RE: What needs to happen to reach $10 STEEM in 2018? (Discussion)
I remain fundamentally in the camp that the number of active users determine the value of the currency. The model I follow is the Mayer Multiple in which social media in general have their value quadruple when the number of active users double.
How to grow the user base?
Technology
Rocks Db to shrink RPC node requirements.
Velocity to speed up the signup process.
Make account creation super simple and have a tool that makes it simple for websites to include it.
Community
For people to come here there has to be community. Folks that come and don't find a home leave. We need to support community. This has technology aspects of SMTs and Communities, but also has to do with whales investing their Steem Power in growing communities that benefit the ecosystem.
Opportunity -
I'm not anti-bid bot. It's better now than when the deals were all behind closed doors and no one could access them. That said, it would be better if whales would sponser curation initiatives. We have tools that make having centrally organized accounts to resteem and vote content much easier. It would be swell if whales would organize communities and sponser their growth by putting as little as 20k SP into an account meant for others.
Down Voting
There has to be more down votes. There's a lot of shit content. We're not goign back to exponential rewards, so that means we have to have a way to clean up what sucks. We need a down vote pool.
Distribution
This has plagued this platform since I got here. The ninja mine lead to one of the worst economic distributions I've ever seen. It's terrible. You can't kill everyone and seize the steem. So, let's slowly distribute it. The best way to do that is inflation and making sure inflation goes to the active users (who typically aren't investors). This provides incentive to be here and write and earn.
Support Businesses and communities
If you're on the platform and want to see things go well buy stuff from others. If you need a server go to someguy. If you want a story go to the writers block. If you want entertainment hit up Steemmonsters. If you want to see the ecosystem grow you have to support it.
I agree. Undoubtedly, the number of active users determine the value of the currency.
This is why companies like Facebook and Google and Netflix all ploughed ahead, making no profits whatsoever in their formative stages, reinvesting all their resources to grow the number of active users, gain the network effect, and take an unassailable market lead. At that point, they monetized the numbers.
This is why bidbots are a bad idea, though, albeit I agree they are better than secret deals.
Since bidbots reapportion funds, from user base growth and retention, back to the holders of Steempower, active users are stagnated, borne out by statistics that show total active user numbers are no longer growing.
Since in a corrupt system, all parties tend to corruption, and the biggest losers are always the most altruistic, a Steemit solution requires altered algorithms, perhaps ones that reward curators more, as suggested by Luke Stokes, or maybe some other idea.
That said, another solution would be to give up on Steemit as a lost cause, allow it to stagnate, and go after new Steem users through the decoupled SMTs. That's where Ned is being really smart, because a better platform than Steemit can still be built on the Steem blockchain, through SMTs, even if Steemit itself ceases to grow.
"number of active users determine the value of the currency"
And this is our very sad report on those active users from @arcange:
I'm one of those content creators steemit is supposed to want to attract. Out of the 20 or so people I brought in this year, only my son @bxlphabet is still here. The others left - mostly quickly. The last two left last week. One said:
"There is no way steemit is worth all that effort. I'm going to stick with fb, pinterest and instagram where I get more better results for much less work."
The other one said:
"Not one of my moron fb friends could ever figure out how to post on steemit. They might be morons, but they are my morons."
Back in January, our number of redfish on @arcange's report was pushing 170K. Seeing it drop so far has been discouraging to me. And the dead fish category is now near 900k - so 9 out of 10 people fail. A few of my people who left are sill voting with auto-voters, so the active number is somewhat inflated.
I have no answers about what can be done, but I thought this report was a good addition to your post. Praying we all succeed here.
Yeah, well, I tend to think this whole thing is basically about hourly wage. When the price of steem is high the wage is high. When it's low the wage is low. Couple that with being new to the ecosystem people have to put in time, and as you note not every facebook dad can just hop onto steemit and roll. That said. I was on facebook for 5 years and never made a penny... so, even when I made a penny here it was better than 5 years over there.
Folks have to learn that getting your free lambo takes time.
But sadly, steemit advertises itself as a place content creators can get paid for their work. Then you get here and Oops! Not really! And then we get the lambo references or discussion about "greedy minnows." That phrase drove one of my guys out.
Many of my content creating friends - including me - do make money posting on fb - either with our pages or groups. We are not on social media to be social, but to earn a living. I get affiliate sales, book sales, and coaching work from fb. Some people do well with fb ads. This is a difference between content creators and casual posters. But neither of those categories of people seems to have a place here on steemit that makes sense.