This point hopefully connects a few points together along the lines of building a cohesive Steem brand story a la 
By bringing all of these things together and aligning their incentives to perform, the Steem community and ultimately all users within are the winners, no matter whether they are investor, developer, contributor or consumer on the blockchain. Of course, many of us fall into several of those categories and therefore benefit at several layers if Steem performs well.
Last week 
But isn't this what Steem is about? Shouldn't this be our brand story? Saviours of Community.
It is common business practice for companies to grow through acquisitions and mergers and Steem is perfectly designed to do just this at a community level. Rather than just attract individuals onto the platform, we can essentially absorb parts of or entire communities and tailor applications specifically for them in an immutable and censorship resistant environment that not only protects them, but empowers them to monetize in various ways, something the centralized platforms struggle to do adequately due to their massive capital requirements and, greed.
The reason Tumblr users who posted explicit content were banned was because of advertising revenue as mainstream (the large) advertisers are not so keen to position their products next to gifs of hardcore porn. The curse of chasing advertising revenue in play as once you rely on them for income, they own you and then will shape content to their needs, not the user or consumer demand. Advertising in this way essentially kills the free market on content.
But, Tumblr is not the only platform that is undergoing the user demonetization crunch due to advertisers, Patreon is another with some of their large names demonetized and others leaving the platform due to it, like Sam Harris this week. Steem is a content delivery platform and is not tied to any form of content. I can be Tumblr, it can be Patreon it can be the applications like podcast players that enable their users to reach new audiences.
Once upon a time a successful entrepreneur told me that the work it takes to convince a 5,000 dollar customer can be greater than that of a 5,000,000 dollar one. The reason is that the small customer is very personally invested in where that 5,000 goes whereas the large is looking at it more objectively, less emotionally. Steem can leverage this by convincing entire communities to make the shift or at least, run concurrently with Steem. Even if they are cross posting across two platforms with Steem being a mirror, where are are they likely to end up spending their time, on the community that empowers them as owners and earners, or the one that threatens to disenfranchise them?
Targeting entire communities through app development that allows them to port their data to protect it (if possible) and provide them a very familiar space that they can essentially use in a near identical manner as they are accustomed shoud bring a slew of new users onto the platform. The other benefit is that those who likely have the most to lose from the disenfranchisement from the centralized platforms are likely the largest influencers those platforms have in certain categories.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Give me your censored, your demonetized your disenfranchised masses to breathe free.
If we want to build a narrative that includes all stakeholder groups on this platform, we have to have a narrative that includes all people that are, will be or could be on Steem now and in the future. We need a story that connects us all to Steem but allows all to be free to act in the way they chose to act and there is no better way than to build environments that people love.
Many of these environments already exist, they are already loved by their user base, but due to their economic reliance on offering a free service that creates a product out of the users for advertising revenue, they are losing their place, the lovers are getting optimized out. For much of this, the wheel doesn't need to be reinvented, it just needs to be ported onto the blockchain.
Steem doesn't need to optimize and package users to be successful, it needs to empower users to be successful themselves, whether as writers or businesses, app developers or investors. The brand story isn't about Steem changing the world, it is about supporting the communities that will support their members and in so doing, change the world. Users as people, not products. People with a diverse range of needs and desires, people with a wide range of tastes and loves, people who want the freedom to be themselves.
People that want to breathe free.
What do we need?
- A high performance, scalable, cost effective blockchain that empowers applications to run their own nodes and frees up resources for other things.
- Developers who are creating applications that are in support of communities and users
- Communities that are supporting members and interacting across like-minded off-platform communities
- Contributors who are adding what they love for people that love it
- Users who are engaging with and sharing what they love broadly
- Investors who are looking long-term and supporting development and communities
- A network of stakeholders that hold some semblance of a common vision of growth, improvement and freedom.
We need to continually find ways to expand the ecosystem to provide more and more people the space and room to breathe so they can be themselves and, this has to be done with more than pure economic incentive. People who create content, who develop blog rolls and Instagram accounts identify with their work, it is a part of them and Steem offers them the opportunity to immortalize themselves on the blockchain, to protect the very essence of who they are by saving the content they love.
We don't need to convince people to join, we need to create an environment where the established communities will want to leverage us, the Steem blockchain. In time, we will be an amalgamation of the world's communities, under thousands of different names, hundreds of tokens and millions of people living and breathing freely - powered by Steem.
Is it hard to visualize? That needs to change. Let's start there.
Breathe free.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]