What If... A Glimpse of a Brighter Future?
Back in my early days on the Steem blockchain, there was optimism everywhere. Some folks claimed that Steem had ushered in a Gift economy and others used to play a sort of a "what if" game. "What if Steem got as big as Facebook?", "What if Steem got as big as Bitcoin?" You get the idea. Big hopes and dreams, not yet tempered by cold-hard reality.
In retrospect, there was clearly some irrational exuberance going on there. Steem was #3 on CoinMarketCap, and some posts were receiving tens of thousands of dollars in payouts. But reality always wins in the end.
Recently, it feels like the opposite. We're so used to the Trending page being flooded with spam, the difficulty of finding interesting content, and the price of STEEM hanging out below the haircut price, that there's not much optimism to be found. Even the people who are diligently working to make the blockchain a better place can't hide their frustration that the current set of problems seems intractable.
So, today I'm here to inject a dose of optimism. Yes, there are problems that shouldn't be ignored or sugar-coated, but the only thing that's permanent is change, so let's look at some reasons for optimism, and then play one of those "what if" games that I mentioned.
Reasons for optimism
- After a 5 year dry spell, development is happening again. Not just through the SPS, but some other independent developers have landed here, too.
- 57% of SBDs are locked away in the Steem DAO, so it seems like inflation will almost certainly have to drop back near scheduled/manageable rates in fairly short order (Scheduled rates are in the neighborhood of 5.9% and falling).
- A potential solution exists to the problem of spam from the voting services. Oh, and by the way, this also solves one of Steem's oldest pain points for authors. The 7-day payout window. The @thoth.test account has made #lifetime-rewards a reality for 4 months, now. I'm not typically one to "toot my own horn", but if you pause and think about it, that is a BFD for the platform - or at least, it should be. Some authors have been receiving rewards - this year - for articles that were written almost a decade ago.
So, yeah, we're not ranked at #3 on CMC any more, and no-one's getting $50k for makeup videos these days, but there are signs of a possible change in direction. Borrowing from Nathan Rothschild, maybe right now is the time to blog when there's blood in the street😉.
So now, let's play one of those what-if games. A few weeks ago, I made a spreadsheet to see what STEEM's price would need to be for the blockchain to be a mid-cap, large-cap, etc... Later, I went back and updated it to see what would happen if Steem grew to the size of some businesses in the blogging and social media space (with the current virtual supply size). Let's take a look at those results, based on some informal web searches and AI queries:
| Firm | Users | Value Estimate | Steem Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medium | 60,000,000 | $600,000,000 | $1.03 |
| Substack | 50,000,000 | $650,000,000 | $1.12 |
| Wordpress | 409,000,000 | $7,500,000,000 | $12.93 |
| 1,200,000,000 | $27,000,000,000 | $46.55 | |
| 600,000,000 | $41,000,000,000 | $70.69 |
So, let's pretend that Steem was priced only as a social media site with no blockchain attached, and let's remember that Metcalfe's Law suggests that social media networks gain value in proportion to the number of users squared.
Under these assumptions, if we get 50-60 million active (organic) Steem users, the price of Steem would be around one dollar. Get to half-a billion active users, and it's anywhere from $13 to $70. A factor of seven increase for getting to the size of Medium, and a factor of 86-467 for getting to the size of Wordpress, Twitter, or reddit.
It's clear that none of the "investors" who are currently feeding the spam machines can hope to achieve that level of ROI with their current strategies. They're stepping over dollars to grab the pennies - so to speak. At some point - sooner or later - they'll start paying attention to the dollars or market forces will demand that they hand their influence over to other investors with better insights. Weak hands fold, strong hands come out on top, and reality wins in the end.
And that price speculation is not even factoring in all of Steem's features as a blockchain or its social media features that can't be found on other platforms:
- zero-cost transactions
- fast settlement
- account recovery
- beneficiary rewards and curation rewards
- escrow operations
- community funding for projects
- zero-cost data storage (via custom_json)
I'm definitely not a pollyanna and it's undeniable that the current state of affairs is challenging, but in my opinion there's still some room for a bit of optimism towards the future. We just need to see the possibilities.
What is the one single thing that anyone can do to make STEEM more valuable and lead us into that future? Maybe it's this. Do what I can at this very moment to make the Steem ecosystem into a place where people want to spend their time and attention.
It's nice to read an optimistic post, because I have to admit that I too am feeling a certain weariness and miss the optimism that prevailed in the early days. But who knows, maybe a brilliant idea could change everything.
I am convinced that fair distribution of rewards is one of the most important factors for success. This means, for example, that spam or useless stuff gets nothing and the rewards actually go to active users. Perhaps interesting in this context is John Rawls A Theory of Justice. What would the reward structure look like if it had been created under the “veil of ignorance”? According to Rawls, the focus would have been on maximizing the minimum. What we see, however, is a reward curve that reduces low-rated posts by a further 50% or so. Okay, that's fine if it's spam, but bad for newcomers.
What would happen if we reversed the reward curve so that highly rated posts received lower payouts? Two effects come to mind: commenting would become more attractive and newcomers would have an easier time. However, we would have to come up with something new for spam.
Perhaps the Steemit team (@steemitblog) should launch a challenge for new ideas?
Oh, and by the way, I was pleased that thoth.test found an old post of mine.
I have to admit, the optimism is hard to sustain in the face of so much destructive behavior in the ecosystem, but the potential is there. There's a lot to build on if we can find the right leadership and collaboration.
I had noticed that @thoth.test picked your post out, and I was also glad to see it. Overall, I'm fairly happy with most of the authors and articles that he's selecting these days.
Agreed. I have always thought that overvalued posts are just harmful as undervalued posts. They're two sides of the same coin. This is why I think something like Thoth can eventually have a solid impact.
Sometime, I'm going to have to sit down and actually try to work out the math, but it's clear that there's some ratio of owned SP vs. delegated SP where the Thoth operator can afford to pay delegators more than the existing voting services (especially if Thoth selects posts that are interesting enough to draw additional/organic upvotes).
Plus, the potential for lifetime rewards means that an author has to think about rewards over the long term, so it doesn't make as much sense to go for the big burst on day 1 just to be ignored forever after that. Maybe my post doesn't draw $100 today, but maybe it earns $5 per month for the next 10 years (assuming widespread adoption of Thoth or something like it).
If you think deeply about Thoth's mechanism, there are a lot of dynamics in play that can help with that sort of thing. For example, even posts that don't qualify now because an author is new might qualify in a month or two if the author stays around and builds their follower network. I have come across a number of interesting nuances like that while working on the project.
I wonder if even a small part of this optimism will return. 🙂 I see great potential in Steem, even despite the huge problems it faces. But maybe I'm a bit of a naive optimist.
I think your post is necessary and relevant. Most of us have stopped seeing the good in Steem and have focused only on the bad. I hope as many people as possible read it.
Yeah, I go through phases, too. I have to remind myself of the possibilities, sometimes. What we really need is some sort of catalyst that converts potential into reality.
This is fantastic news! The 7-day payout window felt too short for certain genre.
It could encourage people to read and engage with older stories, which currently just become a graveyard of old content.
Thanks for the feedback!
I definitely think it will have this effect. It does on me, anyway. In developing the app, I find myself reading lots of old articles that I had missed the first time around - especially posts in languages that I can't read without translating. In my feed, I'm not going to take the time to translate a lot of those posts if I can't tell what the topic is, but Thoth gives me an English language summary, and that often spurs me to click through and translate the original post.
It needs a lot more work and adoption before the blockchain can deliver #lifetime-rewards at the scale we need, but the concept has definitely been proved at this point.
Feel free to check out the posting history for @thoth.test. I think it's already doing a reasonable job at selecting some good posts.
If it works for other non-blockchain site, then definitely this can work.
I would usually translate the feed entirely to select which to read.
Just checked out thoth's curation with it's 2020's list.
Wishing you all the best.
Heads up - I've just downvoted something that you probably won't want to downvote so please review my recent 100% downvote to check that you agree. My justification for doing so is in the comments (actually about a dozen comments spread across multiple posts which you can see in my feed).
Thanks for the heads-up. I had read part of that conversation yesterday, but I don't feel like I know enough about the situation to keep the auto-downvotes in place, so I removed them.
The auto-votes have been for users reward farming - 3 key groups comprising of nearly 400 users now.
This downvote was different (not part of my downvote trail), hence the heads-up. Unfortunately, he's been exposed as a liar and having been exposed, is now trying to deflect attention away from himself. Which is extremely sad and disappointing given the recent funding that he's received.
Yeah, I understand the distinction, and I appreciate the heads-up.
I actually try to keep an eye on my automatic downvotes. No reservations about continuing that. (one time, I apparently downvoted a legitimate post in the German community... seems that you had accidentally downvoted, then switched to upvote, and my follow script didn't undo the downvote. Fortunately, I caught that and reversed it before it paid out. ;-) Hopefully, I haven't missed any others of those...)
I have been thinking that Steemit could put a dent in this by requiring captcha verifications to renew a delegation every 30 days or something like that. It has always annoyed me (even pre-2020) that they are unable to curb that form of abuse. Maybe even start at 30 days and increase the frequency as time goes on.... At some point, an account shouldn't need a Steemit delegation any more.
I'm glad it's being downvoted, but it would be better to stop it at the source.
... gulp! I can't remember doing that! I'm usually very careful because I know you'll follow!
I compiled a list of users a couple of years ago whose delegations were 2+ years old. I can't remember how much STEEM it was... but it was significant. It's probably even more now.
The Steemit Team has historically been very good at removing the delegations when informed. They've been very slow this time for whatever reason - perhaps because I haven't given them an array to simply implement. Maybe I'll do that at some point :-)
It's the "voting permissions" that I find the most annoying... although they're all a "can't lose" proposition for the scammers.
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