FOTO:FORTEPAN / Lőrincze Judit [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Hello Steemit community, this is my first post here! My field is writing on political and social subjects, but this first post is not about those subjects, it is about the Steemit website and concept.
I am very excited about the emergence of sites like Steemit. I think the idea of rewarding not only authors but also commenters under articles and even "curators" (a new concept to me) is just fantastic, and I truly believe this will spark another surge in the online revolution. Having been a blogger for 2 years now I have been frustrated by the lack of a route to making an income from the very important work that we bloggers do.
The reason I think this concept will spark another online revolution is because I believe it will incentivize people to become more active in public debate online on every subject from philosophy to scientific discovery. Some people will even be able to make lucrative careers out of this eventually simply as thought leaders. The possibilities for learning are immense - online teaching could be rewarded by this system as well.
The current avenues for online rewards are very limited and problematic. Many sites have donation options but very few people donate - in part frankly just because it is time consuming (and a possible security risk) to enter your credit card details on multiple different websites. If visitors to a website can now reward the author simply by a click of a mouse, they will be far more likely to do so. They are far more likely to put some serious effort into giving meaningful feedback under an article as well if they may receive a reward for that effort.
Advertisements are annoying and bring with them the possibility of undue influence over content. Youtube of course has monetized videos with the addition of adverts, but viewers have to sit through at least a segment of an annoying advert before the video they wanted to watch even begins. Youtube and Twitter also seem increasingly politically biased, a huge problem for anyone in the arena of political debate. I don't want people who disagree with me to be blocked from the debating platform I am using, I want to debate with them and defeat their bad ideas with reason and evidence!!!
Another problem for bloggers is simply getting people to read our articles. We have to spend a lot of time "advertising" our articles around the web, often with very few "bites". It is rather soul-destroying at times, although when we do get significant feedback it can be very rewarding in a purely psychological way. This is where the idea of curating comes in, because if people are being rewarded financially for publicizing articles they "liked", they are far more likely to do that.
I am particularly interested in the possibilities of this type of technology moving beyond a single website such as Steemit.com and becoming integrated in external sites. This interest comes from the fact that I have been running first my own personal blog, and this year also joined in a collaborative venture into which I have invested a huge amount of my own time (so far with zero financial reward). I don't really want to just drop this venture and move onto Steemit full time, what I want to do is hopefully integrate the Steemit technology with this collaborative website (participator.online) eventually. I believe this is a necessary stage for the revolution I describe to really take off. My initial researches suggest that Steemit is a technology that is more likely to enable me to do this, unlike say Minds.com.
In summary then I truly believe that the revolution in human thought that has already begun on the internet is about to go up a gear and really accelerate with the arrival of these reward based platforms. Any feedback will be very welcome, especially from anyone who has successfully integrated Steemit with external websites to any degree - so far I have struggled to find info. on this although I believe some people have already done it successfully.