I was thinking a little about the 30,000 odd signups in the last 5 weeks and was wondering what would cause it. are they new members or are they alts. It is of course impossible to know for the most part since there is no KYC for Steem. I was thinking about this too a little but I will get to that at the end since I am unsure of the validity.
Not all alt accounts are nefarious.
Alts can be a healthy sign for Steem. If you haven't been paying attention, there are a lot of Dapps on the platform that people want to try but, they don't want to clog up their feed with a lot of different content for various reasons. For example, while I don't use an alt myself (I don't count 
What this means is that a lot of people have created alternative accounts to handle their "off-topic" content that they use for various purposes so as not to confuse (or annoy) their audience. This makes a lot of sense and I might do similar at some point as I tend not to use the various new applications because of these reasons.
Buuuut.... here is a sign.
This is a sign that something needs to be done in order t be able to separate content out effectively across consumption interfaces so that viewers don't have to look at all content from one user unless they want. But, it shouldn't be viewer driven, it should be contributor driven. Do you know what I mean by this?
A platform has unique markers and a contributor could 'tag' their content to be hidden through content aggregators like steemit.com or busy.org etc. Then, their audience could choose to opt-in to see all content or some filtered view of all content. There is a good reason for this from both perspectives of supply and demand.
The supplier can maintain one account and through a type of permissions (remember everything is all available still) they can dictate what posts are visible for their audience on various platforms without extra clicks. People spend a lot of time developing a brand for their account and having to build a new one every time there is a stick application released is going to be impossible. So, this means that they can keep their main account and potentially even get support for their new form content from their old users who opt-in to see it.
From a consumer demand perspective, a viewer doesn't have to be exposed to other forms of media if they so choose but, can still potentially see what is coming through the feeds. From an auto-voter perspective, a contributor could mark various content "Do not vote" and the autovoters could have a check that skips it in the same way they can be set to vote on a certain number of posts but not more, in a 24 hour period.
Building a brand
It is expensive to invest into building a brand but a Steem account should be designed to be universally used across the ecosystem, including when SMTs arrive. What this means is that once an account brand is built, it can traverse the Steem-net and be recognizable through both social relationships and SP without having to dilute its brand value because of the type of content it wants to engage with.
The applications should be cooperating and working out ways that for eample, my account can use their interface for whatever purpose it is designed without me losing brand value on another interface. So, rather than competing for Steem users, it should be empowering Steem users to use as many applications as possible and that means simplifying it to a main account and providing customization filters for both the contributor and the viewer on how they want to present and view the content.
Mass opportunity
There is a massive advantage in being able to do this as we can see from the world of centralized and monetized platforms that are banning, demonetizing and disenfranchising their users. What they do is allow a user to build and even support that user to become popular and bring people on as consumers and then, change the rules of the game. While the account is effectively dead, the consumers remain to keep consuming content from others. It ramps up usage of the platform and means they can always support the trends. The contribution account however is unable to take most of their foloowers with them and even if they take some, they have to invest into building a new home.
Fuck that.
Steem can instead empower users to both build and give them the flexibility to move across Steem platforms with not only their Steem Power in hand, but their hard fought for audiences. What this encourages is that people build one account that has as much social capital (engagement work) as possible to ensure that wherever they go, their reputation precedes them.
This means that as SMTs are introduced and gain traction, accounts are able to not only traverse into new streams, they are able to pull in new users onto those platforms too. Rather than competing, applications are able to leverage each other's success and strengthen and stabilize the entire Steem ecosystem.
KYC - Jelly
We are also going to have to face the facts that for mass adoption of the technology, eventually Know Your Customer rules are going to have to arrive into the scene. While most normal users won't have much of a problem with this as they already do it on various platforms now, the idealistic users are not going to want to reveal themselves. If you have a lot of Steem, that might be fine and you can still earn for the time being but a new user is probably going to struggle as unverified.
There are many reasons for and against this but the positive use cases for anonymity are very narrow and provide lower benefit in comparison to the negatives of anonymity. However, Pseudonymous accounts should be quite easily possible in a number of ways and I was thinking that perhaps there could be something like a verification through a bank account or maybe some other check, with the verifier held behind a metamask type plugin like Steem Keychain. That way, it would provide a much more trustworthy one account system most people could accept without feeling that there wasn't enough Jelly in the KYC when they got bent over.
Moving along
What I m hoping is that through the future development paths of the platform there is much more support for ease of use development that empowers users to take full advantage of steem without having to worry about what kind of content they are interested in. A person could use many apps that post to the blockchain but still keep their core content brand clean and on topic without either diluting brand capital or looking erratic in delivery. It would be nice to have a "Mark as Shitpost" option that only people interested in viewing that kind of thing could opt-in to the discovery.
What I think is really going to take Steem mainstream is being able to connect Steem applications to the real world and I feel that part o that is in the simplification that provides the benefits of building a main account without the drawbacks of using it for many purposes. Not only will it remove a lot of the needs for non-nefarious alts, it increases the potential of a main account by being able to consolidate resources.
If you build a following, that following shouldn't be able to be removed by a centralized authority. This is what YouTube, Twitter and Facebook do every time they demonetize, shadowban or remove users. It is against both the user implicated and the viewers who have chosen to follow them. I wonder what would happen if with a click of a button, a demonetized user could pull all of their followers onto another platform with them.
On Steem, they won't even need to click a button, it is automatic. This is a wing of freedom of information.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]