What Went Down

At our first meeting, we passed the Steem whitepaper around to the group and had quite a lively discussion over some food and good microbrews!

This was everyone's first time seeing the paper, so I'm sure we'll talk about it a bit more in the future.

A picture of some of us at the brewery, taken by our waitress. I have a few more that turned out just like this, but blurrier.

Questions and Comments

At first our guests thought this whole Steem thing was still purely hypothetical, so we (i.e., Hive account@complexring and I) showed them the site and some essentials of how it works.

One person began by asking if a Ponzi scheme comes to mind - a natural first question that someone else answered with "Isn't life a Ponzi scheme?" This prompted a rather political tangent that was a lot of fun, but that I'm not going to go into right now.

Here is an idea about general marketing, and marketing for Steem, that someone proposed:

New technology and business models do better when they're introduced into a certain niche in the market where their application is more clearly understood and they're likely to succeed. For example, instead of trying to make and market self-driving vehicles to everyone at once, how about producing them specifically for trucking companies that employ truck drivers? The drivers could then drive more hours continuously and sleep in the back while driving, which would save these companies money.

The group member who told us this suggested using Steemit (or a dedicated frontend, I suppose) to post, edit, and curate algorithmically generated articles. For example, Forbes earnings reports are written algorithmically, and Narrative Science is a company that teaches computers to write news stories. This is a possible niche market in which we could introduce the platform.

Any thoughts?