Social Media these days is everything. By everything, I of course mean in terms of internet usage, it's how we connect with friends, family, coworkers, and our favorite brands. We use it to video chat over a long distance with a loved one, and to seek the opinion of our friends of what restaurants to go to when we visit a new city. It's purpose is in the name: “Social.” I've talked before about the need for a more “humanistic” approach to blockchain technologies, and I seem to be right back at square one.
On July 8th, just a week after I obtained my first chunk of Bitcoin, I was browsing headlines on my MSN news homepage (just, don't ask, OK?), and one in particular caught my eye. A Cryptocurrency was up 1000% over the week. I took a look at the article, and it talked about this thing called “Steem.” I looked it up, and learned it's a currency attached to a Social Media site. On that site, you can earn the currency based on people “liking” or “upvoting” your post. So I decided to take a look at it.
SteemIt is the platform. It has a fairly simple, clean, and mildly outdated UI (User Interface). There's top posts, trending posts, new posts and a few other categories. One of the easiest things to pick out is just how much people are earning on their posts. When I joined one of the posts had earned some $20,000+. Right now the highest posts seem to be around $2,000. It all seems spectacular. I mean, who doesn't want to post their thoughts and get paid for it?
Image Source: [https://twitter.com/Steemit]
This is the point where the human approach ends and the (as I said in my first article) “Smart Crypto Nerd” begins. SteemIt is broken into Steem (the currency), SteemDollars (the $1 parity cash out of your new digital wealth), and SteemPower (the weighted influence each user has). Each of these can be purchased, each of these can be earned and each of these works together to make the platform run. Honestly, I'm feeling overwhelmed and anxious just thinking about how these Apocalyptic 4 Horsemen of SteemIt work together to ruin your dreams of SteemIt wealth. I'm sure all the Smart Cypto folk get it and it makes perfect sense, but if you're the average Social Media user, it's too much of a mental exercise to think about how SteemPower determines how much someone earns when you up-vote their post (and when), how it also relates to how much you earn when you have your posts up-voted and just how much in SteemDollars you will earn when people up-vote your post. This doesn't even mention the fact that Steem is useless unless you're speculating (which hasn't gone too well after that 1000% gain week) or you're using it to purchase SteemPower which is really a long term investment into the system.
Excuse me while I towel off. I don't know if it was the mental calisthenics or stress. From an average Joe standpoint, this gets even worse. All seemed fair and balanced when I first joined SteemIt. One of my early posts had some 4 up-votes and earned me a whopping 2 cents (in SteemDollars). I thought I was on my way up. Until a week or so later when I had a post with 8 up-votes, and it earned nothing. My first Confessions article, 14 up-votes. Earned nothing. I learned it's because of a “Whales, Dolphins and Minnows” tiered system based on SteemPower. Basically, Whales are “super-users” with high SteemPower. Minnows are the lowest tier. If 1 whale upvotes your post, you may suddenly be at $400 SteemDollars earned and every subsequent up-vote only makes that increase. Have 20 minnows up-vote you, and you may end up with nothing.
This creates a really odd dynamic. I've read of some of these Whales as being bots that automatically peruse posts and will automatically up-vote it based on a large set of criteria just as confusing as the SteemIt ecosystem. As a result, for a good while SteemIt's trending page was filled with posts lacking substance that were literally just an attractive girl saying she loved SteemIt and Bitcoin and was going to make SteemIt their source of income. It all began looking like a gigantic ruse, and I got turned off from it. Yes, I'm still using SteemIt only to post these Crypto based articles, because that's where my audience would be. That audience is the one that needs to hear this: Crypto and Blockchain technologies WILL NOT be adopted by the mainstream if it is this convoluted and confusing. I know where the idea for SteemIt came from, and the execution of that idea is poor. So I will close this with a few points of noobish advice for the folks behind SteemIt:
1) Simplify- Pare down the number of “Steem” items. SteemPower and Steem or SteeemDollars would do. Just two.
2) Decentralize- It looks like SteemIt and it's SteemPower is using Whales as an enticement (or “real case” advertisement). From someone not in love with the platform, it looks like Whales are used to fake results and say “Join because looks how well it works!” That's the team setting that culture. They need to be more hands off in shaping usage.
3) Focus- Right now SteemIt is in Beta. Clarify the UI, unless its going for cheesy late 90's website, it needs to “flow” better. The categories are unclear, and need to be grouped under category better.
4) Socialize- What's the point of social media if people aren't socially interacting? The flow needs to be more engaging between users versus being a massive posturing of “Hey look at my posts!” Otherwise a massive re-branding is necessary and SteemIt needs to become more of a “Medium” of the blockchain space instead of identifying more as a “Reddit” of blockchain technologies.
As a Crypto Noob, that's my take on the SteemIt platform. I'm the people you want invested in your platform, and I'm also the people you want using the platform. If you want mainstream noobs who are less savvy to researching how this all works: simplify, decentralize, focus and most importantly SOCIALIZE.