When I first joined Steemit, the way it was introduced to me by a friend was: "It's a blogging site where you can earn crypto rewards for your content, based on the amount of likes it gets".
Super simple.
So, I joined. And I knew what to expect.
Now everybody's talking about how STEEM and Steemit are not about content creation anymore, they are about something so much bigger. STEEM isn't even about any one thing, it's about... everything, it seems.
It's going to be everywhere, everything is going to have its own amazing dApp, dApp this, dApp that, the other thing, etc.
I'm just wondering how should one sell STEEM to anyone right now. Steemit has no identity, it's just a jumbled mess. What is this site, even? A blogging site? Kinda, sorta, I guess, but if you say that, you're going to have an army of experts telling you how it's not about the blogs, and blogs are cancer, it's all dApps and SteemMonsters now.
This may come as a surprise to some people who are younger, but back in the day, Google wasn't the only search engine. In fact, Google wasn't even the first search engine. It was just one of many. And back in the early days of the internet, those search engines were in a pretty bloody war against each other.
You had Ask Jeeves, Altavista, Yahoo, Excite... anyone remember these? I do.
But the reason many don't is simple; Google won the war. But why, though? Why did Google reign supreme? There's one very easy answer to that question.
Google was the only search engine out of all of the participants in the Great Search Engine War that was just a search engine.
All the other search engines tried to be something more than just search engines. They were all trying to do many things at once. From weather forecasts to whatever else.
Only Google stayed true to what people expected of it: being a search engine.
So, in time, whenever people thought of a search engine, they went to Google. Because being a search engine, true and true, was Google identity.
And lo and behold, Google is sitting where it sits today. On top.
I hope when Voice launches, it's going to be purely a content publishing platform. I hope Steemit will be the Altavista or Ask Jeeves of blockchain social medias that made the mistakes so that no one else has to.
Your userbase and investors need to know what they're getting. And a million things at once - especially when none of them are the focus, and instead there are simply several different half assed side projects coexisting - just confuses people.
I have no idea what STEEM, today, is.
It's a blockchain. Well, whoop-de-doo, wow, a blockchain. We sure don't have, like, a million of those at this point. Next?