the general case (posting photos yourself and your vacation, nobody gives a fuck to pay for that). So by showing these $100s payouts for the few most popular blog posts, Steemit is creating a false expectation of hype that blogging has suddenly become an easy profitable endeavor. This has implosion of the fantasy written all over its future.

Dan is going to destroy the image of crypto-currency is the minds of bloggers. Their first exposure to CC will be being sucked into a lie.

Hey Shelby, I hear you.  You aren't just yelling at a deaf room.  It is likely that Steem is not sustainable in the long term without a massive revenue injection by advertisers, and they will have to figure out a way that advertisers can buy ads solely with their token.  That will be the only way to maintain this momentum.

I would choose Steem, I have never heard of Synero before. Although Steem seems to have some issues at present, almost all altcoins do sooner or later.

Synereo is actually a decentralized social networking platform.  Steem is just the Larimer's latest centralized scam.

Steem is an interesting project with several major flaws. We will have to wait and see. From what I have heard and read about the Synero project, it is more clearly decentralised from the outset.

Steemit has the head start, but can they execute the innovation?

https://steemit.com/steemit/@generalizethis/the-case-for-market-sustainability

*I'll gladly plug sysnero when they offer similar production tools.

I have heard the rumors that the Monero officially endorses STEEM.

So I would say its a pretty safe bet to say that STEEM will be is pumped hard and the Synereo not.

~CfA~

I am not sure how Steem even uses the word decentralised. I think it look interesting, but not decentralized. Please let me know how I am wrong.

Apparently not steem. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1558366.0/) Seems like Steem is a pyramid scheme. But either way, I'd vote for Synereo

Voting or Synereo, excited to see their alpha product in September!

It's funny to see a lot of the guys which were smart enough to get involved in NXT in the beginning are also getting involved in Synereo.

September--can't wait....

I've been thinking more about advertising and its impact on these concepts for decentralized social networks.

Remember I had originally criticized Synereo some months ago, because I noted that the average revenue per user for social networks that generate revenue from advertising is approximately $20 per year on average (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1558366.msg15746113#msg15746113) (much less in 3rd world countries).

That hardly seems like a worthwhile income for content producers, although I guess per the power-law distribution of income/wealth it gets 85% concentrated to say the top 20% of content producers and roughly 38% to the top 1% (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1558366.msg15720345#msg15720345). Thus, mathematically that $20 per user in site-wide revenue, is $85 and $760 per year for each user among the top 20% and 1% (respectively) of the users on the site (and $4 per year for the rest of the users). And that still seems far too low.  (sample calculation is 85 × $20 ÷ 20 = $85)

Synereo's monetization model is to have advertisers pay curators to employ their REP power to push ads onto viewers (which may cost the curators some REP power if the ad is not well targeted and received). Whereas, Steem's monetization model is to attempt to ramp up demand for STEEM for microtransactions (transfers, not voting transactions) and debase those STEEM to pay content producers, i.e. effectively (a combination of some debasement on everyone and) transaction fees will pay for content production long-term.

The key insight I want to add now is that content producers can also avail directly of advertising revenue by embedding ads in their content and especially when these ads are inconspicuous links and mentions. Although they might be paid for the display (e.g. CPM tracked ads), they might more likely be paid by a referrals such as pay-per-click and/or pay-per-conversion (sale). So it seems to me that advertising can be earned directly by the content producers who develop a following in both Synereo and Steem, but the Steem model adds another potential revenue source. This is important because the demand for the Synereo AMPs is only to come from demand for advertising, which might be largely cannibalized by the content producers selling direct to the advertisers thus bypassing the AMP token. In Steem, the token's demand is planned to come from demand for the microtransaction ecosystem (although this isn't even developed at all yet and Steem has other critical problems to solve first).

However, I still see advertising revenue as a small priority for content producers (refer to the math above), unless they are a superstar that gets branding advertising from a major corporation (e.g. Nike). Rather I think they will generate more income from selling paraphernalia to their audiences where they take a large percentage of the sale, e.g. T-shirt sales.

I still see more value from the social networks from commerce than from advertising.

How the father of the internet plans to reclaim it from Facebook and Google


That is my comment quoted.

I liked the steem concept, but it was poorly implemented.. so i'm with synereo now.

Synereo fo'sho me thinks.

Also MEWN

Well, well, well, TPTB_need_war and iamnotback have been vindicated!