Netcoins competition is done.. What did we learn?

Now that finally the craziness is coming to an end i decided to make a short post on what we learned from this competition about crypto and STEEM. How long this list will be depends completely on how fast the morning coffee gets absorbed into my system.

So yeah, i have been super interested in what was happening during this time, partially because i have an advertising background, but mostly cause i have invested fiat into the platform. Im not what you would call a guy that will "make it on STEEM" through content creation so really im just looking at how sensible my investment was.
I find the content monetization of STEEM to just be a secondary aspect of the platform even though its what is mostly attributed to the platform. Id say its more of a "token distribution" platform. Those two things do closely overlap but i find the second definition to be closer to the truth.

So what did i find during this past week.?....

1. People in crypto love to cheat.

This is the first thing that comes to mind and we have seen this over the course of the last few days, most of all with PAC, that has an insignificant market cap and social presence but was leading the "pack" for quite a while. Their votes were taken away but another token took over with their practices. INS literally came in on the last day with 15000 votes out of nowhere to come up on top.
Did Stemians cheat?

For sure there were people that used a bunch of emails, a bunch of browsers to push steem ahead. Some respectable Steemians like Hive account@sircork actually called for it and posts were made by some other steemians as to explain how it could be done.
Now i cant really blame them when they see what others were doing, but with STEEM having such a high call to action potential i really dont think it was necessary and it mostly just hides the actual capability of the community to create an external effect which is an important metric in my opinion...

2. Unfortunately it showed that the STEEM community really isnt as big as we thought or not enough users care as much about the platform as they claim to.

This is a concerning thing. Sure we may have a million wallets but we all know that due to loopholes some people like Hive account@noganoo and a few others were able to create thousands of accounts on STEEM which clearly means that those numbers dont really represent much, if anything.
The active STEEM accounts dont come even to a fraction of that. Even if you look at the daily stats like those done by Hive account@penguinpablo on his blog , the "daily accounts transacting" graph in particular, we still cant come close to any sensible conclusion about the number of active users.. I personally have 2 wallets that i use almost every day and both of them are represented in those stats. What we do know for sure is the actual number is <60k.
The truth could even be that there are less then 10k active users on the STEEM blockchain, and amongst them, who knows how many are spammers.

made by Hive account@penguinpablo

3. A positive thing.

Even though the STEEM vote numbers do show some concerning things, the fact of the matter is that the STEEM community, though smaller then expected, has an amazing potential for "call to action".
This is important for a number of things. First thing that comes to mind is the existence of opportunity for advertisers and marketers to promote their product on the STEEM blockchain and reach a "large enough" group of people. Though, atm, it wouldnt make sense for a large company to buy large stake in the platform to promote its products just to reach a couple thousand potential buyers. What would make more sense is buying some STEEM and promoting something to the top of the trending page for close to 0$ advertising cost. Thats where bots come into play. Love em or hate them, they would make sense to advertisers if the system was developed a bit more and improved upon.

4. Those that care, care a lot..

This is another amazing thing i have noticed which reinforces my belief in the future of the platform. Some people, and i consider myself among them, really went "crazy" over this competition. And thats a good thing. Fanaticism is bad in most cases but in this case it was the match that lit the fire under community member butts....
The promotion of the contest started with Hive account@oracle-d posting about it on trending and huge number of witnesses starting to incentivize voting with upvotes, even Hive account@ned coming in half way through to help the cause.

Even though there was a lot of talk about how NETCOINS listing is super important to the STEEM blockchain i really cant say if it will have that much of an effect. It might be a game changer, but im more of the opinion that if it was so important, that Ned or Steemit.inc would have just sold 30k STEEM on a exchange to get STEEM listed already.
Im not positive but i think a Binance listing is around 180k? (dont quote me on that)

This competition in the end, i think finally, woke us up from the fluffy dream of massive user numbers claims; it showcased the STEEM "call to action" potential and maybe even shown Hive account@ned that he can count on the community and include it in Steemit.inc marketing campaign for SMTs.

Present the community a clear goal. Incentivize participation. Focus efforts on a single target. Change target after completion. Repeat until marketing campaign goal is reached

Best analogy.... Zerg rush it.......