What adds value to Steem?
What adds value to Steem is this: Content
Here are some examples which I consider valuable from top to bottom and in that order:
Educational Content = Tutorials, Breakdowns, Video Essays, Reviews, Advice, Tips, Tricks, Step by Step; topics about philosophy, maths, physics, history, science, science news, geology, sociology, financial (plenty of that already), language, children's education, health, sport, health, beauty, hobbies, how to do, etc
Creative Entertainment = Stories, Art, Movies, Short films, Music, Poetry, Creativity, Animations, Cartoons, Skits, Humour, Standup, Theatre, etc
Revisional/Entertainment Content = Top 10 information videos, Opinions, Entertainment Feedback, Entertainment Breakdowns, Entertainment Video Essays, Fan Theories, Fan Fiction, Popular Media Feedback, Entertainment Education, Entertainment News, etc
Topical Vlogging: blogs and vlogs about artists, workers, teachers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and other topics about work and actions people do - not general lives. Make blogging more topical and useful.
Life/Sport/Fails/Exercise physical evidence of surfing, skydiving, falling, parkcore, exercise, yoga, dancing, travel, relationships, cooking, eating, unboxing, interviews, etc.
The Steem Economy
Here is how it basically works:
Needs
- Users need content to consume and monetary support for their time
- Creators need monetary support to produce and social support to reach their target audiences
- Content needs a data host and a social platform to be consumed.
Solutions
- Creators produce content to consume
- Steem and derivative social platforms give the means for the social and monetary support.
- Steem blockchain data systems and Witness/IPFS Node systems and derivative social platforms and their servers provide a host and social platform for content to be stored and consumed.
Cycle
- User needs content.
- User searches content
- Creator makes content - with costs
- User finds content
- User and Creator interact
- Steem provides value distribution via User/Creator interactions
- Creator gets social support and monetary support from Steem
platforms - recovering costs - User gets monetary support for their time from Steem platforms
- Creator invests in more content
- User invest more time and searches for more content
Cycle repeats. Value increases - due to more valuable content available and more social interactions around the new content.
In summery, users gain value for the time they invest into the platform consuming content. Creators gain value for the content they produce. Content is what ultimately drives the value of Steem - and the Witnessess (or nodes) and other Steem platforms are the bridges between a User/Creator and the home of the central value driver: Content.
More content will drive more users/creators to create more value for the Steem platform by making new content and interacting more. And that is how Steem increases value - via Content.
This is an interesting article. But the 64 $teem question is: Does the structure of steemit really support the development of the content you desire.
Steemit is run on a seven day cycle. After seven days, the author no longer receives rewards for the content.
A good tutorial will not get to the audience in the seven day active period. A tutorial writer cannot build up equity in past tutorials.
The SEO aspects of SteemIt are bleak because search engine algorithms are driven by the update schedule of the search engines. So, if you wrote a great post that Google picked up ... well, you would get bug squat.
For that matter, a great article that gets picked up by Google or other press becomes a burden for the system as the article will burn bandwidth without creating any Steem.
Unfortunately, the workflow of SteemIt dictates that social networking is king on this platform.
In the present tense I agree with you. It's true today that social networking is king. And that will drive the value of steem into the ground in the long term.
If they change the weekly cycle to be recurring and clocked on content value per user, not per one week (can't like twice should be normal so nothing ever over generates).. then it will be self sustainable.
I really like how the upvote has monetary value. But more thought needs to be put into the source of the money. The value of our upvote comes from the inflation built into Steem. This mechanism in and of itself will not provide sufficient revenue to fund content creation projects.
There are also problems like the sad observation that the upvote of new accounts do not have substantive voting power. A single vote from me is less than the rounding error.
BTW, I decided to steal the theme of your post and dashed out my own steemit post.
https://steemit.com/blog/@yintercept/the-sixty-four-usdteem-question
I think I like how you can buy into Steem with "actions" as Steem Power to gain more influence on the platform. This investment into the system that grows the distribution pool weekly is also a factor that grows value. I forgot to mention this. If you buy into it, you earn more from curation. This generates value from external investment into the economy.
Also, nice article and counter arguement. Thanks for the plug!
None of this matters if members don't read and upvote posts. Too much money is being spent on bots. If that money was being spent on upvoting posts and spread over the entire platform then this place has a future.
The User/Creator relationship.. yes. Lately I've enjoyed Steepshot and Dlive more than Steemit. I have also enjoyed Busy. I like the idea that sometimes content is not read, but an image is liked eitherway. Again it boils down to the interactions between a user and creator - a bot is only a tool for exposure ultimately.
And again, a user needs content to consume, and a creator needs users to produce content. There is a slight catch 42 - but a user essentially cannot fix what they are searching for: content.