Steem pyramid scheme revealed

[smooth]

Does the Steemit name convey this meaning:

Here's Jeff taking a STEAMIT all over himself on radio for 90 minutes yesterday:
https://www.freetalklive.com/podcast/2016-08-08

Jeff makes a very astute point at the 32 minute mark, where he reminds me that some allege that Facebook messes with their following and reach, so they build up their followers and then are at the mercy of the whims of Facebook.

Whereas, with a blockchain this will not be the case.

That is a major selling point to make to bloggers that forever they will be in control of their investment into their following.

Of course the caveat problem is Steem being DPoS (delegated-proof-of-stake) with 19 witnesses (delegates) and most of the stake controlled by a few guys. And Steem's license prevents forking, so if someone brings a legal action that forces Dan and Ned to censor the blockchain, then we the ecosystem are maybe fucked. So this ideal may not be strictly true for Steem.

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.

Any form of censorship of Steem/it would have to be explicit and would require fairly dramatic public action (such as electing their own witnesses and forking). At a minimum that is a gain in transparency.

It also means that the full nuclear option of a fork would have to be done even for small forms of censorship like deactivating a single account (unlike Twitter/Facebook/etc. who can do this with the push of a button). Again this is a large gain in terms of censorship-resistence, in practice.

[smooth]

Can you tell me where in the white paper? I don't remember reading about the ability to retire/destroy SBD.

I don't see a particular sentence but the concept is woven throughout the SBD section, for example in describing SBD as analogous to convertible notes, mentioning that conversion can only be done in one direction, etc.

Then how do we know which VESTS to transfer to the party who owns the SBD when a SBD is retired? Or what does it mean to destroy a SBD?

First of all converting SBD does not deliver VESTS, it delivers liquid STEEM (which can then be converted to VESTS via a power up). Second of all, VESTS are fungible so there is no such thing as "which VESTS".

[iamnotback]

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.

Any form of censorship of Steem/it would have to be explicit and would require fairly dramatic public action (such as electing their own witnesses and forking). At a minimum that is a gain in transparency.

It also means that the full nuclear option of a fork would have to be done even for small forms of censorship like deactivating a single account (unlike Twitter/Facebook/etc. who can do this with the push of a button). Again this is a large gain in terms of censorship-resistence, in practice.

Not necessarily true, if Dan and Ned sell their stake to Narc Suckerborg. Then the Graphene DPoS blockchain witness and full node servers can be made more private than they already are.

You may argue that the masses would stop using the site[1], and then in the same breath you (and/or others) argue that they won't care about the "pre"-mine either.

You (all) need to make up your mind. Do the users care or not? It is actually an extremely important question, because if the users don't care, then we are wasting our time with blockchains.

So you all better start to get my point about the naming and the entire point of viral attraction better be the ideology, else we are simply barking up the wrong tree with social networks on the blockchain. Note the way we sell it to them matters though. We might not emphasize government totalitarianism, and simply point to the kind of corporate abuse smooth mentions above. Which I presume is a more palatable notion to mainstream users than the fear of a 1984 government (which would likely alienate them making the site appear to be populated by tin foil hats and UFO apocalypse doomsters). A "pre"-mined PoS blockchain is a corporate blockchain. It puts the control in the hands of too few of entities which could sell out control at any time. And as I showed in my most recent blog, the debasement rate is far too low to diminish their stakes any time soon. Note if somehow Steem Inc could actually give away that 40% stake they hold as free signups (and/or spend it to diverse contractors and vendors) and if those aren't 85% abandoned as they appear to be from the steemd.com stats, then the stakes of the whales could perhaps be diminished to less than 50% faster, but alas that doesn't appear to be the case. Unfortunately we perhaps can't hope for the whales to sell their powered down STEEM POWER stake 1% a week, because that would likely crash the price as it appears to be doing.

(I love debating with smooth because he comes up with really clever logic, then it challenges me to come up with more clever logic than him. It is a fun chess and he often wins and sometimes I do too. Hope he is similarly not bored.)

P.S. For those who think I am nitpicking, please observe that it is a mathematical fact that Steem is not growing virally. The daily signups are not growing, they are flat. Steem is slowly failing. And that is a fact. Unless something changes (such as a mention on national TV), it is already checkmate in slow motion. So when you read my posts, realize I am trying to think of how to fix the concept with a competitor. If that turns you off, then put me on ignore. You aren't going to stop me with your dislike of me. The rewards gimmick is not working as a viral onboarding attraction. Unfortunately. It may also be possible to innovate on top of Steem without forking it ... I'm still in this analysis process so I can't yet conclude unequivocally ...



Edit: I've just realized that "steem" (as in steam) could also associate with locomotion. "Everybody is doing a new dance now, do the Locomotion ... so come on and do the locomotion with me":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNNW0SPkChI

Yeah I think that could be a great theme song for Steem:

https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/steem-it-come-on-do-the-locomotion-with-me

[1]

Note that someone could create a fork that is protocol compatible with the blockchain without violating the license which prevents forking the Steem source code. If such code was not ready, then those who attempted to fork the code of Steem without written permission of SteemIt, Inc. would be doing so illegally (which means if Narc Suckerborg bought SteemIt, Inc. he could legally fork the Steem source code). I am not quite sure how the law would treat users of the illegally forked source code, as opposed to those developers who forked it. Not clear who the license is enforceable upon   Even forking the protocol legally may not be sufficient, if the users simply continue to download their clients from Steemit.com which is then under the control of Narc Suckerborg. The users would blissfully receive the protocol that Mr. Suckerborg has decided they should receive. Afaics, it always distills down to that if the users don't care en mass, then there is no censorship resistance. Or we'd end up with a proliferation of perhaps non-interoperable protocols each serving a different set of political preferences. In other words, what I am really saying is that we don't want to end up with just one funnel Steemit. We want to embrace multiple blockchains and then write tools to interopt between them, because that is the natural path anyway.

[AlexGR]

"well, I don't care what it's called, as long as I get paid"

I don't know why you guys are still stuck on the getting paid delusion.

Most people are not going to be making any significant money on Steem via the blogging rewards system.

Do the math. Rewards are 7.75% of market cap yearly with 50,000 signed up users, so 0.0775 × $200m ÷ (12 × 50000) = $26 monthly per user. But the rewards are distributed non-linearly roughly in a power-law distribution where the upper 20% get 85% of the rewards, thus 80% of the users will get 0.15 × 0.0775 × $200m ÷ (12 × 40000) = $5 monthly. If you argue that actual usership is 1/10th of that, then multiple those figures by 10, but realize the system is failing at adoption then (and the market cap is way too high for the number of actual users). Social networks are typically valued at around $100 per user, if we are looking at the stable case down the line. Even if we up that to say $1000 with expectation of acceleration and more ecommerce than typical social networks ad funded models, it is still only $77.5 per year per user without factoring in the power-law distribution effect.

We need another reason for them to like to be on Steem.

Censorship resistance. In a world where social networks tweak their algorithms to bury what they don't like, in a world where social networks try to create upheaval in countries, or shape elections, or censor influential people from posting altogether, this is something that could be of great value.

[iamnotback]

Censorship resistance.

That is my point.

[Matt Guy]

Why the big sell off? Time to buy?

[MWD64]

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.....

yup.

smooth, you ever see this article?:

"The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed"
www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

It's kind of jaw dropping, but at the same time it's very much "of COURSE that's what this looks like in action."



MWD

[iamnotback]

More feedback from Steemians:

I'm really not as sure here. I don't think that the only reason people join is to earn a lot of money. I joined because @officalfuzzy told me that there was interesting tech stuff happening, and did end up earning some money. Better still though is the fact that the money causes people to:

• Have the time to produce great content
• Be incentivized to publish great content
• explore new lifestyles
  .....

And the rest, that's not written yet. The users who abandoned, should come back for the content, and if they want to earn, they should practice, practice, and practice their writing. Writing is really difficult and we're not all going to be successful in steemit terms at it from the get-go. That's alright.

What about coming for the idealism of not giving Facebook the control to censor our content which they are doing?

So we don't build up our following and then have someone else in control of that asset we invested to build. No one else should own and control our investment of effort, time, and creativity.

Edit: add this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOE1HFEL8XA

[smooth]

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.

Any form of censorship of Steem/it would have to be explicit and would require fairly dramatic public action (such as electing their own witnesses and forking). At a minimum that is a gain in transparency.

It also means that the full nuclear option of a fork would have to be done even for small forms of censorship like deactivating a single account (unlike Twitter/Facebook/etc. who can do this with the push of a button). Again this is a large gain in terms of censorship-resistence, in practice.

Not necessarily true, if Dan and Ned sell their stake to Narc Suckerborg. Then the servers can be made more private than they already are.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake. Censorship still requires a nuclear option, no matter who pushes the button.

[iamnotback]

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.

Any form of censorship of Steem/it would have to be explicit and would require fairly dramatic public action (such as electing their own witnesses and forking). At a minimum that is a gain in transparency.

It also means that the full nuclear option of a fork would have to be done even for small forms of censorship like deactivating a single account (unlike Twitter/Facebook/etc. who can do this with the push of a button). Again this is a large gain in terms of censorship-resistence, in practice.

Not necessarily true, if Dan and Ned sell their stake to Narc Suckerborg. Then the servers can be made more private than they already are.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake. Censorship still requires a nuclear option, no matter who pushes the button.

How do you figure? If the masses don't care how the backend works, they may not protest. The censorship could even be seen as positive by the masses, removing beheadings, etc.. And the occasional censorship of WeAreChange, etc may go entirely unnoticed by most.

Note please see my footnote edit in my prior post.

[smooth]

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.

Any form of censorship of Steem/it would have to be explicit and would require fairly dramatic public action (such as electing their own witnesses and forking). At a minimum that is a gain in transparency.

It also means that the full nuclear option of a fork would have to be done even for small forms of censorship like deactivating a single account (unlike Twitter/Facebook/etc. who can do this with the push of a button). Again this is a large gain in terms of censorship-resistence, in practice.

Not necessarily true, if Dan and Ned sell their stake to Narc Suckerborg. Then the servers can be made more private than they already are.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake. Censorship still requires a nuclear option, no matter who pushes the button.

How do you figure? If the masses don't care how the backend works, they may not protest. The censorship could even be seen as positive by the masses, removing beheadings, etc.. And the occasional censorship of WeAreChange, etc may go entirely unnoticed by most.

Note please see my footnote edit in my prior post.

If the entire system is replaced with a web site and the blockchain is entirely irrelevant and ignored, then sure. But then we don't need to discuss stake at all.

This is hard to do while still retaining the token rewards scheme. To get there, exchanges and others would need to accept the new change/fork to the back end. This change would be transparent. In other words, it is still a nuclear option.

[MWD64]

Censorship still requires a nuclear option, no matter who pushes the button.

So could Steemit be destroyed if someone posted a bunch of "illegal content" on there? If so, that's a HUGE flaw in a business plan considering the current state of The State.

How does Steemit deal with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or, creepy kiddie touchers posting links and pix. I know pix referenced on Steemit are hosted elsewhere, but if references to them are hardwired into the blockchain, and it would take a hard fork to remove them.....

Seems like those two things right there doom this to fail.

[iamnotback]

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.

Any form of censorship of Steem/it would have to be explicit and would require fairly dramatic public action (such as electing their own witnesses and forking). At a minimum that is a gain in transparency.

It also means that the full nuclear option of a fork would have to be done even for small forms of censorship like deactivating a single account (unlike Twitter/Facebook/etc. who can do this with the push of a button). Again this is a large gain in terms of censorship-resistence, in practice.

Not necessarily true, if Dan and Ned sell their stake to Narc Suckerborg. Then the servers can be made more private than they already are.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake. Censorship still requires a nuclear option, no matter who pushes the button.

How do you figure? If the masses don't care how the backend works, they may not protest. The censorship could even be seen as positive by the masses, removing beheadings, etc.. And the occasional censorship of WeAreChange, etc may go entirely unnoticed by most.

Note please see my footnote edit in my prior post.

If the entire system is replaced with a web site and the blockchain is entirely irrelevant and ignored, then sure. But then we don't need to discuss stake at all.

This is hard to do while still retaining the token rewards scheme. To get there, exchanges and others would need to accept the new change/fork to the back end. This change would be transparent. In other words, it is still a nuclear option.

ETC and ETH are both nuclear forks on a major exchange. Two different philosophies, the latter of which is Narc control.

Those interested in capturing a power vacuum use false-flags to achieve their goal. They know how to manipulate the masses.

Also please re-read my footnote, as I was adding to it while you were writing this reply.

I think you can just forget the notion of one blockchain Steem to rule them all.

P.S. Steemit is just a website with a corporate controlled blockchain already (and some minions who pretend it isn't to give the illusion that we have achieved decentralization). It seems you are contradicting yourself. Narcs can play this deception game also. The Larimers are writing the playbook.

[smooth]

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.

Any form of censorship of Steem/it would have to be explicit and would require fairly dramatic public action (such as electing their own witnesses and forking). At a minimum that is a gain in transparency.

It also means that the full nuclear option of a fork would have to be done even for small forms of censorship like deactivating a single account (unlike Twitter/Facebook/etc. who can do this with the push of a button). Again this is a large gain in terms of censorship-resistence, in practice.

Not necessarily true, if Dan and Ned sell their stake to Narc Suckerborg. Then the servers can be made more private than they already are.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake. Censorship still requires a nuclear option, no matter who pushes the button.

How do you figure? If the masses don't care how the backend works, they may not protest. The censorship could even be seen as positive by the masses, removing beheadings, etc.. And the occasional censorship of WeAreChange, etc may go entirely unnoticed by most.

Note please see my footnote edit in my prior post.

If the entire system is replaced with a web site and the blockchain is entirely irrelevant and ignored, then sure. But then we don't need to discuss stake at all.

This is hard to do while still retaining the token rewards scheme. To get there, exchanges and others would need to accept the new change/fork to the back end. This change would be transparent. In other words, it is still a nuclear option.

ETC and ETH are both nuclear forks on a major exchange. Two different philosophies, the latter of which is Narc control.

Those interested in capturing a power vacuum use false-flags to achieve their goal. They know how to manipulate the masses.

Also please re-read my footnote, as I was adding to it while you were writing this reply.

I think you can just forget the notion of one blockchain Steem to rule them all.

P.S. Steemit is just a website with a corporate controlled blockchain already (and some minions who pretend it isn't to give the illusion that we have achieved decentralization). It seems you are contradicting yourself. Narcs can play this deception game also. The Larimers are writing the playbook.

You're still ignoring the difference between decentralized control (which doesn't really exist here) and decentralized transparency, which does exist here.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake, whether it is Steemit or Facebook. For any such owner to fork the blockchain and censor it would be transparent. We already know, because Steemit Inc has told us (aside from common sense) that the steemit.com web site may be censored, and users who want to avoid that censorship will have to use different ways of accessing the blockchain. The blockchain is still censorship-resistant. Part of that resistance comes from the unavoidable transparency inherent in forking it to censor it. (A level of transparency that does not exist when Facebook, Twitter, etc. censor with no visibility or accountability by secretly manipulating the behavior of their servers.)

BTW, The term "The Larimers" is trolling (or perhaps you have been successful trolled by someone else with a "The Larimers" obsession) and false unless you have some evidence of more than one Larimer being in a position of authority. Ned is not a Larimer.

(I read your footnote.)

[iamnotback]

Afaik, we don't really have the data we need to know what is going on with Steem's adoption:

Note that Alexa rank is not linear when converted to page views, thus when comparing Reddit's global rank of 26 to Steemit's 17,563, the actual ratio in terms of page views is 1438, and not 17653 ÷ 26 = 679. For United States rank the ratio between the two w.r.t. to page views is 1033 which is closer to the 8799 ÷ 9 = 978 ratio of the ranks.

According to Alexa rank, we'd need 1000+ Steemits to match Reddit, but we'd also need 9 Reddits to match Facebook. But Google Trends seems to indicate that we'd need more than 9 Reddits to match Facebook (although the scale is not entirely clear). I read that Reddit has 234 million users and Facebook 1.71 billion, so that appears to be a ratio of 7.3.

So roughly as of now w.r.t. page views, we'd need 1000 Steemits to match Reddit and 10,000 to match Facebook.

But from steemd.com we can compute that roughly 85% of the signups are not active, so Steem has roughly 5000 - 10,000 users. So in terms of users, we'd need 20,000 - 40,000 copies of Steemit to match Reddit and 8 times that to match Facebook. This is because for now the Steemians are viewing many more pages than on Facebook. But this could be misleading for numerous reasons:

• early adopters are more enthusiastic
• activity on Facebook doesn't always reload the page, thus no page view incremented
• Facebook has so many mobile app users who may not be counted in Alexa's stats; whereas, Steem is primarily accessed from Steemit.com as of now.

So it is far too early to conclude that Steem is on the way to world domination.

Also note that the projection of daily signups increasing is very speculative given the extremely high volatility on the chart. Also we don't know to what degree this is a proliferation of Sybil attack accounts and/or actual increase in real people signing up.

And afaik we don't have good data on the account abandonment rate of real people, since afaik we can't easily differentiate which accounts are Sybils and which are real people.

So we are really lacking the data to make a determination of how well or poorly Steem is doing in terms of adoption and viral spread.

[smooth]

Afaik, we don't really have the data we need to know what is going on with Steem's adoption:

I agree. I place little value on the analysis of internal blockchain data that I've seen so far because I think there is a lot of account scamming abuse, along with non-abuse account creation that doesn't come from actual users (such as what was and is needed for mining). We don't have any good data on the magnitude of these nor how it has changed over time. I wouldn't rule out that someone could analyze internal usage data and convincingly account for these other factors, but I haven't see it.

I think the Alexa trend is mostly valid (and shows growth, but somewhat slow and slowing). I did see the earlier comments you are someone else posted about Alexa rank being bogus but I think that mostly applies to smaller sites like individual commerce sites and blogs. When applied to sites with wider public use, especially when reasonably highly-ranked, I think it is useful. For example, that steemit is now higher ranked than bitcointalk is a reasonable result consistent with the rate of posting and the number of active users I seen posting. That this is only recently the case is also consistent with my experience.

(And by "mostly valid" I mean that it shows a positive growth trend only. I don't think it has much if any quantitative meaning.)

But from steemd.com we can compute that roughly 85% of the signups are not active, so Steem has roughly 5000 - 10,000 users. So in terms of users, we'd need 20,000 - 40,000 copies of Steemit to match Reddit and 8 times that to match Facebook.

Steemit has about 5000 unique daily users (in practice slightly fewer because of bots). Reddit has about 1 million unique daily users (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic). I guess reddit has bots too, so not sure how that part compares.

The ratio is only about 200:1. I don't know if that is a good or bad stat in terms of prospects.

1 million reddit users is not surprising to me. Most people I talk to are not reddit users. Occasionally I run into them. With Facebook the experience is the opposite.

[iamnotback]

I think you can just forget the notion of one blockchain Steem to rule them all.

You're still ignoring the difference between decentralized control (which doesn't really exist here) and decentralized transparency, which does exist here.

(I read your footnote.)

How do you figure I ignored when I acknowledged the distinction in my footnote  

The point is that decentralized transparency naturally resolves to blockchain protocol proliferation.

There is no way you can put all the features and preferences users will want into one-size-fits-all protocol. There are tradeoffs of choices in the parameters of the protocol.

There is absolutely no technical reason users have to put their data only on one blockchain (although the economic reason with the tokenization might be an issue). Their UI clients can hypothetically interopt with multiple blockchains.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake, whether it is Steemit or Facebook. For any such owner to fork the blockchain and censor it would be transparent.

I think you are missing my latest implied point, which is that transparency is only orthogonal to control, if we have a proliferation of blockchains. Take into account my entire train of thought including the ability to capture the power vacuum by manipulating the minds of the masses (e.g. false flags).

So either we assume protocols can't proliferate because of interoption friction, and thus transparency is impotent because it becomes a winner-take-all political power vacuum, or we take the stance that blockchains can proliferate and UI clients can deal with this and thus there is no such power vacuum. I am leaning towards the latter.

We already know, because Steemit Inc has told us (aside from common sense) that the steemit.com web site may be censored, and users who want to avoid that censorship will have to use different ways of accessing the blockchain. The blockchain is still censorship-resistant. Part of that resistance comes from the unavoidable transparency inherent in forking it to censor it. (A level of transparency that does not exist when Facebook, Twitter, etc. censor with no visibility or accountability by secretly manipulating the behavior of their servers.)

Ditto what I wrote above.

BTW, The term "The Larimers" is trolling (or perhaps you have been successful trolled by someone else with a "The Larimers" obsession) and false unless you have some evidence of more than one Larimer being in a position of authority. Ned is not a Larimer.

It appears to be somewhat of a community euphemism for acts such as releasing Steem with a license that doesn't allow forking. I guess I just mimicked the community FUD for lack of time to repeat some long-winded description of the centralization issues which I have already done too many times. It was just a shortcut.

Suddenly father and son no longer communicate. Sorry I don't believe that. Look my stance is they can do what ever they want. And the community is free to make jokes about it. They need thick skin for what they did with the "sneaky" "pre"-mine, so I presume they can handle it. If for example, I was somehow brought into Steemit, Inc or something, then I'd need thick skin too. Not saying that will happen. I dunno.

Hey you used to troll "The Larimers". Funny isn't how our attitudes change. Lol. Relax man you know that is just cryptospeak around here.

[iamnotback]

But from steemd.com we can compute that roughly 85% of the signups are not active, so Steem has roughly 5000 - 10,000 users. So in terms of users, we'd need 20,000 - 40,000 copies of Steemit to match Reddit and 8 times that to match Facebook.

Steemit has about 5000 unique daily users (in practice slightly fewer because of bots). Reddit has about 1 million unique daily users (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic). I guess reddit has bots too, so not sure how that part compares.

The ratio is only about 200:1. I don't know if that is a good or bad stat in terms of prospects.

1 million reddit users is not surprising to me. Most people I talk to are not reddit users. Occasionally I run into them. With Facebook the experience is the opposite.

I read Medium has 30 or 40 million monthly unique users and appears that Reddit has about 17 million. Facebook has 1.13 billion daily active users on average for June 2016; 1.03 billion mobile daily active users on average for June 2016; 1.71 billion monthly active users.

So we can see that Facebook has 1000 times more reach than Reddit in terms of daily uniques. For monthly uniques, it is only 100 times, so this much mean that users return to Facebook daily but on Reddit they return within a month. So Alexa rank is not capturing this accurately.

So Steem is roughly 200,000 times smaller than Facebook by daily uniques. We do not have enough data yet for Steem to know the monthly uniques. It could be the case that the abandonment rate is very high and thus the dailies are just new signups cycled through the system, not aggregating to monthlies. In that case, the monthly uniques could be the same or even worse than the 200,000 ratio.

Again we concur, it is really difficult to analyze without better data from Steem. At least we have a rough idea that we are a long way from being able to conclude we are on the way to challenging Facebook.

[smooth]

Hey you used to troll "The Larimers". Funny isn't how our attitudes change. Lol. Relax man you know that is just cryptospeak around here.

I used the term to refer to Bitshares which did have two Larimers directly and publicly involved. Steemit does not.

(I'm not sure I would agree that I ever trolled them; mostly prior to Steem/it I ignored them; sorry r0ach, even true when you were a Bitshares pumper.)

Regarding the "one blockchain to rule them all", that never came from me, so I'm not going to address that straw man. I'm agnostic on how strong network effects are on blockchains, meaning, in the inverse, how likely it is for there to be many of them. I'm even agnostic on whether any blockchains are useful enough to survive long term.

[iamnotback]

Regarding the "one blockchain to rule them all", that never came from me, so I'm not going to address that straw man. I'm agnostic on how strong network effects are on blockchains, meaning, in the inverse, how likely it is for there to be many of them. I'm even agnostic on whether any blockchains are useful enough to survive long term.

Is it a strawman if I didn't attribute it to you explicitly? Perhaps there was an implied attribution which was begging for your clarification.

Good to hear you are agnostic (although I don't think that means you don't have an opinion of the likelihood). As you know, I am just trying to decide where I should try to focus my effort. I want to start coding, but I don't want to go waste my time down a deadend. So I am trying to ascertain whether I should try to partner up with Steem in some way (build some project on top of it, perhaps attempt to petition Steemit, Inc for funding) or go try to work on an alternative blockchain (or some combination of the two!)

It is a lot to think through and digest. There is technical, marketing, economics, politics, etc.. to consider.

I think it is not enough to classify the question as the strength of network effects because for example maybe (?) there can be very strong network effects without precluding strong internetwork effects as well. I dunno.


Edit: you did write upthread that a competitor would have an uphill climb against Steem's first mover advantage, but I guess that is somehow not the same as blockchain to rule all other of social networking blockchains (?). So it sort of did come from you. And I am not entirely disagreeing with you on that opinion. Again, I dunno.

Edit#2: I also want to emphasize that if Steem transitions to the masses, either the users need to become educated about the importance of censorship-resistance diligence, else I think it is likely that the open source mantra will be overrun and replaced with corporatism. Typically the masses are not diligent on anything that isn't cute and fun.