What's the current workflow?
From a content creator's perspective, Steem currently works like this: you are supposed to set up an account and supply content, preferably created exclusively for Steem. In return you have a chance to receive financial rewards.
What's the problem with this approach?
Well, so far most (not all!) of Steem content has been quite mediocre, and there is a good reason for that: being a niche, we are not able to attract top contributors. Most established authors are... established, which means they have already gained reputation on one of the major social networks and have an account there with lots of followers attached to it. Why would they want to give it up and offer their content exclusively on Steem? At this stage Steem doesn't have a user-base big enough to draw their attention, as for them being exposed to a large audience is rightfully much more important than earning a couple of dollars here on Steem. In other words, currently Steem is too small a deal for them to even give it a try.
What if we reverse the process? What if we could first set up an account, let it get some traction (and earn money) and only then invite the owner of the account to join Steem?
We could build an account for an author, publish the author's content here on Steem on their behalf and once the reward pool grows to a significant amount, contact them and offer to pass the account's private keys to them. For sure, it's much easier to convince someone to join Steem if there is already a financial reward waiting for them and lots of supportive comments.
How can Steem be extended to attract top contributors?
Imagine this: content created exclusively for Steem remains highly appreciated but you are equally welcome to share somebody else's content (it can be anything: writing, video, audio, music), even if the original author doesn't already have a Steem account or has never heard of Steem, which will be the most frequent case. You would do it primarily because it's fun to share valuable content, but your main motivation would be to reward the original author, as most (or all) of the funds raised by this kind of post will go NOT to you (i.e. the creator of the post), but instead to the original author once they decide to unlock those funds by the act of joining Steem.
How can this be achieved?
Let's assume you want to share on Steem a YouTube video created by some author who owns a YouTube account named xxx. Now all we need is this new feature: Steem creates a smart contract which will guard the reward accumulated by your post (the one which introduces the video) and unlock the funds only to a person who can prove she/he controls the YouTube account xxx. Obviously, this would work not only for YouTube but also for any other major social network, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, Instagram, Medium, etc.
What's the assumption?
I assume here that such smart contracts are feasible, as the matter of proving someone's claim of owning a YouTube account (or any other account) can be objectively adjudicated using the YouTube API (or any other API) and Steem's witness infrastructure. I realize that this is a very rough idea which surely needs a lot more consideration. Also, a big question is being raised here: does Steem want to open up for both rewarding and sharing content (some sort of Reddit and Patreon combined into one system), as opposed to only supporting original content creation, as we have it now?
Your feedback is very appreciated.
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