the future of steem is dapps?
From @penguinpablo's reports (and I generally look at those when I am considering buying), the #1 onboarder to steem last week was steemmonsters. I found that fascinating.
source: https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/weekly-steem-stats-report-monday-november-18-2019
Although to steem's credit or injustice to the community, these were the number's yesterday.
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source: https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/daily-steem-stats-report-friday-november-22-2019
It is likely that the folks behind steem just let a backlog of new users applications accumulate, then approved them probably after many folks lost interest in doing whatever it was they had planned.
Although many new communities are being established, it takes an tremendous amount of steem investment, in the form of rc credits, to onboard one new user per 5 day [recharge] window. I guess that is about 9k steem worth of rcs if am reading it correctly-only $1000 to onboard a user every 5 days under today's steem prices.
https://beempy.com/resource_costs
The concept of writing a community is no big deal if you can get beyond the steemconnect apis. After that is down, it's pretty much cakewalk. if you don't use hivemind (I haven't), a concept for displaying new posts to simply find the latest block number from curling steemd and curl that block number from steemd. parse sections for simplicity sake include "authored a post:"-the more complex story is that the phrase could appear in undesired locations. Then curl again the actual posts from steemd or steemit. Then recall the previous block and repeat until you are happy. Then it's just a matter of presenting what you parsed. Then your run of the mill steemconnect api to add comments or upvotes features.
source:https://steemd.com/b/38400174
What you do with it from there will greatly depend on what you want done. Maybe parsing tags so you have your own dedicated community, Maybe have an app account that let guests posts, an app that imports other blogging sites including allowing bidirectional comments, maybe only allowing users that registered on your own platform, or blocking tags to keep our nsfw or cheetah posts, maybe new posts 1%. Maybe you want to create an community that excludes listings of posts who authors powered down or transferred steem into an exchange in the last year as to limit the supply of steem in circulation and thus your investment-you could do that.
source:https://steemd.com/tx/f5395a33df53f31d0c69ff18f24ce93a1ad25698
But in the end, it is basically like steemit only with extra steps...and a few extra perks. The bennies for the winner is ad revenue and exposure. The burden of course is still telling a new user to join the steem community. So it isn't just developing a better mouse trap that gets to make outsiders want to join steem, it is about being able to invest in steem to onboard new users....cause the folks at steem historical have and probably still are doing a poor job of it.
It is hard to make the case for any dapp-outside of permanent storage- that doesn't involve financial transactions. There could be some loosely construed exceptions, but most dapp developers will own or rent their server to run their scripts and thus have their own storage space which the storage is fast and dirt cheap compared to retrieval from a block chain.
In thinking, there could be an additional notable exception. I may dabble with whats in my head, when I dunno as I have other obligations. But many people who are into gaming knows that there exists private servers. Gaming companies tend to hate this because they are often violating copyright too, or engaged in theft of service, and ruin game play. But I am speaking more at the hobbiest/indy level where a developer may see it more profitable by getting exposure.
Maybe a group of users like the classic version of a game, another group likes to play the game with modifications, another a game with free stuff, maybe a group of users like to cuss, or spam, or cheat. So I am seeing that clone of a gaming server (and it could be affiliate based) gets to set their own rules and own modifications around a game engine. If I do a game engine, it will be like 1980/early 90s era stuff to run on a browser. Nothing sophisticated. The root servers (servers A[1]-An[n], or simplified for example as A) gets to run their own gaming servers and do the local stores of course, then every so often you put the stores on the block chain as needed. Server clone B is able to run their version of your software, and add their own tweaks to the game, and not just be able to import your gaming character but also add to it the progress made in their variant. And server clone C could either work off of A and/or B or neither. if server A bans you, then server B or C could keep you without restarting and still access your progress from A-unless A wants to be a jerk and delete your progress too. Each keeps their independent progress on the chain and cannot touch another.
Let's just say that a user on server C is enhanced from progress on server B, but server B turns rogue. Let's say they either intentionally corrupt or modify a gave save data that C can no longer read, or it does something evil like set a users max hp to -10000 in a game where the max is 9999-insta game over. Server C could just patch the game by removing enhancements from B. Likewise, if A and/or B goes down, server C will still operate but without any enhancements from A and or B. The big problem is what happens if steem goes down for good. At least each server should have their own local data stores. Which again begs the question why block chain, if they could just post their data on a webserver in the first place?
Actually the model I see is not really using clones (even though clones are inevitable if the concept catches, and people applying it to 3d engines), but I haven't ruled that out either. It also isn't just limited to variants of the same game, server C could write their own game built off the theme or look of A for example-or change those too. At this point what I am picturing is letting the mod developers do their own thing on the chain through custom tools, then loading that copy if an end user selects it. The mod developers then don't have much opportunity to put rogue files on my server. At best, other than registration, there might just be transaction ids and appnames stored in the database. And hell, even if they update a mod their old one is still on the chain which could be accessed. More of a question if old content should be allowed to save since developers tend to nerf things quite frequently.
The burden in dapp development on steem is in RCs. I have plenty for most apps, and if steem ever bottoms I'll have even more. The block chain purist about transparency would like everything store on the block chain. Your RC's recharge fully in 5 days. You can comment every 3 second. Each comment cost 1 RC. 1 RC is one steem. That is 144k steem to keep posting things every 3 seconds. Even at today's all time steem lows, that is about a $15k+ investment to be a purists. For steem to really be a viable dapp environment, either the cost of RCs need to go down at least a factor of 100 or people have to get over their purist ideation and settle for more off chain storage. Storing things every 5 minutes makes more sense, also also happens to drop cost by a factor of 100 putting it within the reach of most hobbyist....at least at todays steem prices.
Ideally to help take steem out of circulation, you need dapps. dapps can be steem hungry little things. 11 cent steem certainly sounds like a good entry point for the 5 minute saves. Of course if steem hits 5 cents, maybe it wasn't a good entry point considering you could do 150 second saves for less money. But still in many cases, you have to ask, why block chain? And perhaps the answer to sell stuff. And an offshoot question to that answer is, is steem the best block chain for that purpose? We need to do a better job of onboarding new users people, not just create things they might want to use.
Or alternatively to create so many dapps and tie up so many resources that it drives the price up so that the average person may see blogging with steem worth their time again.