chainBB Relaunches with Custom Forums Truly Bringing "Subreddits" to the Steem Blockchain

But they come with /f rather than with /r.

"It’s internet points, like you have on Reddit, but now those points have real market value. People are earning money for doing the things they were doing for free before. People spend all this time creating free content for social media companies, and now they can be rewarded."

• Ned Scott, CEO Steem Inc.

Steem Inc. CEO Nedd Scott, Hive account@ned, has often mentioned the influence the social network Reddit had on the creation of Steem and its own social network. That despite claiming to never have used Reddit himself.

Subsequently, when writing about the Steem ecosystem, media loves to refer to Reddit but while at heart both networks may share a vision, a still young Steemit is very different from what Reddit was in its earlier years. Popular AMA and .self subreddits are rather recent in Reddit's timeline. Until they gained mainstream popularity, Reddit was mostly the "Frontpage of the Internet", a place to discover hot and trending content across the world wide web.

Yet, Steem has moved a step closer to being a real Reddit, complete with its own subreddits substeems, thanks to a relaunched chainBB.

What is chainBB?

chainBB is one of the more popular alternative interfaces to Steemit, based around presenting the content of the Steem blockchain in forums. Launched and operated by top witness and overall Steem developer rockstar, @jesta, chainBB has a place in the history of the Steem blockchain and is often mentioned when the main interface, Steemit.com, experiences issues.

chainBB, as the name gives away, is also a nostalgic reminder of a core concept of the Internet: bulletin boards.

We don't often use the term rockstar for founders, product owners, operators or developers but how often do you run into somebody who is a top witness of a popular blockchain, creator and operator of a blockchain explorer GUI, developer of a popular open source desktop wallet for a blockchain, and also developer and operator of a top 5 interface to that blockchain?

Steemian Hive account@jesta is all those.

chainBB Relaunches

Last weekend @jesta announced that he was relaunching the chainBB service and planned to expand the forum functionality with hosted forums.

In other words with an option to create your own forum/content vertical on chainBB, and thus also on the Steem blockchain.

On Steemit it has often been difficult to create new niche verticals. While the introduction of a new tag isn't difficult, popularizing that tag and finding more contributors to it can often be a struggle. The semi-closed nature of forums can sometimes be helpful in the adoption of new content verticals, forums as such.

Queue custom, hosted chainBB forums, the biggest change with the relaunch of the chainBB forums.

Custom forums are a premium service offered to Steemians, allowing each Steemian to have their own hosted forum on the Steem blockchain, in exchange for a small nominal fee.

But that isn't all, forum owners will receive rewards from all content contributed to their forums. A rewards model and fee resulting from a transparent discussion between @jesta and the chainBB community, and thus also the wider Steem community.

The financial model, creating/hosting fees and rewards matrix, may as such still change in the coming weeks or months. Contrarily to most more traditional startups, Hive account@jesta is holding this dialogue in public view and actively listening to and implementing the ideas of chainBB users and the wider Steem blockchain community.

The current chosen revenue model, comes from a Steem member and will reward forum operators on an affiliate-alike model, based on how much value the content of their forum created in a month. Here's the link again.

We think this is an absolutely awesome model and rewarding both for forum owners and for chainBB itself.

We feel that with the new custom forums chainBB has ventured on a new path and, just like the Steem blockchain and its main site Steemit.com, Hive account@jesta may have opened unexpected doors of disruption.

If chainBB, and Steem, can at some point ease up on the hurdle that still is account creation/approval, popular forum options such as Discourse, the multiple *bb platforms, and even more modern options such as Flarum.org will face an uphill struggle.

Add to that the possibility to soon also roll out FaaS, (hosted) Forums as a Software, based on smart media tokens and allowing forums to exist in their own vertical content silo on the Steem blockchain, even with their own tokens and coins, and the internet could soon see a complete revival of forums.

Here at theSteemObserver we won't shed a tear if chainBB's relaunch leads to the dwindling popularity of Facebook Groups & co. But we promise that we will try very hard to at least tear up once if that happens. We will try. Possibly. Maybe.

You can check out BEATMAKERS ON STEEM, one of the first custom forums on chainBB, created by Hive account@heymattsokol, to get an idea of how your custom forum on chainBB could look, and even perform.