Many successful Steemit posts are well written and thoughtful. But many are not. Their value is questionable at best. I'm sure everyone has taken a look at some of the 10000+ dollar posts and had that reaction. So that made me wonder if Steemit is an efficient market.
How much money would I need to pay the average internet blogger to post this type of material if I were standing in a room full of bloggers? I'm going to be generous and say that it would probably be around 50 to 100 bucks. Competition would force it lower. This is a far cry from the 10,000 dollar posts we've seen. So I suppose the first question I could ask would be, is there enough competition now to accurately evaluate content?
I think the answer to that question is definitely no. It's early days, subscribers will only increase. And speculative interest is not guaranteed to increase along with it. But what would Steemit look like if there were the appropriate amount of competition. Many of you might be familiar with the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The service basically allows users who sign up to earn money doing HITs (Human Intelliegence Tasks). These tasks are usually things that are difficult to automate. They consist of anything from filling out surveys to translating documents. Most are fairly simple tasks and pay very little. Even the translation doesn't pay much. The reason for this is competition. With a bit of practice and a lot of time anyone can do it. If you intend to make a living like this it is a huge grind. Honestly you're much better off finding a real job. Right now Steemit is feeding off the pile of speculative bitcoins that were shoved its way by greedy alt coin enthusiasts. What happens when the hype dies down? Will Steemit turn into a digital sweat shop? What happens when the rest of the world decides to join us. They all join for free just to compete for a slice of Steem.
Bitcoin gave Steemit a 300 million dollar value from speculation. But it has another, more basic value that was built into its system. When users buy from Steemit they are buying a currency which Steemit will then accept in exchange for influence. This is how it is given its basic value. Influence within Steemit grants you more voting rights and a larger share of "company". This works in much the same way a fiat currency does. A government mandates the use of a new currency and then says it will accept that currency as payment for taxes. That gives it value. The question I have is, without the speculation by bitcoin users, how much is that influence/shares actually worth to Steemit users? Steemit users are not using their influence to sell anything yet. They could in the future. Perhaps they need to be thinking about doing this now.
In my experience the things that make a lot of money are the things that are the most difficult to do. Right now the only thing Steemit is doing is shouting, loudly into the void. When I can use my Steemit to buy something that I can not get for free elsewhere, then I will consider Steemit to have value. We can do better than just functioning as a glorified algorithm that spits out mildly interesting blog posts. Get to work on that Steemit. I believe in you!
First order of business. Kill the Amazon Mechanical Turk!
https://www.mturk.com/
https://www.reddit.com/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/ HITs worth Steeming for?