Steem pyramid scheme revealed

[iamnotback]

Bitcoin has not gone mainstream because ordinary people are creeped out by Crypto Culture...
(And the egomaniacal hyper-geeks that want to replace all things human with robots and code)...
So to point fingers at Steemit from Freaking BitcoinTalk, the single most degenerate site on the web, is laughable.  

Agree to some extent, but I think the more significant reason is because they haven't had any need for crypto or blockchains.

The only selling point of Steem is the lie that you can make money from blogging. Thus not compelling to a wide usership. Thus Steem is failing viral adoption.

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[iamnotback]

Otherwise they'd quit facebook the moment someone posted something they perceive as "hurtful" that took 500 likes.

My mother uses Facebook to communicate about dog rescue and she never looks at the feed page. So she has a need fulfilled and she is not offended.

My gf has told me she hates when Facebook shows her extreme violence and porn on her feed, and also she really hates when people add her to a group without her permission. But she stays on Facebook because all her contacts are there and she gets gratification that far exceeds those rarer transgressions (including lots of shares about cute dogs, clothes, etc).

Steem is trying to onboard and attract users away from existing established networks. Steem has a lot of bizarre philosophical babble that is going to be absolutely meaningless to my gf for example. And to my mom, I am sure she would get her nose bent of out joint 5 minutes after opening Steemit and she would NOT be coming back. She doesn't need that stress in her life. Also my mom told me she has no time to blog (age 70) even though she used to be a newspaper co-editor. And I know my gf would never write long-form blogs. She prefers short-form microblogging.

All I ever see when I open FB is all the updates of photos of friends. Facebook is never bombarding me with content that offends me. It serves my limited purpose as a communication tool only.

Edit: my gf recently wrote a microblog post on her FB share recently about how historically some Chinese women tied their feet in shoes that were too small. I was surprised that she wrote she had been researching this topic. She posted a photo and a link. She likes to get comments feedback on her microblog share posts.

[AlexGR]

-how to make money from these visitors (I think I've cracked this by proposing a different treatment: only serving ads to the non-logged users while registered/logged users have an ad-free experience)

You'll probably lack much of the data on the user's preferences and habits in order to make ads more relevant for significant revenue.

This is doing nothing to create an ecosystem for the token.

Rough guesstimate appears to me to be a waste. You also show new users that the site is another ad-fucked place.

I know the topic they are reading and I may have browsing history too (from other things they've read on steemit), not to mention cookies... so.... I have a pretty good starting point for targeted ads.

-how to incentivize them to register / participate as registered users to drop a few comments, hang around, etc.

Exactly. Make sure you blast them with bizarre content that offends them.

Lol...

[iamnotback]

You'll probably lack much of the data on the user's preferences and habits in order to make ads more relevant for significant revenue.

This is doing nothing to create an ecosystem for the token.

Rough guesstimate appears to me to be a waste. You also show new users that the site is another ad-fucked place.

I know the topic they are reading and I may have browsing history too (from other things they've read on steemit), not to mention cookies... so.... I have a pretty good starting point for targeted ads.

Thanks for repeating what I already know and not addressing any of my points.

Go quantify with actual revenue estimates your "pretty good" and then you might understand why I guesstimated it is a waste. Generally speaking if you are reverting to ad-funded, you've already lost.

[r0ach]

I completely agree it is generally insane for a man to marry in a Western country.

H.P. Lovecraft said he thought about killing himself before, but the main reason he would not do it is because of intellectual curiosity, that there's too many gaps in knowledge that exist and "adventures in antiquity".  Doing the generic marriage and living in the suburbs thing is kind of the equivalent of death in that regard.

[AlexGR]

Otherwise they'd quit facebook the moment someone posted something they perceive as "hurtful" that took 500 likes.

My mother uses Facebook to communicate about dog rescue and she never looks at the feed page. So she has a need fulfilled and she is not offended.

My gf has told me she hates when Facebook shows her extreme violence and porn on her feed, and also she really hates when people add her to a group without her permission. But she stays on Facebook because all her contacts are there and she gets gratification that far exceeds those rarer transgressions (including lots of shares about cute dogs, clothes, etc).

Steem is trying to onboard and attract users away from existing establish networks. Steem has a lot of bizarre philosophical babble that is going to be absolutely meaningless to my gf for example. And to my mom, I am sure she would get her nose bent of out joint 5 minutes after opening Steemit and she would NOT be coming back. She doesn't need that stress in her life. Also my mom told me she has no time to blog (age 70) even though she used to be a newspaper co-editor. And I know my gf would never write long-form blogs. She prefers short-form microblogging.

All I ever see when I open FB is all the updates of photos of friends. Facebook is never bombarding me with content that offends me. It serves my limited purpose as a communication tool only.

Reddit is smaller than FB or twitter precisely because reddit serves different needs than the other two networks.

Steemit is going to "compete" more in the reddit/forum/blogging demographics, rather than ...twitter/fb/instagram etc. Naturally, these demographics may be unsuited for people that are bored to read or write, that feel offended in everything they read, etc etc. You accept that and move on. If the target market drops from 2bn to 200mn or 50mn (+billions in page views from links), it's still a pretty large market.

Nobody will make a blockchain based or centralized facebook killer for the next couple of years. Even google+ failed... and they actually tried to onboard users by forcing them there through the associated services (gmail/youtube etc).

[AlexGR]

Thanks for repeating what I already know and not addressing any of my points.

Go quantify with actual revenue estimates your "pretty good" and then you might understand why I guesstimated it is a waste. Generally speaking if you are reverting to ad-funded, you've already lost.

I don't see it that way. If I'm not maximizing my revenue, it's money left on the table that could be used to fund my authors that could then increase my content and the content pull more users and more viewers which in turn bring in more ad revenue...

[iamnotback]

Thanks for repeating what I already know and not addressing any of my points.

Go quantify with actual revenue estimates your "pretty good" and then you might understand why I guesstimated it is a waste. Generally speaking if you are reverting to ad-funded, you've already lost.

I don't see it that way. If I'm not maximizing my revenue, it's money left on the table that could be used to fund my authors that could then increase my content and the content pull more users and more viewers which in turn bring in more ad revenue...

$1   (10,000 not signed in readers per blog post)

And the cost of showing new users an ad-fucked site.

Man I feel like you need me to explain everything to you 3 times before you get the point.

Accidentally deleted my prior post:

Generally speaking if you are reverting to ad-funded, you've already lost.

This is why Steemit got so much attention. It is creating payouts for blogging which are not normally seen from ad-funding.

Just do some simple math. A typical payout for type of targeting you are thinking of is perhaps $1 or less per CPM. The blog author would need a million (probably 10 million) readers to earn $1000 on a blog post. That ain't going to happen.

[smooth]

How do you recover your active key?

I have the master key and the post key, but can't find an option to recover the other keys.

Use the password reset with your owner key (I assume that is what you are referring to as the master key).

Bitcoin has not gone mainstream because ordinary people are creeped out by Crypto Culture...

Bitcoin hasn't gone mainstream because if I have to stay awake at night worrying about how the actions of Jihan Wu, or Gmaxwell reacting to his actions is going to do to the price, then we obviously have no Nash equilibrium.  Seems like the software was designed in a way assuming there would be so many individual miners that one person influencing all of them would not be possible, and the act of forking would involve just blind voting without collusion.  Bitcoin just has a lot of annoyances like this where you can't really justify it's market cap going equal or higher than metals.

Both wrong. Bitcoin hasn't gone mainstream because mainstream is happy with USD/EUR/etc. and Bitcoin doesn't give them the order of magnitude advantages that are necessary to overcome the huge network effect.

This was less true in 2009-2011 in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Many people were open to at least the possibility to think about replacing the existing system and be their own bank, even if that involved some compromises. Memories are short and now they are not.

Crypto as mainstream is waiting for the next financial crisis to even have enough potential to get off the ground that people are willing to really invest in trying to make that happen. For now it is fringe uses (though this includes some very large ones potentially, just not "mainstream"), experiments, and a solution in search of a problem.

[iamnotback]

Reddit is smaller than FB or twitter precisely because reddit serves different needs than the other two networks.

Steemit is going to "compete" more in the reddit/forum/blogging demographics, rather than ...twitter/fb/instagram etc. Naturally, these demographics may be unsuited for people that are bored to read or write, that feel offended in everything they read, etc etc. You accept that and move on. If the target market drops from 2bn to 200mn or 50mn (+billions in page views from links), it's still a pretty large market.

Medium is only surviving on venture funding. There is no significant business model for blogging sites. The revenue math does not work. Medium is frantically trying to find a revenue model now, and they will of course fail (see the link below for why).

Reddit is a very low cost operation that generates a measly $8 million of revenue which is perhaps significant enough for the people who run it, but would amount to nothing for the bloggers if it was distributed to them.

Btw, make sure you read this, so you can understand the background on my guesstimate of why your idea was a waste:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/snapchats-valuation-based-single-flawed-assumption-dare-obasanjo

Nobody will make a blockchain based or centralized facebook killer for the next couple of years. Even google+ failed... and they actually tried to onboard users by forcing them there through the associated services (gmail/youtube etc).

You don't compete with Facebook by attacking its strengths, i.e. that everyone is already there. Instead you leverage Facebook's strengths.

You need some compelling activity that Facebook can't quickly replicate, which is also extremely popular.

And that activity needs to have a business model. If you are going ad-funded, then make sure you read the link I provided above.

[AlexGR]

Thanks for repeating what I already know and not addressing any of my points.

Go quantify with actual revenue estimates your "pretty good" and then you might understand why I guesstimated it is a waste. Generally speaking if you are reverting to ad-funded, you've already lost.

I don't see it that way. If I'm not maximizing my revenue, it's money left on the table that could be used to fund my authors that could then increase my content and the content pull more users and more viewers which in turn bring in more ad revenue...

$1   (10,000 not signed in readers per blog post)

And the cost of showing new users an ad-fucked site.

Man I feel like you need me to explain everything to you 3 times before you get the point.

Accidentally deleted my prior post:

Generally speaking if you are reverting to ad-funded, you've already lost.

This is why Steemit got so much attention. It is creating payouts for blogging which are not normally seen from ad-funding.

Just do some simple math. A typical payout for type of targeting you are thinking of is perhaps $1 or less per CPM. The blog author would need a million (probably 10 million) readers to earn $1000 on a blog post. That ain't going to happen.

It's additional income, not exclusive income.

Plus, even as additional income, a steem-like platform can do something that is not ordinarily possible by typical ad schemes: Decentralize the ad-buying / ad-placing process and allow 100% of the revenue to go to the author, instead of 30-50-70%.

You create an interface in steemit for advertisers, they login, buy SDs or STEEM, and then spend it on ads in selected content / topics or selected authors they want to sponsor. It'll have some failsafe to ensure the ads are not abusive/porn/etc etc, and off you go with 100% revenue to the author (almost unheard of).

[iamnotback]

It's additional income, not exclusive income.

Are you blind?

And the cost of showing new users an ad-fucked site.

You gain < $1 per blog in revenue (which no one is interested in!) and then you impact the new users experience with the site by showing them ads. You will lose more in cost of attrition of news users due to being bombarded with ads, than you will gain from revenue that isn't even compelling to anyone.

Why do you force me to write the same points over and over again. You are going to put me in a position where I am compelled to never converse with you due to the very low S/N ratio.

You don't seem to contemplate that adding features is not free. There are ramifications which can be worse than anything gained from the feature.

[iamnotback]

Bitcoin has not gone mainstream because ordinary people are creeped out by Crypto Culture...

Bitcoin hasn't gone mainstream because if I have to stay awake at night worrying about how the actions of Jihan Wu, or Gmaxwell reacting to his actions is going to do to the price, then we obviously have no Nash equilibrium.  Seems like the software was designed in a way assuming there would be so many individual miners that one person influencing all of them would not be possible, and the act of forking would involve just blind voting without collusion.  Bitcoin just has a lot of annoyances like this where you can't really justify it's market cap going equal or higher than metals.

Both wrong. Bitcoin hasn't gone mainstream because mainstream is happy with USD/EUR/etc. and Bitcoin doesn't give them the order of magnitude advantages that are necessary to overcome the huge network effect.

Yes same as what I wrote upthread. But the crypto weirdness (thefts, long passwords, hardware wallets, etc) also is a factor that will prevent mass adoption even if there is a compelling need for it, but it is not the first impediment as we agree.

Btw as you I assume know, @dan has already pointed the way to potential solutions and I have even suggested to him in a comment how to rectify one of the other aspects (which he read because he upvoted my comment).

This was less true in 2009-2011 in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Many people were open to at least the possibility to think about replacing the existing system and be their own bank, even if that involved some compromises. Memories are short and now they are not.

Nope. They were less willing then than they are now, or roughly the same. It was only the tinfoil hat nerds who were poised in the wake of subprime collapse. And we've already onboarded them. Mainstream nerds (the non-tinfoil hat variety) haven't gone all in yet on crypto, because the clear use case remains dubious.

Crypto as mainstream is waiting for the next financial crisis to even have enough potential to get off the ground that people are willing to really invest in trying to make that happen.

Nope and specifically on the word "mainstream". Perhaps they will jump on the next bubble, and if Coinbase, Paypal, etc have made onboarding easy as pie. I think more likely we are waiting for the US stock market to skyrocket, which may reignite mass participation in speculation. The masses have been on the sidelines of bubbles since 2008. They've been hoarding cash, which is evident in the plummeting velocity of money.

For now it is fringe uses (though this includes some very large ones potentially, just not "mainstream"), experiments, and a solution in search of a problem.

Agreed except I don't agree very large ones potentially, until the second impediment is rectified.

[AlexGR]

It's additional income, not exclusive income.

Are you blind?

And the cost of showing new users an ad-fucked site.

You gain < $1 per blog in revenue (which no one is interested in!) and then you impact the new users experience with the site by showing them ads. You will lose more in cost of attrition of news users due to being bombarded with ads, than you will gain from revenue that isn't even compelling to anyone.

Why do you force me to write the same points over and over again. You are going to put me in a position where I am compelled to never converse with you due to the very low S/N ratio.

You don't seem to contemplate that adding features is not free. There are ramifications which can be worse than anything gained from the feature.

You are answering on a misunderstanding you hold. The ads, in the proposal I wrote above, is not for registered users. It's only for visitors - the kind of traffic which I expect will dominate in the future - and which, to you, the web server, are "free riders".

Once a user registers and is logged in, pufff... all ads disappear. So there is no attrition. And the ads don't have to be invasive. I don't close every tab that has an ad. But I will close it if it throws me a few popups, if it is extremely spammy, etc etc. Only porn sites / casinos / illegal tv streams / torrent sites have that kind of spammy ads where you want to close the browser ASAP.

As for reddit, just because reddit sucks at monetizing their content doesn't mean it's not doable. You analyze the failures, improve and move on.

[iamnotback]

It's additional income, not exclusive income.

Are you blind?

And the cost of showing new users an ad-fucked site.

You gain < $1 per blog in revenue (which no one is interested in!) and then you impact the new users experience with the site by showing them ads. You will lose more in cost of attrition of news users due to being bombarded with ads, than you will gain from revenue that isn't even compelling to anyone.

Why do you force me to write the same points over and over again. You are going to put me in a position where I am compelled to never converse with you due to the very low S/N ratio.

You don't seem to contemplate that adding features is not free. There are ramifications which can be worse than anything gained from the feature.

You are answering on a misunderstanding you hold. The ads, in the proposal I wrote above, is not for registered users. It's only for visitors - the kind of traffic which I expect will dominate in the future - and which, to you, the web server, are "free riders".

WTF  

I think you don't understand the English language. Try again to read what I wrote. In your proposal, the new users who come to the site and are not registered yet, will see ads, which will impact on their opinion of the site and (most likely) lead to a higher attrition rate. The revenue gained is so miniscule that is can't be argued to be worth the risk of attrition. Nobody is interested in $1 of revenue per blog. This is the reason everyone is excited about Steem, because ad-funded blogging is not worth it.

If you presume that "new users" means only signed in (registered) users, then you lack the ability to infer meaning from context. Obviously I am not stupid enough to have not understood your proposal. Do you think my IQ is that low.

[smooth]

Nope. They were less willing then than they are now, or roughly the same. It was only the tinfoil hat nerds who were poised in the wake of subprime collapse. And we've already onboarded them. Mainstream nerds (the non-tinfoil hat variety) haven't gone all in yet on crypto, because the clear use case remains dubious.

Disagree and I wasn't even talking about nerds of any kind. Maybe you were out of touch being in the Philippines but in developed countries people were very willing to reexamine the status quo find an alternative to bankers and especially their bailouts. It was just colossally unpopular and very much at the front of mainstream financial desires for 2-3 years. Bitcoin wasn't ready to accommodate that demand, of course, or it may have actually happened.

Nobody cares now, except of course the tinfoil types who always care. I don't believe Dan's innovations are enough to overcome the network effect of the legacy system unless there is another push to make mainstream people want to get away from it (i.e. another major crisis with deeply unpopular bailouts or some other obvious clusterfuck).

[AlexGR]

It's additional income, not exclusive income.

Are you blind?

And the cost of showing new users an ad-fucked site.

You gain < $1 per blog in revenue (which no one is interested in!) and then you impact the new users experience with the site by showing them ads. You will lose more in cost of attrition of news users due to being bombarded with ads, than you will gain from revenue that isn't even compelling to anyone.

Why do you force me to write the same points over and over again. You are going to put me in a position where I am compelled to never converse with you due to the very low S/N ratio.

You don't seem to contemplate that adding features is not free. There are ramifications which can be worse than anything gained from the feature.

You are answering on a misunderstanding you hold. The ads, in the proposal I wrote above, is not for registered users. It's only for visitors - the kind of traffic which I expect will dominate in the future - and which, to you, the web server, are "free riders".

WTF  

I think you don't understand the English language. Try again to read what I wrote. In your proposal, the new users who come to the site and are not registered yet, will see ads, which will impact on their opinion of the site and lead to a higher attrition rate.

Ads on the internet are a fact of life. FB, Youtube, everyone has them - except wikipedia which is begging for donations every year. And you can't get rid of these ads in all those large sites without hacks.

In this case you tell them sign up and make the ads vanish. It's an incentive to register. If they don't register fuck them and let them see the ads. I, as steemit, lost nothing. After all, a reddit-type site can only have so many registered users due to the issues you mentioned upthread. This is not FB to attract billions - blogging/foruming etc is a "niche" inside the social networks market that will only attract a limited audience. So all those free-riders (that would never register anyway) get to pay something indirectly.

[r0ach]

The public is not like apeshit level stupid.  It's not that Bitcoin is too hard to use or anything, it's that they don't see it as a store of value.  Due to things like rough consensus attacks (ETH vs ETC) and all the black swans that can send Bitcoin to zero, the only people putting money into Bitcoin instead of silver and gold are traders with a large appetite for risk, which is not a very large demographic.  Even with metals being a superior store of value, the general public doesn't even own any of those right now, so they're obviously not going to be buying tons of Bitcoin until the chart below begins to change:

(the other takeaway of the chart below is that everything else is in a bubble that will soon collapse while metals skyrocket)

[smooth]

Agree with you r0ach. tldr people are happy with dollars. Disagree they know or even intuitively know about rough cnonsensus attacks and all that shit. Just happy with their Big 4 banks, credit/debit cards, and USD. Simple as that.

[iamnotback]

Nope. They were less willing then than they are now, or roughly the same. It was only the tinfoil hat nerds who were poised in the wake of subprime collapse. And we've already onboarded them. Mainstream nerds (the non-tinfoil hat variety) haven't gone all in yet on crypto, because the clear use case remains dubious.

Disagree and I wasn't even talking about nerds of any kind. Maybe you were out of touch being in the Philippines but in developed countries people were very willing to reexamine the status quo find an alternative to bankers and especially their bailouts. It was just colossally unpopular and very much at the front of mainstream financial desires for 2-3 years. Bitcoin wasn't ready to accommodate that demand, of course, or it may have actually happened.

Seems you are out of touch? The mainstream were not at all considering any of that. You might be thinking about your cohorts in the financial industry? That isn't the mainstream.

The mainstream have only heard of Bitcoin because it reached $1000. But it all happened too fast and was too crypto weird for them to jump into the bubble. And they were scared away from jumping into bubbles by the 2008/9 crash.

I was very aware of what was going on in the USA, because I have contacts there and because I was writing weekly articles for goldbug sites, so I was doing a lot of reading on current events.

Never did any of the masses move their money any where but under the mattress. You could for example remember the Peter Schiff interviews at the Occupy Wallstreet, and there was no interest in seeking out alternative places to put money. All the focus was on protesting corruption and concentration of wealth. The mainstream was focused on fixing the system, not bailing out.

Nobody cares now, except of course the tinfoil types who always care. I don't believe Dan's innovations are enough to overcome the network effect of the legacy system unless there is another push to make mainstream people want to get away from it (i.e. another major crisis with deeply unpopular bailouts or some other obvious clusterfuck).

The mainstream will come in if it is bubble, they are back into dot.com speculation mode, and there is a super easy way for them to onboard that doesn't have any crypto weirdness. Or if there is some significant overlooked yet untapped use case for Bitcoin that comes along. Otherwise they will never come onboard Bitcoin. I don't think they will come onboard Bitcoin due to a financial crisis, because the last thing they'd want is what they perceive to be more weirdness and unsafety.

As for another way to onboard them (not Bitcoin), there is a way. Steem has demonstrated a core principle, but seems to me they didn't get it quite right. And you will hear it from me hopefully soon.