...
"Tsu users, meanwhile, didn’t come because they cared about connecting – they came for the money. That never ends well." I am thinking it is okay if money is part of the initial motivation that separates the project from the existing social networks, for as long as they stay for the features which are unique. Money is okay as an onboarding gimmick. Also I am very much okay if those unique features help them to build successful money making businesses. Tsu's problem is it didn't offer anything. Even the money was paltry (because afaik it was coming from advertising/sponsorships). Steemit...They basically lost me when Dan posted his insane plan to have a "whale curation bot arms race"...
And force people to read only garbage dictated by bots in a 30 minute window...
If I see another "Steem changed my life" or "here's more pics no one cares about" I'm gonna hurl.
I had all the same reactions to those specifics. Imagine if Amazon had 50 college age millionaires pick the only products you can see and buy...
As opposed to real people who work... and spent hard-earned money to buy the item... and write a sincere review...
It's a good parallel because books and music are very widely reviewed on Amazon.
Apt analogy. See my latest post about Leah McHenry. This is the whole problem with having engineers design consumer products...
They have no concept of what usability means for an average person... or the 1000 other options they have.
I am an engineer who also understands the marketing side. Like the asshole decision not to release a Windows binary of steemd = massive, deliberate security hole...
How much money can one put in an account secured ONLY by an unregulated, centralized web site targeted by every hacket out there?
Are you lamenting the inability to access accounts from a Windows client and thus forcing Windows users to access it through Steemit? |
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I have a plan and a design and now I've chosen a 5 letter, one syllable name.
My mother who is 70, former newspaper co-editor, and who is much more astute with words and language than I am, says that she really likes the new name I have thought of. She said it fits well with the memes of Millenial generation, is also a very serious name while having a fun side that is even applicable to music (as well as blogging), and has numerous meanings all of which are applicable. So I think the name choice is done. I don't expect any competing project to find a better name than the one I've chosen.
I wonder what it is with Asians. They always like to cheat when it comes to money. They did the same with Stellar when they had a facebook giveaway. It is also the same in games of chance. All they do is try to cheat.
Use or be used has been the reality in Asia. Asians are very comfortable with the reality of economic slavery. We in the West have had such a good run of economic success (as opposed to the time before the Black Death in Europe when every European was living at the level of rat), that we thought this reality no longer exists. You can even see this clash of cultures on that one female Steemian blogger @sweetsssj from China, who is just milking the system and doesn't reply to any of my comments which challenge her. She makes clickbait titles and is milking the "China is cool" circle-jerk. Meaning she wants to reply only to superficial comments, and she doesn't want to frankly interact with her audience (contrast against music creator Leah McHenry below or some of the other popular western female Steemian bloggers such as @kaylinart).
...
I think growth is critical, everything else should follow from that. Agreed, but growth comes from some underlying viral qualities. But it seems to me your analysis is missing an important point, namely, that the initial beginning of a viral growth seems to be more counter-intuitive until it reaches a critical point where, all of a sudden, lots of other unforeseen network effects kick in and it becomes obvious. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that the puzzle fits together.
Well yeah it looks unpredictable to those who are incapable of loading everything that is going on, in their head and processing it. We know already based on current metrics that Steemit.com (as current formulated) is not scaling virally. I am counting only about 1500 serious users on the 7 day active distribution at steemd.com. What is less obvious is whether there are some feature changes or entirely new UI apps built on the Steem blockchain, which could fundamentally alter the current trajectory. If my analysis of the key flaws is correct, then I think the Steem blockchain is incompatible with any attempt to build a different UI on it for viral growth. Will probably write a longer post discussing the problem. I am also putting serious thought into a design and Steemit is an extremely valuable inspiration.
I had some preliminary architecture in mind, but think it can be hugely improved thanks to recent experiments with several other projects.
I think the blackswan is more likely to come from a competitor to Steem which is not just a fork. Btw, the following confirms everything I've been saying about the critical importance of building sub-communities (and make sure you listen to how she first failed with posting her content to Facebook). But it also points to a serious fault in Steem's design of making everything public on the blockchain: Click "popout" on the audio player, skip to the 12:20min mark, and you will hear the most relevant comment w.r.t. Steemit. Very insightful point about the importance of owning your followers and the danger of existing social networks. However, isn't there a problem if Steemit is making this data public, so that competitors can steal your marketing mailing list. This is also relevant: https://steemit.com/steem-help/@jacor/can-the-social-code-be-cracked |
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If an altcoin distributes tokens into 100s of million of users' wallets in a way that they won't just dump it immediately (e.g. Auroracoin airdrop) and which they are engaged into that token's ecosystem, then Bitcoin has become the Appcoin!
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Rocket ascent is the outlier in the graphs you used
Are you referring to Google search popularity that I mentioned in my blogs week ago? Facebook reached 1 million users in 11 months (which is roughly 10X Steem's current growth rate) and the Internet population was 1/5 then (so Steem is growing 1/50th as fast as Facebook did, unless it can accelerate): On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
1 million — End of 2004.
5.5 million — End of 2005.
12 million — End of 2006.
20 million — April 2007.
50 million — October 2007.
100 million — August 2008.
150 million — January 2009.
175 million — February 2009.
200 million — April 2009.
250 million — July 2009.
300 million — September 2009.
350 million — End of 2009.
400 million — February 2010.
500 million — July 2010.
608 million — End of 2010.
750 million — July 2011.
800 million — September 2011.
845 million — End of 2011.
901 million — March 2012.
955 million — June 2012.
1.01 billion — September 2012.
1.06 billion — December 2012.
1.11 billion — March 2013.
If yes, note steemit has already peaked and is declining: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=steemit |
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My guess it is in more in the 2 year time frame for social media success--and not in the rocket ascent of an instagram outlier.
I believe it is unlikely for Steem to make any changes that would create viral adoption. I thus believe it will peak at much less than 1 million users. Yes I think you need a rocket viral ascent.
The Chinese appear to be coming to game Steem's curation reward system: This has never happened before, and Maximum CPC exceeds 800%
Later they will realize they need to collude to take more of the money, as did the Bitcoin Chinese mining cartel. But Bitcoin has a use case. I fear Steem will unravel. I don't think it can sustain at a low level of usership because the forces holding it up are expectations and later these must turn into fighting over money (Tragedy of the Commons). All that changes perhaps if Steem has a widespread use case. But I don't see it. |
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Start from where you failed last time: Where is the money going to come from?
Investors. Later demand for commerce. The key is viral adoption growth. Btw, I'm #44 on the Top 50 list at Steem this week: https://steemit.com/steemstats/@lukestokes/exchange-transfer-report-08-07-2016-to-08-13-2016This is relevant to our discussion: https://steemit.com/steemit-ambassador/@hisnameisolllie/how-to-explain-steem-it-to-a-friendThe Problem
Steemit is full of well educated, cryptocurrency savvy, users. It’s incredibly easy to get ‘sucked’ in to believing that everyone should be able to understand what is going on here, or that the world suddenly understands Cryptocurrency/Blockchain technology. Well, the world doesn’t, and in order for Steemit to become successful, we (as a community) need to sign up our friends and family who are not interested in these intricacies.
For the first 4-6 weeks of using Steemit, whenever I tried to sign up a group of friends I got blank faces, sometimes even fear…
Say, "from the constant stream of new investors because it is onboarding the masses".
As far as my rebuttal to it being a "ponzi scheme" Say the initial money comes from constant stream of investors and later the money comes from commerce once the masses have joined. Lol: got a nice twist on where the money comes that I use to explain to friends of mine. I say that money comes from drug lords that wash their money here and in order to do so, they give some to you. It works like a charm. When they ask for proof I say that @berniesanders and @nextgencrypto are ones them and show that they donate to almost every marijuana post.
It's not the real explanation, but effective way of explaining. |
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One more followup: Now I've had a look at Medium, I have a totally negative opinion of it and won't be going back....
Self righteous PC numpties having a martyr self support meeting.
Interesting. Thanks again for the feedback. I've read a few important technical blogs on Medium over the past year. So I don't see it as only a politically correct haven. But what is most revealing to me about your reply, is that exactly as I expected, the Steemians are trying to force their world view onto the world. Sorry that won't scale. I think Steemit has a potential to change the internet and thereby change the world, because of the way it is set up. Steemit has only been online since March. And if I can earn some money doing it that would be great too.
I believe that if we want to change the world, we have to engage with the world. Snobbery and a circlejerk groupthink won't get us there. Unless you are really good at exploiting the Steememes, $10 per day for an exhausting amount of daily blogging won't change your life (nor the world's). P.S. I wish you good luck and I actually support similars ideals as you want. But I want to be clever about attaining them. And yeah I am trying to get off the forum, but I want to make sure my logic is not incorrect. Because I expended a couple of months of intense work to code a dating site last Spring 2015 and it wasn't well thought out in terms of monetization and thus I wasted all that effort. So I want to make sure that before I go into the coding cave, that I'm not wasting my intense effort. |
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Opposing viewpoint aka my 2 cents: I am thinking there is a very easy way to determine if Steem or any competitor such as Peerplays is failing.
As @xtester wrote in his most recent blog, it is all about the rate of growth. Which is what I've been saying.
Seems Steem signups are averaging in the rough neighborhood of 1000 per day and are not increasing. Of these, about 80+% become inactive within 30 days or less (xtester claims 66% but I think he is fooled by a recent reacceleration of signups and my prior calculations showed 80+%).
So with actually about 200 signups per day, that is ... drumroll please ... a humongous 73,000 active users after 1 year.
And we don't know how many of those are bots. And we don't know how many of those will quit within a year.
73,000 users is freckle on an elephants ass when we are talking about the economies-of-scale in networking that are necessary to make a social network (and merchant) ecosystem viable.
Even if we increase that by an order-of-magnitude, at 730,000 users in one year, it is still at least an order-of-magnitude insufficient.
There is a deeper point. The Steem adoption rate numbers are indicative of lack of viral spread. The signups are merely barely replacing attrition. Intuitively I am nearly certain that the reason is because there is no compelling networking of the reason to signup.
Try to understand the reason people signed up for other social networks. It was because they did something very unique and in high demand. So when all your friends were joining, you caved in and joined too.
Steem has none of those attributes. It doesn't do something very unique that is in high demand. And not all of my friends are joining. The reason is because most people don't give a fuck about storage persistance and censorship resistance, and blogging to earn $ is not something most people can do well (and besides it is not immediately gratification and requires a lot of work, both of which are things the masses hate).
Sorry you need a new formula and Peerplays can repeat this same mistake but it won't cross the chasm.
I have a plan and a design and now I've chosen a 5 letter, one syllable name.
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I am thinking there is a very easy way to determine if Steem or any competitor such as Peerplays is failing.
As @xtester wrote in his most recent blog, it is all about the rate of growth. Which is what I've been saying.
Seems Steem signups are averaging in the rough neighborhood of 1000 per day and are not increasing. Of these, about 80+% become inactive within 30 days or less (xtester claims 66% but I think he is fooled by a recent reacceleration of signups and my prior calculations showed 80+%).
So with actually about 200 signups per day, that is ... drumroll please ... a humongous 73,000 active users after 1 year.
And we don't know how many of those are bots. And we don't know how many of those will quit within a year.
73,000 users is freckle on an elephants ass when we are talking about the economies-of-scale in networking that are necessary to make a social network (and merchant) ecosystem viable.
Even if we increase that by an order-of-magnitude, at 730,000 users in one year, it is still at least an order-of-magnitude insufficient.
There is a deeper point. The Steem adoption rate numbers are indicative of lack of viral spread. The signups are merely barely replacing attrition. Intuitively I am nearly certain that the reason is because there is no compelling networking of the reason to signup.
Try to understand the reason people signed up for other social networks. It was because they did something very unique and in high demand. So when all your friends were joining, you caved in and joined too.
Steem has none of those attributes. It doesn't do something very unique that is in high demand. And not all of my friends are joining. The reason is because most people don't give a fuck about storage persistance and censorship resistance, and blogging to earn $ is not something most people can do well (and besides it is not immediately gratification and requires a lot of work, both of which are things the masses hate).
Sorry you need a new formula and Peerplays can repeat this same mistake but it won't cross the chasm.
I have a plan and a design and now I've chosen a 5 letter, one syllable name.
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If you succeed, people will hate you
Not necessarily, if you give them a way to join you and make a lot of money. |
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"1. Transactions Volume: has experienced a significant growth since 4th of July and has reached a healthy state where on most days we see on average more than 100,000 transactions per day. By contrast, Bitcoin has on average more than 200,000 per day, and Ethereum less than 50,000.
Has been flat since mid-July even while signups have increased. As @roelandp put it, you’ve got Playmates, Vigilantes, Pirates and many others with hundreds of thousands of followers.
Who came to extract money, not to bring their followers to Steem. Everybody is milking this. Who ever is investing to give us their money is mighty brave. |
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An opposing perspective: Because not everyone shares the same interests and they may not find their engaging connections here?
Not everyone in the world likes Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or McDonalds. Not everyone has to like something for it to be successful. I think you missed my implied point, which is that Steem appears to be a microscopic (6400 active users) community that is focused on a set of weird interests that will not be popular. And then you go compare to businesses with millions and billions of users. I went and read some of your blogs and frankly you are floating in the clouds. I find your blogs pointless, rambling, and of low quality. But apparently some users here like it when you write a very long rambling blog about tripping on Peyote, or posts some below average photos of Mexico, or talk about why you think Steem might be great (but your analysis seems very amateurish to me). Sorry this isn't hate, rather I am just being frank. Too much backslapping and not enough reality. Because the rewards for most users will be less than $5 per month, i.e. meaningless?
I'm not sure where you're from in the world, but $5 is a lot of money to a lot of people around the world. I am in the Philippines. And I lived on $1 a day for a year or so in the mid-1990s in squalor here. I am not filipino. Btw, the average salary in the Philippines for someone educated well enough to communicate eloquently in English is about $20 a day now. $5 a day is below the minimum wage now. But any way, filipinos are not earning money here, because they do not understand how to write to the weird Western nerd audience here. I've seen a few try and fail. And besides, when a platform is consistently allows the publication of high quality content on the Internet, that's valuable regardless of if you're getting paid to read it.
Yeah like Medium with its 25 million readers. Medium reports only 20,000 of its 25 million readers blog weekly. Blogging is not something everyone can do well. So what do the rest of the users do that is engaging?
I think you've answered your own question here. Why is Medium so popular, if only such a small percentage like to write on it? Because Medium caters to a diverse audience. Steem doesn't. Steem incentivizes writing to the weird Western nerd audience who awards the votes here. Medium isn't being pigeon-holed by a dysfunctional voting reward system. The voting system is not additive, it is 1 + 1 = -1. I've never used Medium
Thx for confirming. So if you gush about Steem with its 6400 active users (bloggers and readers/commenters), why would not also consider Medium with its 25 million readers and 20,000 active weekly bloggers? As a blogger, isn't your goal to reach the most readers. Or do you want to write for a microscopic circle-jerk just because you can earn wow $10 per day. I agree that we (Western nerds) want to support a platform that stores content on a blockchain which no one can control, but did you know that a few guys control the Steem blockchain? Details matter. And the masses probably don't care about this aspect. the quality of content on Steemit is incredible
Is it the quality of intellectualism and prose, or predominantly the quality that the content matches your interests? Both. The assumption in your question seems to be that there is some kind of problem with finding a niche, or having a site that's more popular with certain types of people. There isn't. Actually, that's a good thing, because it helps something become popular faster, and more of those types of people will want to join. It would be a problem if that "Western tinfoil hat, hippie/druggie, nerd backslapping while extracting $ from the collective TO DA MOON" niche is too small to scale the merchant ecosystem that they are relying on to create enough demand for Steem tokens so that we can afford to pay bloggers without imploding the value of the tokens. Nevertheless, the range of content on Steemit is also quite wide. People write here talking about art, philosophy, psychology, anarchy, personal secrets, economics. If you really think it's so limited, perhaps you'd like me to link you to a few things which demonstrate the diversity.
I am not interested to read about someone peering at their navel, which is how I characterize most of the content on Steem. I am reading a lot of it everyday, it is nearly all amateurish crap that I wouldn't read if I wasn't investigating Steem. The great bloggers stand far above, and I read them only when I need to, because they have something important to say. I don't have time to whirl away browsing amateurish blogs daily for entertainment. |
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Just got out of the shower (first one in weeks), and I forgot to say that my opinion is that the rate of active users isn't likely growing enough to support a merchant ecosystem. I think maybe 10,000 - 15,000 active users max right now and who knows how many are bots. To cross the chasm to a merchant ecosystem, I think they need millions of users.
I think we need an onboarding with a higher rate of viral engagement. We'll see....
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@suchwowwow
I suspect most demand is driven by expectations so if there announcements which drive up expectations, then it is possible that might be a net increase in demand.
The money supply is always increasing (and very fast for the next several months) so on a purely Quantity Theory of Money basis, the price should decline, but the QTM may not be the only factor.
The increase in the liquid money supply could accelerate if more people decide to start powering down, but it is limited by the 1% of week cap.
I think to sustain the platform, they eventually have to move away from voting rewards as the main feature (although it serves as an onboarding paradigm for the time being) and have some other compelling viral engagement features, whether it be in social network or commerce or what ever.
I am not convinced that the voting rewards paradigm is the best one that can be done for onboarding, but it is too late to change that now in Steem. And my alternative idea for one might not be better, let's see what others think when and if I announce it.
Okay guys, I like to go quiet now for some days. Happy Sunday.
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...because there are so many writers who wanna scam steem.
There is a lot of idealistic appreciation of Steem. See my prior post, which I added to since you read it last time. |
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Follow up:In spite of the following, I think my blog is still important for the community to read, because we are brainstorming and discussing the very important design characteristics of Steem. The important flaws in my proposal were pointed by @alexgr, @sunjata, and @smooth: - Verified accounts can be sold.
- Desired connections between communities dilutes the metric for motivating unique communities.
- Users don't have a strong enough motivation to be verified.
- Intent of following is not a public metric.
I have deeply analyzed in my head (and various writings sprinkled over Steem and Bitcointalk.org) numerous facets and ideas for reducing the top-down effect of (the natural) power-law distributed STEEM POWER w.r.t. to voting for rewards taken from a pool of debasement of the collective, and I can't find any solution that isn't a degenerate outcome that rewards unproductive or winner-take-all behavior. The fundamental problem (design choice) is the rewarding of a collectivized pool of funds via a popularity contest. It is a Tragedy of the Commons. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no way to spread this out to motivate the investment in creating diverse communities. We can observe recently the whales (or at least apparently @smooth) are spreading their voting out more, so that now the top trending posts typically have much smaller rewards. The only big paying rewards now seem to come when those whales (and perhaps a large contingent of dolphins) who vote less frequently, decide they really value a post such as Dogecoin creator's post today. But that isn't necessarily motivating community building nor finding (ranking) content relevant to each user's communities. It is a top-down managed effect, and not driving diverse user actions w.r.t. to building followings. The follow and tags features aid somewhat these needs, but it isn't very monetary (mathematically the typical user can't earn more than ~$5 a month on Steem even if rewards of uniformly distributed) as compared to the reach a user can attain on a larger network that doesn't pay anything, e.g. Facebook. The value of a social network is in the network connections and network size, not in the content. Users (even content producers such as bloggers) go where they can reach their audience (followers/fans) and friends (fans). There won't be viral penetration into the masses (excepting those ones who have a cryptonerd begging them to join Steemit) given there is no compelling reason for them to be on Steemit, i.e. the rewards paid out on average aren't compelling and the network is small with no incentives to drive network connections and no viral engagement paradigm. In essence what I see on Steemit, are many people joining due to enthusiasm about the idea and thinking that others will too. They view their votes in the site-wide popularity contest as important for influencing this grand "we are changing the world" enthusiasm. It seems to me to be backslapping, but the masses won't see it that way. They will simply ask, "what is the advantage for me". Edit: the above doesn't necessarily preclude other features and use cases for the Steem blockchain and token that might come to fruition. The onboarding gimmick of voting from a shared pool of debasement could be perhaps just enough to jumpstart an ecosystem, even though it might not (probably won't) virally spread to millions itself. I am skeptical though. The following blog post quotes are confirmation to me of my idea that the relevance of community is essential to viral adoption: I had bugger all Facebook friends, and most of them were “lurkers” (they never posted anything or even “liked” anything, let alone made any comments. So meaningful interactions were few and far between.
About half of what few friends I had left on FB disagreed with much of what I really wanted to post about, so if I got into subjects like conspiracies such as false flag shootings or “climate change”, or health subjects like low carb diets or the vaccination con, its safe to say I rapidly had less FB friends.
That giant pool of Facebook users don’t post much worth seeing, so to me FB was like a giant sponge that soaked up every creative urge in my mind and replaced it with a giant sea of shallow distracting crap.
The biggest reason I quit FB was that I wanted to see new ideas and be inspired by intelligent discussion. That wasn’t exactly coming thick and fast on FB
The following appears to incorporate some amount of "we will change the world" backslapping because he doesn't even mention having tried Medium for comparison: Steemit has already amazed me with the quality of the content. I’ve only been aware of Steemit for 48 hours, but I’m already inspired by what I’ve seen here, and I’ve learned more in two days surfing Steemit than I did in the past two years feeding my FB addiction.
What I think is inspiring him is he sees some of his interests are shared by the community on Steemit. The Steemit crowd is probably into the specific idealistic issues he mentioned. And there are some smart Steemians. But I believe this sub-community can also be found on Medium (but perhaps not as highly charged and massive)? Any way, the point taken is that communities and size of network (connections and engagement) within the communities is essential, which is my point also.
the quality of content on Steemit is incredible
Is it the quality of intellectualism and prose, or predominantly the quality that the content matches your interests? Here, people have to make content which is truly engaging
Engaging as in much discussion and spawning communities of like interests? Or appealing to the site-wide most prevalent desires the voter has to upvote if the post games some emotional need the voters have, such as the desire to get others to promote certain causes, the male desire to see girls show their boobs, the "Steem will change the world" meme, etc.. I agree with the premise of content quality finding its worth in votes
I'm skeptical for the reasons above.
When would demand leave though?
Because not everyone shares the same interests and they may not find their engaging connections here? Because the rewards for most users will be less than $5 per month, i.e. meaningless? Medium reports only 20,000 of its 25 million readers blog weekly. Blogging is not something everyone can do well. So what do the rest of the users do that is engaging? The more likely scenario in that situation would be that the dollar/BTC value of Steem would approach zero.
Which would disincentivize cashing out at some level above zero, because of the cost of cashing out isn't 0.
Facebook has over 1.7 billion users, while Steemit has less than 100 000, so at this point Steemit would still need to get 1700 times more members to be as big as FB.
The sobering truth is Steem may only have about 10,000 active users and we don't know how many of those are bots.
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I'll hedge my bets a little bit if the opportunity presents itself: I'll offer you $200 in BTC, and if I am able to get more than $1000 out (via powering down and exchange to poloniex), then I will split the difference of the remainder that I can get out in (as measured in BTC value I get out).
So you retain some upside if the price rises, you get some immediately liquidity out and protect yourself against total collapse of the price.
I have a 3 year reputation in crypto, see my introduceyourself post, so I would not reneg on the terms since it would disrupt my reputation which is very valuable to me.
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I'll be gone for some days or so: It can't be paying only for long-form blogging because Medium reports that only 20,000 of its 25 million readers actually blog every week. Expert blogging is not something most people can do well. Perhaps only 15% of the people who join Steem(it) actually earn anything and only 1% anything resembling an income. This is not viral spread, because 85+% of those who join will get exasperated. The cryptonerds are begging their friends and gfs to join, but it isn't moving beyond that one degree of relation.
So yeah the concept of onboarding via debasement distributed to users is innovative, but unfortunately we are failing with this design. Sorry to say. Mark my word.
Absolutely @dollarvigilante, Steemit will probably be that 'gateway drug' for people who know nothing about cryptos and finally get on board once they realize the dollar and other fiat currencies are in trouble due to gov't manipulation.
I wish I could crumple your tinfoil hat into a 1" diameter ball and see if any brains oozed out. You really understand the masses well don't you. Do you think they will also stock their basements with MREs. Thanks guys for the discussion. |
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