We have identified a selection of preconditions that we think are important to the growth and success of the Steem platform. We don’t provide the answers, but hope that this can be the start of a fruitful discussion on Steem’s future.

Efficient Content Discovery

The value created by the platform, arguably almost exclusively stems from the platform’s ability to efficiently incentivize the creation and discovery of valuable content. As such, today’s stake-weighted voting mechanism has its limits. Efficiency is limited by the cognitive capacity of the users. We argue that higher voting power for individuals is needed for Steem to more efficiently discover content.

Identity and Reputation

There are numerous different ways of achieving this, including identity and/or a reputation system. Identity verification would prevent sybil attacks while giving real individuals with limited stake significant voting power. A reputation system could increase voting power for reputable users to discourage spam and increase the production of consistent, high value content.

Proxy Voting

Adding features for Identity and/or reputation directly would entail a fundamental change at the protocol level. However, one feature that could allow for parallel discovery of new reward mechanisms, is proxy voting. Currently, large investors will have to spend enormous amounts of time and cognitive resources to maximize the benefits of their voting power. With proxy voting as part of the protocol, investors could outsource the voting to “power users” who in turn get a cut of the rewards. Consequently, this feature will benefit investors, active users, and the system as a whole.

To take it even further, a company could, for instance, proxy its voting power to its user base, offering value to its users, as well as being an income source for the company. The voting power distribution could be determined by a formula of the company’s choosing taking into account, for instance, some form of identity verification and/or reputation system. It would open up Steem to a whole new level of horizontal scaling by allowing customization.

Low barrier-to-entry

In order for Steem to grow efficiently, we must make it easy and attractive for anyone who wants to participate to create value for the system and thus for themselves.

For the sake of simplicity, we divide the Steem community into three main categories: Users, Investors, and Entrepreneurs. To analyse the situation, we should take a look at it from the perspective of each of these categories.

Users

Casual Readers

For the casual reader, there is not much of a barrier to entry. Click a link and read the content. However, the impression of a closed community with biased or inaccurate content curation might put a casual reader off at the doorstep.

Curators

A casual reader can quickly turn into an active curator. Seen from the perspective of a new user with close to zero voting power, how can that user participate in the system? Voting on posts will have a discouragingly small effect, unless the user goes out of her way to purchase STEEM on an exchange.

As it stands today, the only voting power a new user has is given by the faucet. Paying money to every new user in the system might not be an optimal solution in the long run, especially considering the limited effect of this solution.

Posters

From a poster’s perspective, the strength of Steem lies in the possibility of earning money for producing good content. It is therefore important that a post is esteemed according to it’s real value. Otherwise the user will experience a high barrier to entry, in that she must spend time learning the “rules” of the community and catering to specific biases and tastes of the large STEEM holders.

Investors

As mentioned above, under Proxy Voting, it is almost impossible for an investor to get the most out of their investment. The current situation does not invite investors to actively participate in the network without spending a lot of cognitive resources to curate content. This creates a high barrier to entry for active investors, and discourages investors who would prefer to remain passive.

Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs want to take an active role in building the Steem infrastructure. Let us distinguish two types of entrepreneurs: partners and developers. Partners copy, deploy or integrate Steem services in their local community or network. Developers innovate and create new features and services based on the Steem network.

Partners

Partners look for attractive opportunities and easy to understand documentation and licensing that allows them to deploy Steem services through their own network effectively. Partners could be exchanges like Poloniex, social media forums like Quora, or local franchises that use the Steem/Steemit brand in their own local network.

Developers

Developers want open source tools and educational material that gives them flexibility to innovate and create new features without restrictions. Developers are looking for a blockchain with general features and good documentation giving them freedom to innovate and extend and improve functionality beyond what the reference interface allows.

Public Image

In the cryptocurrency space, the public perception of a project is important. Cryptocurrency ethics such as fair token distribution, openness and easy access to communities and resources give projects a good reputation.

In society in general, both cryptocurrencies and claims of rewards for posting and curating content is greeted with suspicion by most people. This means that Steem/Steemit needs to be exceptional in fostering a good public image.

Moral High Ground

This is one of the areas where Steem can really excel, as it represents a disruption to centralized alternatives such as Reddit, Twitter and even Facebook, where the users are the product, and get nothing back from their value creation. The pitfalls here are also obvious: Stake-weighted voting and cash payouts can seem both suspicious and ruthlessly capitalistic to many ideological subgroups. Emphasis on individual voters, their reputation, perhaps combined with proxy voting, could begin to address these challenges.

Open Source

Open Source code is important in the eyes of the public, especially in the cryptocurrency community. It is both a security measure, removing trust from the equation, and it is seen as a friendly model, giving everyone in the community a sense of ownership to the project.

Equal Opportunities

Equal opportunity is vital to a sense of fairness. Everyone, regardless of where they are from, should be able to rise in the ranks. Steemit should have a high degree of what we might call Social Mobility.

Creator of value gets value

The feeling of ownership and “belonging” in the community is paramount to a prolonged commitment to the platform. This is perhaps the strongest feature of Steem, that it pays its users to create and curate content. Again, the important point here is to make sure that creators are rewarded for content that is valuable to all users, not just to a few stakeholders with lots of STEEM Power.

Artistic Design

The user interface esthetics should not only contribute to ease of use, but is also an important part of the public image. If something looks professional people tend to like it. Clever interaction design and gamification can give a good impression while being easy to use and educational. We shouldn’t be afraid to use ideas from working designs (e.g Reddit).

Marketing

As part of the marketing there will have to be a lot of education about what Steem is and what it represents, beyond just the benefits to the individual users. People want to be part of something meaningful, and Steem should position itself as a genuine alternative to Facebook, Reddit, and other centralized social media platforms. Charity, public social events, and personal video blogging can help light up the human element of Steemit.

Robust and Secure

Decentralization of development is extremely important to grow and make the fundamental infrastructure more robust and secure. Attracting a world-wide network of active developers ensures that the technical aspects of the system are of high quality.

Responsive Evolution

To promote responsive evolution of the Steem blockchain and the various applications (like Steemit.com) they should be open for parallel development. This will avoid centralized bottlenecks for each decision and sprout novel features that can later be integrated by the other actors.

Conclusion

While we consider these to be the most important preconditions for the growth and success of the Steem platform, we claim neither that they are exhaustive, nor that the answers we have provided are in any sense final. We hope this document provides a starting point for a wider community discussion.

Growing Steem to its full potential