Blockchains allow communities to interact with each other and create value in novel and exciting ways.
Bitcoin was the first step. It loosened restrictions on money. Whereas before all transactions were verified and filtered by middlemen like PayPal and central banks, now currency can be issued and spent/earned without such hassles.
As a result, money flows in a more natural way around the world. New value is unlocked when average people gain access to vastly expanded financial networks.
The Current State of Attention Markets: Facebook & Beyond
Money is one of the fundamental elements of life in a society. Time is another. We have very limited time, and (in theory) choose to spend it only on the activities that give us the best joy.
Social Media Networks, with Facebook leading the pack, have monopolized our online attention.
Most of our idle internet time is spent browsing these “attention markets”. Facebook offers you dozens of posts, videos, advertisements, and you scroll here and there looking for something interesting. It’s designed to be inoffensive and addictive - the famous “echo chamber”.
In other words, the attention market has been hijacked and we are way off of the “gold standard” here. There’s no way to sustain the insane level of noise here in any kind of productive way.
What if we could have a higher level of signal-to-noise, a better average quality of content and engagement, within social media networks? What if our attention markets could do a better job of matching people with relevant and enriching content?
Enter Steemit: The Decentralized Attention Economy
Steemit removes the centralized authority from the social media equation.
On Facebook, there are three elements: Content creator, consumer, and service provider (Facebook). The content creator makes stuff, the consumer looks at the content and sees advertisements, and the service provider maintains the infrastructure and collects the revenue.
Steemit does not take the financial rewards from the Steem blockchain. Instead, 100% of rewards are used to pay witnesses (i.e. miners), content creators, commenters, and curators.
In this way, Steem creates synergy between good ways to spend time and money. When you upvote a good piece of content, you are telling the blockchain that your time was rewarded by the content, and informing it to deliver money to the content creator as a result.
On Facebook, content is ranked based on how financially valuable it is to the Facebook Corporation. Steem ranks content based on how financially and temporally (i.e. time & attention) valuable it is to the consumers.
That is why I believe Steem offers a crucial service. It is the world's first “Fair Trade” social media network which treats all participants in a fair and ethical way.
Incentivized Communities
Steemit creates an opportunity for greater human interaction with no physical borders. Not only are people able to engage with each other and form communities, they are financially incentivized to do so.
A chess club used to pay its members with fun and experience - if anything, the members themselves would pay “club dues” every so often to gain access to the club.
An incentivized chess club requires a 100% Steem Upvote (or $10 upvote, whichever is smaller) 2x per week to help fund the club, and pays out members based on participation and performance.
A “song per day” listening club gets real interesting when an upvote is the entrance fee to hear the track, and then 50% of the rewards go to the artist, 40% goes to the most insightful commenter on the thread, and 10% goes to the administration as a kickback.
A local hiking club could hold its meetings as Steem threads where everybody agrees to show up at the same hour and discuss. Then, once the threads generate enough income from upvotes, that money funds the hiking trip!
Incentivized communities represent one of the biggest opportunities in the blockchain world for non-developers. I am eager as hell to apply some of these concepts in my own projects soon.
What do you think? Do you see a way to enhance your current projects by applying Steem to the equation?
