My experience as a creator with Steemit & DTube a couple months in: Cautiously optimistic

I'm a gamer / let's player and have been uploading content on dtube for the past 4 months or so. I wanted to write my early experiences both for new members who just found out about dtube, but also for more experienced members to chime in and maybe help me understand things better.

Why i joined dtube

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Simply put i was fed up with the likes of YouTube, Twitch, Dailymotion, Vimeo etc. I still don't understand half of the tech that happens behind blockchains like steemit (which is what dtube is based on), but it's definitely a breath of fresh air!

What i like so far

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Being a decentralized platform essentialy run by its users, there's a lot of things to like compared to say YouTube:

✔️ There are no unfair copyright strikes or flags. Games tend to have a few seconds of music here and there and there's nothing worse than some random company (including scams) monetizing hours worth of your gameplay just because an in-game radio (which i can't turn off) plays some totally unknown tune for 5 seconds. I even had a gameplay series that featured classical music which was 100% public domain, but youtube's algorythm of course can't tell the difference between this, a commercial execution of the same song, or a scammer.

✔️ The monetization is instant and based on what the viewers like, not advertisers. About a decade ago and after years of work i had the sad experience of reaching the monetization threshold on one of my google blogs. Of course google "discovered" something wrong and decided to demonetize it, without giving any reason or responding to any of my appeals - effectively stealing money from me. I still have a few youtube channels, but that's because i love what i do, not for money - i fully expect google to "suddently" demonetize my channel once it reaches the required number of hours / subscribers.

✔️ The system behind the scenes that calculates how often you can post or upvote content and how much power each user has seems generally sound to me. (i'm stressing "generally" here because there are cons to this; i'll talk about them in a bit).

✔️ Viewers are rewarded! This is huge! Not for me, because i'm more of a creator than a curator, but it's very important for the survival of the platform. The revenue is actually being split between content creators and curators, the latter being people that upvote your content early, thus making it more visible to other users.

✔️ The steem blockchain and steemit, on which dtube is based seems like a generally viable model to me, without forcing subscriptions or a lot of ads. It's tough to explain and i bet i'm about 50% wrong here (veterans can help me out here maybe) but this is what i've gathered so far: People post content on steemit / dtube -> This gets the attention of investors who buy steem cryptocurrency to promote their content or place ads on steemit.com. -> This cryptocurrency is shared among creators, viewers and people who work for or provide services to steemit / dtube -> some of this cryptocurrency can be cashed out immediately, while the rest can only be cashed out after 2 years and is worth keeping because it gives "voting power" (for lack of a better term).

What i don't like so far

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Before diving into the cons, let me first stress that this is a young project and i really think what has been accomplished so far is amazing, as in it really has a chance to be a game changer in the blogging and media industry. That said:

❌ There's little actual interest in the content itself; most people are still consuming content on traditional media, youtube etc. Again, it's a young project, so things can only get better here, but it still can be disheartening to watch mostly bots upvote and comment on your content. Also i'm fairly certain that most real people also don't actually read or watch my content before upvoting or downvoting, which brings me to my second con:

❌ Most users who interact with my content seem to be either bots, or interested only in exploiting the economy of steemit. Because curators earn cryptocurrency as well, most of them tend to follow around the most powerful users and simply upvote everything that those powerful users upvote. In my case this makes me effectively a sponsored creator, who only gets rewarded whenever a powerful user decides to upvote my content. I can imagine someone posting quality content and never getting rewarded for it, while - even worse! - he watches on as mediocre content makes a lot of money! Which bring me to the next point:

❌ Because there's in essence only a handful of powerful users dictating who gets paid or not, there's A LOT of unfairness on DTube. As an example i see the user "DTube" (which i can only deduce is the main account of the company itself) upvoting a lot of content everyday and it's that's how most users seems to make money on the platform. Although i'm thankful that this user has noticed me as well and upvotes about 1/10 of my videos, i also see him (and all the bots and users that blindly follow him) upvote more often content of poor quality, like videos with lots of grammatical errors, low effort in general etc.

Just a few minutes ago i noticed a video that was short, had no commentary, no editing and featured a relatively unknown mobile game get monetized for 100's of $, while most of my videos which are being recorded with commentary, editing and with pro / semi-pro equipment i have invested a lot of my spare money into, stay forever at 0$. I get why this happens, but still the result is that quality is not being rewarded. The same happens on steemit in general, where one often comes across well researched articles making exactly 0$, while a random picture of a tree gets 100's of $. Finally, there's also "bad" powerful users; i had one of those disagree with one of my comments on a political topic, so he decided to downvote a few of my videos, effectively deleting them from the platform, even though a lot more users (with lesser power) had upvoted them.

⏰ TL;DR

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All in all the dtube / steemit project gives me hope that things can be different from what we are used to from the likes of YouTube and Google. It's definitely worth supporting for that alone, but i also really liked how copyright and monetization is handled in general. What i didn't like are mostly the growing pains of the platform; a few powerful users dictate who gets paid or promoted and a lot of bots and exploiters follow them around; the end result being that quality content is not (yet) being fairly rewarded.