Steemit has the ability to overtake Facebook, but it will take lots of effort from the developers and the users. There are lots of Facebook users who are clueless that every time they post a comment, image, or video it generates value for Facebook. Facebook can prove they have an active community so it attracts advertisers. Advertisers pay Facebook. Shareholders speculate about future profits based on the forecasted growth and ad revenue. Increases Facebook value even more. Yet, the community who created all that value does not get paid. Where is the love!!
Steemit changes this whole notion on it's head, there is no company that is profiting, all the value the users generated goes right back into community by paying the people who contribute the most. This should attract many millions of people to join the community and in turn generate the equivalent value that will be used to pay it's users.
Some might wonder, where does this money come from?? All the perceived value is being speculated on a "Wall Street" type exchanges. These exchanges only deal with crypto currency where the Steem Coin is traded. There are buyers and sellers who look at the steemit community growth and activity to speculate how much the Steem coin is worth.
In order to overtake Facebook, steemit community is missing some major components to draw all the Facebook users away. Here are a few:
- Privacy settings so you can share with just your family and or friends.
- Photo Albums
- Groups
- Blog Pages with lots of configuration features
- Invite Features
- Live Video
- Powerful Search engine
- Professional User interface / User experience
Once some of these major features are in place and people can feel like they are talking to their same group of friends and they can blog at the same time, then I think people will have a genuine reason to ditch Facebook. People will want anonymity with the public and their real identity with their friends and family. Steemit will have to accommodate both to get the most traction.
All this will be possible, but we have to support our software developers to make this happen. These guys and gals have regular jobs and can only spend so much time on steemit, which is an open source development project (volunteer based software development). You can support developers by up voting their contributions and suggestions. Maybe steemit should build something in their code base that automatically pays out steem coins to developers who commit peer reviewed code. These things need to be sorted out, but now that steemit has figured out that a financial market can support a software project, it will radically change how business is done.
I hope this article has inspired some thought, and I hope you will comment to give your opinion. I am genuinely excited about steemit and I cannot wait for it to get to the masses.