As I seem to understand it, the Steemit platform and the Steem cryptocurrency itself are experiencing some systematic problems. Deflationary pressures on price, lack of retention of quality contributors and curators, increasingly automated interactions via bots, lack of investment in the platform, are but some of the problems that may threaten the long-term viability of the Steem blockchain. Many of Steemit’s key indicators (user retention, user activity) are either rolling over or maintaining a downward trend since around August.
It would seem that Steemit just isn’t gaining the mainstream traction that early proponents and believers in the system thought it would. Therefore:
I would like to propose the creation and implementation of a Mobile-based Mirror of Steemit.com for the People’s Republic of China, in order to attract both new capital investment and increase user adoption.
I would just like to preface this proposal with a disclaimer that I am merely offering practical and realistic considerations for a successful introduction of Steem to the Chinese market. Though I am one of the most principled supporters of all forms of non-violent liberty, and am sickened by government censorship of people's most basic and fundamental freedoms of speech and thought; these suggestions laid-out below are simply a reflection of the absolute necessities and requirements for compliance with Chinese regulations. It is not my purpose henceforth to discuss matters of ethics, but merely to offer a concrete and functional outline and roadmap for a project that I believe in the long-term would have the potential to dramatically increase the global monetary value of the Steem blockchain, as well as increasing the attention it deserves to receive internationally. Thank you for your time.
Also I would like to extend a big thank-you to @Lexiconical, for inciting me to write this proposal, discussing the idea in a continuous back-and-forth, as well as offering his suggestions and insights, and making edits to this post to make it more appealing to the good people here at Utopia.IO
1. China is the biggest smartphone market in the world.
For 2017, the number of smartphone users in China is estimated to reach 663.37 million, with the number of smartphone users worldwide forecast to exceed 2 billion users by that time. Source
That means that a quarter of the people using Apps in the world are currently located in Mainland China (excluding Taiwan and Hong-Kong), where to my knowledge, Steemit is completely unheard of. (I can attest to this because I can access it here without using my VPN). Currently, Steemit is not on the government censor’s naughty-list (even though there is a rather large Chinese community of Hong-Kong and ROC based users active on Steemit).
It's probably already on their watch-list, given the kind of strong-libertarian and freedom-loving currents that thrive on Steemit, but apparently they haven't had a reason to preemptively ban it. It seems possible to me that they are waiting to see how this concept evolves before taking any action?
This is a common sight in China's public spaces, to see everyone's attention being completely absorbed by their smart phones
2. China is the fastest growing economy in the world.
This is no secret. For decades now the average Chinese household median income has been growing. This has lead to the emergence of what the Western media call ‘The burgeoning Chinese middle-class’.
A consequence of this phenomenon that is often less well understood and explored is the liberalization of the Chinese economy. This phenomenon, the advent of an explosion in Chinese economic muscle in the world that goes well beyond being ‘The world’s factory’ (i.e: a mainly export-driven society), is huge; and we are just beginning to see the tipping point of China transitioning from an export-driven economy to a domestic consumption driven-economy like the United States.
Apps such as Alipay (支付宝) that allow people to manage their bank account, pay their utilities and rent, order food, buy movie tickets, make travel and booking arrangements, among many other functionalities, have propped up left-right-and-center. And they are light years ahead of the West in terms of functionality, compared to Apple Pay and other similar Digital Money apps used globally. The adoption rate of these technologies happens almost over-night it would seem, as today every single vendor in China readily accepts these Apps in their day-to-day transactions.
China’s most successful messaging app also functions as a social network. WeChat (微信) took the market by storm just a few years ago. It allows Chinese users to post statuses, share links, upload photos, create groups, as well as integrating digital wallet functions similar to Alipay.
WeChat and Alipay have become so widespread that it would be hard to imagine Chinese society today without them.
Whole other segments of Chinese society have also shifted to App-based marketing strategies. For example, Ofo and Mobike are two successful giants that have successfully placed rent-a-bike solutions all over the major cities. One has but to enter the code on the back of the bike, or scan the QR code to unlock the bike and use it all throughout China.
Regarding the sphere of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin would be nowhere near as successful as it is today without its mass adoption in China. Regardless of real global volumes of trade, China is the aforementioned leader in Bitcoin mining and trading. The government has expressed concerns over its ability to regulate Bitcoin, however, no concrete plans to halt its adoption by Chinese society have yet been proposed.
The Chinese public is very keen on adopting new technologies and I predict that within a few months of Steem being introduced in an acceptable and appropriate format to the Chinese market that 80 year old grandmas would be posting 3 original posts a day and loving the Steemit experience.
3. It doesn’t take much to incentivize the Chinese.
One of the problems with user retention for the Steemit community is that many people who would give it the good old college try, find that after spending hours and hours formatting their posts and creating original content, are dismayed by the lack of traction that it gains: 3 cent payoffs just seem like a waste of their time. (I can attest to this as I convinced several of my friends to join the platform and they all gave up on it because they saw it as a waste of their productive energies).
In China, people are used to being underpaid for their labour. This does not dissuade them one bit from working ardently. The Chinese have a formidable work-ethic that is probably unparalleled with any other country in the world.
They get up at 6 in the morning and stop work at 8 at night, doing all kinds of side jobs on the side, just to add a few extra bucks in their pocket at the end of the month.
I confidently predict that not only would Chinese users adopt these technologies much faster than the average Western user, successfully adopting markdown and HTML within seconds (and formatting professional and skillful posts within days of adopting the technology), but they would be happy, dare I say excited, to put in all that work and receive a mere 30 cents payout for all their work. Especially if they believed that there was a meritocratic principle to the platform, and that they believed if they just worked hard and kept at it, they would one day hit it big.
Chinese people have no problem starting from the bottom. If I may say,they’re frickin’ ballers. They know they can make it. This is the modern spirit of the Chinese population. No matter what the problem, they believe it can be overcome by putting all their minds on it and figuring out what the fix is.
4. Tremendous and untapped potential for Steem
To my knowledge, there is tremendous potential for Steem and Steemit-Mirrors to blow up, but one of the key factors that has stunted Steem’s growth is the steep learning curve, and lack of a proper marketing campaign to help it gain global traction.
In 2007, Facebook and Youtube were legal in the People’s Republic of China.
One of the factors that ended up getting these services banned in China was the fact that foreign media was being indiscriminately shared around, especially ‘Western propaganda’, that tarnished the image of the Party and threatened China’s national security. With no way for the government censor’s to remove ‘dangerous’ content from the platform, the whole platform had to be done away with. So it was just simply banned.
Given the problems that I outlined in my introduction, Steemit could use a certain kind of reboot. China could be an ideal testing ground for such a reboot, and there is no reason why the underlying technology behind Steemit would have to banned if it did not threaten the Chinese Communist Party the way that YouTube and Facebook did back when they were widely available in China.
I may find myself to be alone in this opinion, but if the overall concept of Steem-backed social media blogging is to survive and the future success of the Steem blockchain is to be safeguarded and its promise fulfilled, it’s going to need further capitalization and an expanding, consistent user-base.
China could provide both of these in abundance. Demographically speaking, there is no shortage of supply of Chinese investors looking for the next big multi-billion dollar idea, and technologists seeking to develop and promote new technologies that will benefit China’s economy and population’s social cohesiveness are always eager to supply rich investors with new products to invest in.
5. Here are just some of the considerations for introducing Steem to the Chinese market.
If a Steemit Mirror were not only to survive for any amount of time in China, but thrive and gain widespread adoption (and with it an influx of capital the likes of which Steem has probably never seen), it would need to have a party-friendly user interface, and would probably need to be mostly mobile-based.
I’m speculating on a hunch here, but from my understanding of censorship in China, information could most likely be added to the blockchain without government backlash, allowing for compliance with whatever regulation currently exists and whatever new regulations may come to pass regarding these information based services.
These are the initial considerations that come to mind, though further research would need to be done in order to properly identify the potential features and tweaks that would need to be made to any Chinese Steemit Mirror. (Please understand I'm merely acting as the messenger here. I by no means would of my own volition desire imposing any of these conditions, but they would be a nonnegotiable requirement here in China).
- An ability to censor content on the Mirror:
Post content, tags, pictures and other forms of information available on the Chinese Steemit Mirror and App would have to include built-in filters that could be used by the government censors to track, identify, modify, block and remove content as appropriate.
Additionally, for posts and tags that circumvent the filters, (or clever and sophisticated terms that bypass the filters,) there would have to be some kind of flagging functionality to alert government censor’s that a certain post violates the user-terms of the platform and thus can be removed/censored from the mirror. (Not from the blockchain itself, but all the content of those posts would have to be removable/deleted as well as the posts being visible on the mirror app to other users).
As it stands, the Chinese censors have incredibly good tools for detecting this information and are very good at suppressing it. For example: any WeChat group chat with more than 3 users is monitored by Chinese censors.
It’s too expensive for them to bug everybody’s home and listen and record everything that people say with their mouths. Instead, they focus their energies on mass-surveillance through mobile technology, and are incredibly responsive when it comes to neutralizing any undesired information, and preventing it from gaining any kind of mainstream traction within the Apps themselves.
Complying with Chinese regulations regarding their censorship tools would be the only requirement for a Steemit mirror and Steem itself to gain widespread traction and adoption in China. - Mobile identification
This is a key feature that would need to be considered. In China everything is not only verified electronically by text-message, but often requires a government-compliant form of verification. For Chinese people, this is their national ID number (身份证明号). The government will obviously and necessarily need a way to track and monitor everything that Chinese users are writing and posting; anonymous and untraceable posting would not be tolerated very long by the government. It goes against every freedom loving bone in my body, but a Chinese mirror would have to be accommodating to the Chinese state’s national security needs.
As a sidenote, willing and able Chinese users may of their own free-will discover ways of bypassing these measures and spreading their stigmatized dissident opinions anonymously, and though the international Steemit community could cheer these heroic and badass users on, the app would still have to be designed with the idea of trying to prevent that from happening as much as possible in mind. - Flexibility.
If this Steemit mirror could bend over backwards and relegate all the required levers of control to government censors, and there was a potential for investors to make oodles of money, while Chinese users could get excited about earning a few extra yuan per month for their social media blogging... it would be the win-win-win scenario of the decade concerning Steem’s future value: for people already invested in Steem globally, the Chinese state, and Chinese bloggers.
How does this kind of censorship work?
Controlling content using filters: for example, tags and sentences such as ‘Chinese Officials Lying’, ‘Corruption’, ‘Scandal’, just to name a few buzzwords, would need to be blocked by a filter that denies posting content using these words. If you would like to know more about how this currently works on platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, QQ and other Apps, a link to an article can be found here.
For blogs and micro blogs, it works in a similar fashion. Pages will be inaccessible, or content will be edited or removed without the author's approval.
This could in theory take the form of removing politically sensitive sentences from poster's articles (rendering them missing/invisible), or in some cases, completely deleting the entire post from the mirror. That would be up to the censors' discretion.Mobile Identification on most apps takes this form. People can usually log in to most of their services using their mobile numbers. It is currently illegal to have a phone number that is not registered to one's national ID number. (This doesn't dissuade Chinese hackers from supplying SIMs registered to fake names, but this isn't a widely practiced norm for most Chinese.)
All apps that allow people to connect require this kind of mobile identification
How to craft a Chinese Steemit mirror?
As for who would write the code for and host this Steem mirror, a public bid could be organized where Chinese tech companies all compete. The company that submits the best action plan for the creation, implementation and hosting of the Mirror, gets the Steemit-community backed vote of approval and green light. The Steemit Witnesses could throw their weight behind the company that had the most experience coding for mobile online-media apps that comply with Chinese regulators, and who can do it the cheapest way possible. Whichever Chinese tech-company comes up with the best idea first, gets the keys to the Lamborghini.
All that would be needed is a back and forth between the global Steemit community and the tech company working on the Chinese mirror: suggestions and contributions from the Steemit community and utopia.io about visual and graphic design ideas, implementation of key mobile features and functionalities, and other such technical matters; and a final product could idealistically be brought to market remarkably fast. Given several witnesses have designed and hosted their own mirrors (such as https://gosteem.com/ ) with only their own resources, the only real concern for hosting a large Chinese mirror will likely be hosting and maintenance, rather than design and development. I would let the techno-savvy members of the Steem community come up with practical ideas and the like.
A happy ending for Steem and its wonderful, invested community?
Once it’s on the app-store, it would be a mere few hours before it starts getting adopted on a massive scale.
Word-of-mouth is an incredible force here in China. It doesn’t take hours of pleading and convincing to get someone to switch from one App to another. Chinese people will be like: ‘What’s that?’ – ‘You blog and you get paid for it based on how many likes you get’ – New frequent user: done and done.
I know it would be no small technical feat to accomplish, but if there was money backing the project, it would be no problem.
If this app existed, and every-day common mainland Chinese started following their friends and public icons, blogging and resteeming everything that they came into contact with, interest in Steem would spike virtually instantly, and I predict the value of Steem would increase drastically as Chinese investors scrambled to buy up every available Steem on the market.
I make this prediction based on the fact that Chinese investors are very limited in their options for investment... That's why so much Chinese capital has gone into cryptocurrency mining and trading. There are lots of capital flight controls in place here, so if a big investment opportunity propped up domestically, it would definitely garner the attention that it deserved.
Even an interest in Steem that could capture 1% of the Chinese crypto market could have a wildfire effect on its global value; this would send the value of Steem rocketing to ever new heights.
As it stands, the regular Steemit platform is not even banned in China, which shows that it has either not yet drawn to itself the attention of the Chinese government and their regulators (unlikely), or that the Chinese government is waiting to see how the Steemit project evolves, and whether it can be integrated into the Chinese market (more likely).
As long as the party remains in control, and that this Steemit mirror could be used as a force for good that doesn’t threaten national security, and everybody can make money from an up-and-coming technology... everybody’s a winner, even in the very paranoid eyes of the elite party cadres.
So here’s what I’m proposing in a nutshell.
In a nutshell, a proposed new Steemit mirror needs to be region-locked to China if the cryptocurrency is going to see an influx of Chinese capital.
Therefore:
Create a very back-doorish and easy to filter Steemit Mirror App (screw a website, nobody would even use it anyway) that is linked to the Steem blockchain.
The value it would add to the Chinese economy would be that it would allow Chinese people to write opinion pieces about the foods they eat, the places they travel to, their family life experiences (sickness of a parent or grand-parent, bullying at school, too much homework, obesity as a growing health concern, their aunt’s pedicure parlour), their sob-stories, stories about their wedding days, their landmark events and successes and failures, inner feelings… Basically, a platform for them to blog about every kind of cultural event and experience in China (Believe me, even with 200 million users, they would never get tired of connecting with each other and reading each other’s stories).
Things that Chinese people already blog about incessantly and are not currently financially incentivized to do so.
Show them how they could earn a few extra yuan if they get 50 of their friends to like their post, with a simple, cute (emphasis on the cute), user-friendly and easy to understand introductory video and marketing campaign.Make a big push to convince early adopters to invest as much as they can in Steem, explaining how this will give their voice a distinct advantage over the hundreds of thousands of other users who will probably never make more than a few cents per post (and won’t bat an eye at that reality).
Illustrate how this will facilitate public discourse in China and help raise people’s standards of living.
(Just to state the obvious, most Chinese people really aren’t trying to bring down the Communist Party. They don’t dislike and distrust the CCP more than Republicans distrust the Republican Party or Democrats distrust the Democratic Party in the US. Both are Authoritarian regimes in their own manner).Explain this in an easy, non-threatening way for people to get paid for the content they produce and the curation they perform. (Can reinforce the idea that original content will be rewarded and copied/plagiarised content will be flagged/downvoted/removed). Though don’t hold your breath, they will all be plagiarizing the shit out of each other, but what does it matter if they’re only getting paid 0.001 Steem because 5 of their friends with no Steempower upvoted it.
China already allows people to spend their money however they see fit without excessive taxing and regulations, long as they don’t open their big mouths about the very nature of that social contract. (Regulations do exist on paper but are not enforced. That’s why the rice you might be eating might actually be 99% petroleum product, or why illegal prostitution services in ‘massage parlors’ are a norm, or why fake alcohol is sold in very fancy and expensive venues, etc.)
Here are some screenshots of WeChat's social media functions. In my opinion, a Mirror that copied these most basic features and added depth and usability to them would be incredibly successful.
- The 'Discover' Tab.
The Moments page is like the Twitter-style feed where users can scroll-down and peruse all of their contact's posts. It looks something like this:
The Discover tab in a Steemit mirror could for example have categories such as Hot, Trending, Featured/Promoted, as well as Browse by tags and other categories of interest.
- The 'Me' Tab.
Below is the Me tab. This allows one to view one's own posts, access one's wallet, check 'favourited' items, etc.
Something like this could easily be adapted to meet Steemit functionalities, which are already strikingly similar. An option to manage one's Steem wallet, that could incorporate some form of internal market functionalities to convert Steem in Yuan? Functionalities to review/edit/post to one's own blog; to change name, banner picture, profile picture, add location, website URLs; to download emojis and gifs, etc.
- The 'Contacts' Tab.
This could be a place for Chinese users to peruse through the users they follow and the users that are following them. This would make it a more friend-based platform than the current Steemit model, and this would likely be a good way to keep average Chinese user's number of followers down to a minimum, thus imposing a kind of synthetic cap on the amount of visibility and exposure common users can garner, and therefore limiting the number of upvotes they can receive as well as post-payouts.
- Three or four tabs at the bottom of the App would probably be more than enough
Some form of premium app/computer-based software to edit and format posts could be offered. It could allow for greater functionalities than accessible by most common mobile-user Steemians.
The company hosting and doing the maintenance of the App could offer these premium services for upper-class / iconic Steemians, for a fee. This would allow the tech company to generate some revenue, as well as appease China's ruling elite, who could thus pay to gain access to superior tools, enabling professional post formatting that would be out of reach for the normal Steemit mirror mobile users.
These kinds of class distinctions are very important in China, and they would not detract much from the popularity of the App. Steemit already operates on a similar ''the more you invest the more you get out of it'' basis, so this could easily be tweaked to suit the ruling classes' interests. I know I'm talking about built-in inequality, which I am totally against, but this would really help the chances of Steem blowing up in China, and that is the only reason why I'm mentioning it.
Chinese could thus see the 'featured posts' from their favourite artists, comics, speakers and thinkers, and other public icons. In return, these icons would thus have a privileged position and greater incentive to promote and help popularize the platform. The government could also eventually issue licenses for Premium Steemit users, increasing their feeling of control over the mirror.
These kinds of functionalities already exist in WeChat, which allows licensed groups to format professional looking pages that are different from the common user experience. Companies, universities, hospitals, media outlets, etc. all make use of premium features unavailable to common users.
There you have it.
To conclude this proposal that I submit to you, I hope that I have elucidated these ideas in a clear and understandable way.
I equally hope that the idea of introducing Steem to China has garnered your attention and struck you as much as it struck me when the idea first popped into my head, after 
Please feel free to get in touch with me to further discuss the ideas if you believe this would be a worth while venture for the Steemit community to embark on!
I bid everyone who's taken an interest in this suggestion a wonderful day and happy Steeming.
Peace and Love,
Hae-Joo
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors