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 $10 upvote, whichever is smaller) 2x per week to help fund the club, and pays out members based on participation and performance.
A “song per day” listening club gets real interesting when an upvote is the entrance fee to hear the track, and then 50% of the rewards go to the artist, 40% goes to the most insightful commenter on the thread, and 10% goes to the administration as a kickback.
A local hiking club could hold its meetings as Steem threads where everybody agrees to show up at the same hour and discuss. Then, once the threads generate enough income from upvotes, that money funds the hiking trip!
Incentivized communities represent one of the biggest opportunities in the blockchain world for non-developers. I am eager as hell to apply some of these concepts in my own projects soon.
What do you think? Do you see a way to enhance your current projects by applying Steem to the equation?
I like the idea of the clubs , if would give me more reason to post my music and would bring it to a larger audience, but there are some problems with steemit that i think need to be addressed before mass adoption and integration can happen,
Do you think the idea requires Steemit to have mass adoption / integration? I feel like we can start experimenting with this stuff now and build the foundation for when Steem technology is even better, and perhaps we DO hit a critical mass of millions of daily users.
I dont believe it's necessary but a few things need to change to help the idea achieve its highest potential , Steem is still in beta, and ever since the recent HF the value has massively dropped both the currency and the platform itself, my earnings went from 40$+ a post to barley over 1$ and i have no idea why this is so,.. the question to me becomes,Is Steem worth staying on, if good original content isnt getting seen or properly valued because the platform hasn't evolved to keep up with the number of users, just a thought, @heymattsokol
For Steemit to go full blown big, it needs to have integrated messaging and chat, it needs more of the social network type features w have long been accustomed to. I love Steemit, but many improvements are needed before it reaches a vast enough audience.
Resteemed this post as I find it's of great value. Thanks for writting this up!
:-D
Integrated chat in a sidebar would be AMAZING. Browse Steem with 80% of the window, have your Steemit Chat on the left 20% of the screen. I agree completely with you, Steemit need some serious interface improvements before it will reach its potential.
One could probably easily achieve this via a 3rd-party userscript, the only hitch would be that it requires people to install a userscript. :s
Excellent idea! I love the community aspect of Steemit! I would love to get involved in some real life clubs founded on and funded by Steemit! So what do we have to do to make this a thing? Aside from a chat bar, and things we don't have yet, what can we do to get this process rolling with the tools available now?
It's definitely one of the most exciting areas in cryptocurrency. As far as crypto as money It needs to somehow solve volitility if it wants to go from a speculative asset to a used currency. But there is so much potential for experimentation of new economic systems. I think a key part of it is community interaction and contests and collaboration are a good way to do it Good examples in music space here are open mic night, beat battle and Minnow support project radio station.
Follow Back And 3 Upvote Back daily
https://steemit.com/@tushartosi
Follow Back And 3 Upvote Back daily
https://steemit.com/@tushartosi