When I first joined Steemit, my initial reaction was, "It's just like reddit, but with cryptocurrency!". I'm guessing many of you had the same first thought.
Taken at pure face value, Steemit's tangible financial rewards seem like an obvious improvement on Reddit's social-status-only karma system. But as I've gotten acclimated to Steemit, I've started to better understand the nuanced impacts that putting dollar signs next to posts have on human behavior.
I now believe that the future of Steemit looks more like Medium.com than reddit -- but that path is not set in stone.
The underlying reason is so simple it's borderline obvious -- reddit is a place where people curate content from all sources. Find an interesting link somewhere? A funny picture? Made it? Stole it? Doesn't really matter -- post it on reddit, and if people like it, it will get upvoted. The rewards (karma) are useless anyway. And the original author might even get some recognition or traffic (in some cases, more than their website could handle). As a result, reddit functions as a content aggregator for content from pretty much every place on the web, and for almost every kind of content -- and has a reader base to match.
Now consider the same kinds of content on Steemit. Post an interesting link or funny picture? No upvotes. Stole it? Hello, Cheetah. And rightly so! Why should you get thousands of dollars for the 15 seconds it took you to post a picture of a cat riding a roomba when other readers are spending hours pouring their heart and souls into writing insightful, original content? It just feels unfair. Those dollar signs make all the difference in how we view content rewards.
As a result, Steemit provides value more as an original content generator rather than a content aggregator (much like Medium.com). That inherently limits the amount of content it can provide per day, which has the side effect of limiting the audience. And the best stuff will end up aggregated on reddit, so you'll still visit there anyway.
At first, I thought those dollar signs under the posts were awesome! I can make $1000 or more for posting something insightful? I'm in! (In reality, I've yet to make even $1 -- here's hoping this is the one). But now I'm beginning to understand that those dollar signs act as stimulus for one limited kind of content (original) and serve as a disincentive for another (pure content aggregation).
Maybe that's okay -- Steemit doesn't need to be the next reddit (it still provides value as a monetized version of Medium.com). But it feels like it would be so much better if it could be.
Thoughts?.
Oh, and here's a picture of a cat riding a roomba:
