I was an early angel investor in Changetip, and the growth of the platform impressed nearly everyone. Metrics were beautiful and adoption seemed to come effortlessly. Furthermore, it seemed as though the company had closed the viral loop where more members would incentivize more members who would incentivize greater content creation, tipping, and enhance the service altogether.
Changetip Growth:
The service worked fine, you could send a few cents or a few dollars over major social networks. The problem, as far as I can tell looking back, was that the majority of users were more excited about the product itself than they were about using the product to solve other problems. A lot of the highest tipped content fell into two categories:
- I'm new to bitcoin and Changetip, can I have some?
- Meta Stuff (new changetip feature or use case)
Changetip, despite constantly improving their product, ran out of (no pun intended) steam. Even as an investor in the company I found I wasn't tipping that regularly. Steemit is not Changetip, of course, but I see some similarities between the two. When I look at the top rated posts for the past few weeks they are mostly:
- Introduceyourself - I'm new to Steemit, can I have some?
- Meta Stuff (Isn't Steemit great?)
The bottom line is that introductions and exuberance about the product build only get a community so much. The candle that burns brightest burns the shortest.
Therefor, it should be important to you, if you care about this platform, to encourage discussion about things other than Steemit and crypto. Communities of amateur photographers, makeup professionals, or marijuana enthusiasts (though less savory) are more important to the long-term success of Steemit than the power-poster who is writing about their personal interaction with Steemit. The reason nothing has replaced Reddit or twitter to date is because of the strong network effects held by these companies.
While you'd like to say "Steemit is the answer and every community should find a home here" the reality is that the best chance of success doesn't come from trying to boil an ocean, it comes from finding users on whose participation Steemit can depend because it's the home to their entire community.
My challenge to you is to involve your other passions in Steemit (yes, I understand the irony of my post being about Steemit, har har). That might be a local meetup that you participate in or a small hobby that you share in with others. At first, you might feel that you're shouting into an abyss when yours is the only post with the "underwaterbasketweaving" tag but when you share that post in the community's other forums and its members see that you're being rewarded for your efforts, there's a good chance that some will come over to Steemit to participate as well.
That's more valuable to this platform than people who are mostly just excited about this platform, I'm sorry to say.
TLDR: Enthusiasm about Steemit itself will eventually wane. The platform's success will depend on whether it has any network effects in smaller communities passionate about things other than Steemit.