Steeve's Business Plan

During the past two weeks we were exploring the possibilities of how to make the development of Steeve sustainable. We have been studying business models of other online services both from Steem and from outside of it. We have to say that it was a journey down the rabbit hole, especially when digging up the details of how Facebook’s business works or who actually pays for Steem rewards and how they are distributed. You can read more about the findings in a post that @hr1 put together.

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Most of the content online (blogs, videos, music, social networks, search) is funded through the “freemium” business model. Users are given a service for free, but somebody else must obviously pay for it. We realized that this system is fundamentally broken because the incentives of the business can’t be in line with the incentives of users unless the users pay for what they are getting.

Our Realization

Long story short, we realized that “nothing of value is actually ever free” and “if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product”. Steem doesn’t rely on any revenue from ads (at least yet), but has nevertheless also a freemium business model, so the fundamental problem is there, too. The problem with Steem is that we, the active users of Steem, are relying too much on the hype around cryptocurrencies and on the mysterious blockchain mechanics which provide us with rewards. So when the markets go down, we have to worry whether the rewards will continue, or all our savings will change to dust.

We have an idea how to fix that. Originally there was a mechanism in Steem design which motivated people to power up - curation. Currently (or arguably never), this mechanism is not working. There is too much new content created every day. No human can ever go through it all and find the good posts. What’s even worse, even if you find a good piece of content, your upvote will be purely altruistic, because no-one will find it and upvote it too. The probability is just too low. So there will be no curation rewards for you, which means no motivation for doing the real curation work, which means no motivation to power up.

Steeve wants to change that. We want to combine the power of AI which can go through all the 20k posts created daily on Steem with the power of human curation. The power of your curation.

We are pleased to announce the Steeve Upvote Program!

We will be selecting the most popular posts on Steeve and upvoting them with our second account @steevebot. We have already gathered 150k Steem Power for this cause and are looking for investors who agree with the importance of our goal.

But let me first explain how this will affect Steem. Since the beginning, Steeve’s goal was to learn what you like using AI and discover new interesting content based on that for you. So Steeve will do the heavy lifting of finding the posts you might like and you will do manual curation on that. This alone might be a game changer for Steem. But we are not gonna stop there.

By gathering a significant amount of SP and upvoting the most popular posts on Steeve, we will not just appreciate the authors who truly deserve their reward. We will be effectively rewarding our users for their curation work. This will further motivate our users to power up and enhance their curation rewards. A higher amount of STEEM locked up in SP will increase the price and push the economics into a virtuous cycle.

Can Steeve be the missing piece in the puzzle of the original design of Steem incentives?

This takes us back to where we began in this post - nothing of value is for free and Steeve can’t be different. We did our first research this spring, started the development in July, working part time on it at the beginning and the last 3 months switched to (more than) full time with a team of 3. If we want to continue Steeve’s development, we have to make a business out of it.

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Our goal is to provide the whole Steem ecosystem with the greatest value possible. In order to do that our incentives must be aligned. We analyzed what kind of value Steeve brings to each part of the ecosystem and how each part can support Steeve back.

Readers

Steeve provides readers with new interesting content outside of their classic Steem feed, motivates and rewards their engagement through increased curation rewards and other mechanisms (such as unstaked voting, Steeve’s stars, ...).

Authors

Steeve is increasing the reach of good content by recommending it to the readers who can appreciate it. This also means higher engagement of the readers on the posts, and finally also higher author rewards!

SP Holders

If Steeve helps Steem to work as originally intended, users will be motivated to gather more SP. The distribution of rewards will be more fair because curators will be rewarded for finding good content and authors for creating it. More STEEM locked in SP together with more actively used blockchain will drive demand for STEEM and increase its price. That is good for the whole ecosystem and mainly for the big SP holders.

Steeve

Steeve will be rewarded for its work in three different ways depending on which parts of the ecosystem will benefit from its service.

1. Steeve will take a percentage of each vote going through our platform to the content which the curator wouldn’t have found without Steeve.
2. Curation rewards from Steeve’s votes using the delegated SP.
3. Third, as an author you have the option to set Steeve as a beneficiary. This is currently optional and you can use it as a way to appreciate what we do. In the future when there will be more work done on helping authors we might change that, but currently our focus is directed mostly at curation.

Currently Steeve’s services are completely free. We already started gathering SP delegations. So the next step is to start rewarding the most popular content on Steeve together with starting to charge our curators. We will give you more technical details later, but you can expect this feature coming live around the next week.

Join the Discussion

We are really interested in what you think about the plan. It affects you as the author, the curator, the investor, and it may and hopefully will affect Steem in general as well. Let us know what you think in comments or join our Discord server.