When I first got into cryptocurrencies, I found myself constantly time-travelling.

At the bull season, I would lie down and imagine myself going back in time and start picking up more coins when they were real cheap.

But when the bears start ravaging the crypto-village, then I find my brain turning to alternative scenarios where I’ve sold certain coins earlier when the price was higher.

Either way, I usually quickly come to my senses. I remember myself that you cannot turn back the hands of time, and that all you can do is learn from these lessons for when the opportunity comes back again.

This year at the bear season, I noticed the strangest thing.

I realized that I wasn’t alone in this, and I’m not talking about individual amateur investors getting stuck between FOMO and “time travel” due to lack of experience.

I’m talking entire coins, actual cryptocurrency leaders and their dev teams not accounting for the bear market and maybe neglecting to take advantage of the golden opportunities that laid ahead right in front of them.

They were probably thinking that things were always going to be like that, or better yet, that the prices would skyrocket further towards the moon.

The normalcy bias, it’s a real thing. But I try not to judge, the sector is still young and we’ve all made mistakes.

Today as I type this, it seems that the times of wine and roses are long gone - until the next bull run anyway - and what we’re starting to see is a predominant conversation about what should’ve been done when the sun was shining bright on the cryptocurrency markets.

To give an example, here’s a picture that’s better than a thousand words:

Courtesy of:

https://www.worthofweb.com/website-value/steemit.com/

This is from today, it makes you wonder what could’ve happened if steemit had affiliate ad revenue back when the markets were up and the user base was at all times high. That and all the other streams of revenue that online platforms usually generate leveraging their user base size and page views.

Maybe all those developers would’ve kept their jobs today, maybe not. Nobody knows.

But what we know is that this still a possibility today. If steemit could generate a few thousand Dollars a day in ad revenue, then maybe this should be an option to explore.

Or even better, part of that revenue could be employed to take Hive account@blocktrades on his proposal which actually solves a tangible and real problem.

Now I know, many people speculate that steemit.com has failed and that the content is the real problem.

But what if steemit.com hasn’t really been utilized to the fullest of its potential? After all, if you compare steemit with the rest of its mainstream competitors the chasm is probably bigger than we think.

Especially when it comes to marketing, interface design, user experience, moderation… Tell me when to stop.

So maybe part of the problem wasn’t combining blockchain and social media, but rather that the media part was actually missing.

If memory doesn’t fail, steemit was at one time in the top 1000 websites in the world.

If all big platforms from TechCrunch to Infowars can generate millions of dollars in ad revenue per year, there is no reason why steemit couldn’t.

After all, isn’t this what all user-heavy platforms try to achieve? To grow the audience’s size bigger, generate more revenue and invest part of it to achieve even more growth and earn even further?

Let’s call that: The Basics.

Winging it Without the Basics

Steemit started as a revolutionary concept, and those of us who joined in the early days felt like we were witnessing something truly extraordinary, as you can read in our first stories.

Back then, we’ve probably all expected it to exceed mainstream platforms when it comes to innovation, but instead we’ve stayed behind.

The UI design barely changed, the functionalities barely changed… In fact, change is about the last thing you’d expect to happen fast.

Development was going so slow that people started joking that you had a better chance to learn coding and implement stuff on your own than to see it implemented on steemit.

And then there’s that “Beta” thingy under the logo.

Almost three years later and it’s still hanging in there like a constant reminder of what could’ve been.

But we believed, despite it everything we believed. There were no moderators, no marketing, no consumer behavior analysts, no social engineers, no PR specialists... But we believed.

Almost everyone was sure that steemit would be the next revolution of social media. But I’m the last person to judge.

Hell, two years ago I even made a prototype YouTube promo myself, and what was the tagline? “Welcome to the Social Media Revolution”.

I guess that the revolution is gonna have to wait after all.

But here’s the thing that some of us missed while we’re busy staring at the clouds:

We were focusing a little too much on the potential of innovation that we overlooked the fact that all the basics were missing.

Grow the user base, nurture the existing community, focus on the user’s experience, attract more adopters, generate revenue, rinse and repeat.

It remains peculiar that for a social media site, steemit.com has never leveraged its size for some reason, but maybe I’m just missing a part of the story. Either way, there is still some untapped potential and it would be a shame to see it go to waste.

But how about you? What do you think?