Thanks for coming here to discuss+debate. The more we can learn, the better.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about in terms of monetizing content consumption. It's very clear Bitcoin investors, (which makes up 98% of the STEEM market), are paying content creators. How much the content creators are paid by these Bitcoin investors is determined by the curators. That's the entirety of the system in its current form. So I wrote the article asking, "What tangible value do Bitcoin investors get in return for STEEM."
In the context of professional content creation, where independent creators are a subset, the entirety of one's living is earned through selling produced content. For a filmmaker this is charging people to see their movie, for a author this is charging people to read their work, for a game developer it's people buying and playing their game. Steemit in no way in its current form gives Bitcoin investors any direct value. Sure, you may say professionals dabble in Steemit as you stated above, but it will in no way facilitate the development of professional content. If a Bitcoin investor can directly broker a deal with a producer for a cut of a production's revenue, vs buying STEEM power... From a strict investment point of view, buying STEEM power as a Bitcoin investor looking to make a legitimate ROI (one procured from actual productivity), is essentially a gracious donation to STEEM users.
You appear to be missing the point that the business model of Steem is to onboard many users, then sell them a microtransactions ecosystem that has yet to be fully developed. So far, they have the 3 second block period confirmations of the Graphene DPoS blockchain and the claimed high transaction rate headroom which currently Bitcoin's blockchain can't do (and Lightning Networks for Bitcoin has other technical hurdles to cross yet).
The content is there to engage the usership in order to build an ecosystem for gamification and selling things online, including for example selling content, e.g. selling music downloads.
But he fails to understand that the value of a social network is not its content, but its users ongoing use of the site due to their investment in the communities of the site.
Shut the fuck up for a second, and stop making assumptions.
You write with the similar profane cockiness as your accomplice MPeX (the self-proclaimed DAO cracker). It is somewhat of an entertaining joust. So is the sport of boxing. Do you do both?
A social network is not valuable at all. If so Reddit would be profitable already (after a decade or something), and it wouldn't have taken Facebook a quarter of a billion dollars and a decade to become profitable. Social networks are indicative of bubbles. Just because Facebook was able to avoid having their bubble completely popped doesn't make them a success story.
There is no value to be mined from Steemit from the "users' ongoing use of the site", because they aren't producing anything of value. Using Steemit will not yield flying cars, or cold fusion.
If you knew about my post history, I was the one telling everyone months ago that Steem and Synereo would fail because the advertising revenue per user per year for the social networks averages less than $20. So of course they aren't very profitable businesses ($20 is such a small morsel of a user's annual value production).
Everyone is still trying to find other demand cases for crypto-currencies other than Bitcoin's use as a quasi-legal wire transfer and bank avoidance tool.
It is thought that perhaps the free market can open up new currency uses in the microtransactions sphere. Yes we all know about why microtransactions haven't been adopted thus far. We have linked to the research articles on that.
One thought is that more people can be come content creators, not just dumb consumers of content (which makes them dumb over time).
In fact research has shown consuming large amounts of social media usually reduces critical thinking and overall intellect, so trying to attribute ANY value to a social network seems retarded. How about people actually go outside and socialize, instead of sitting behind a computer screen pretending to socialize?
Dude are you a 60 year old dinosaur? The world is changing and you better adapt.
We are on the cusp of changing social networking into a productive activity. And meeting outside physically is as inhibiting to exploration as gold is to wire transfers. You seem to be oblivious to the power of the efficiency of the speed-of-light.
He fails to understand that indie content can be a lot more interesting and precisely targeted to smaller audiences (coteries) than Hollywood content.
Dude. You are so uninformed in regards to the entertainment marketing machine. Most indie artist who do it out of love, say Diggable Planets, still have to eat, they just care less about the monetization of their content. They are the ones where "enough" is an reachable goal. For these people the most efficient machine for distributing their work is the best machine.
Also the one that gives them the most useful networking with fans.
Steemit is not one of them.
Lets say the value in Steemit is the eyeballs attached. Well how do you get eyeballs to see your content? Steem Power. So you go and buy a bunch of Steem and conver it to Steem Power just to upvote your content visibility. It makes the front page of course, but you find that there is a 1% click through rate, that is only 1% of people convert to your personal website from Steemit. On top of that only 10% of that 1% actually purchases something. Until there is a sane market for Steem, (which I doubt there ever will be), the PPC bids for Youtube, Google, etc. ads are far more efficient, and produce far more revenue per dollar invested. Even then the targeted nature of internet advertising has to be done with a great deal of finesse or you end up losing money on your advertising campaign due to low conversion rates.
You don't yet understand that the voting system is an onboarding gimmick. It was designed to psychologically fool people into joining.
The end goal is to create an efficient means for content distribution, networking, and sales. I also have my doubts that they can achieve it. But at least I recognize the conceptual potential.
If brand advertising becomes the bread and butter of Steemit, then the indie creator automatically gets pushed out of the trending stack. In this case large corporations are the STEEM power whales and use Steem as essentially a giant billboard.
Agreed.
Either way, STEEM has a lot of problems to figure out before its valuable. And honestly due to lack of acknowledgement of them or outright denial, I don't see it becoming valuable ever.
Agreed.
Your idealistic assumptions are myopic. I'm only making realistic evaluations, with valid concerns. Not one person has convinced me I wouldn't be a bagholder if I were to buy STEEM, and it seems other BTC investors are realizing this as the price dropped 0.0059 to 0.0041 since the release of my article.
I wasn't making assumptions. I am bearish on Steem economically. I was correcting you on what might be possible conceptually. I presume you aren't aware that I am contemplating whether I might create a Steem competitor. And I would structure many aspects of it differently.
