The great opportunity I see in Steem

In early Feburary I learned about Steemit from a stray comment on a former colleague's Facebook page. It looked worth investigating, so I came, looked around a bit, and signed up for a free account. Then I forgot about it. At the time there was a three-week lag for free account signup, so I got an email saying my account was ready on March 2.

I bounced around for a little bit trying to figure out how I wanted to fit in here. I tried posting some of my photography, I did some copyediting for another poster, I started writing a little bit about books and movies. But mostly what I was doing was trying to grasp what was going on here, and by the time I got a little bit of a sense of the Steem economy, I knew this was something I wanted to be a significant part of. I've only become more sure of that since.

The biggest risk in cryptocurrency investing is that so many projects are fly-by-night scams, sold on strong marketing without any intention to ever follow through. It's extremely difficult to judge when a project has a real future. Steem has solved that problem by backing its investing platform with a community of content creators, not only allowing investment in a variety of ways but creating an expectation that anyone who operates a service on the platform will be a member of a real community. This may not remove the risk, but it mitigates it immensely.

On the other side of things, traditional social media is a colossal time-waster. As it has evolved across platforms, the expected quality of content has decreased along with the social and professional reward for communication, and a focus instead on punchy, viral, shallow posts. It has also shown its extreme vulnerability to centralized control, as Facebook has repeatedly made choices to harm its users. Steem has solved both of these problems by backing its blogging platform with an investment opportunity, putting ownership of the network in the hands of the users, and creating a system where creating good work can lead both to greater ownership and financial rewards.

Do these systems work as well as they might? No, they don't. Steem isn't a money tree, it's a money sapling. It needs nurturing to become its best self, and I see that as both personally and financially rewarding.

The future Steem ecosystem I see is one where the major population is composed of content creators who are also small-time investors, reaping the benefits of platform ownership while also developing a community where we reward each other for quality communication. To me this is the revolution that creators need in the 21st-Century economy, a way to lift our work forward while generating financial benefit at the same time. This can also benefit the large-scale investors by creating a thriving platform and market for their capital.

I was fortunate enough to be a small beneficiary of the rise in Bitcoin, allowing me to become that creator/investor hybrid from the moment I decided to commit myself here. But there aren't all that many creators who fit that category, and if we want them, we're going to have to make them. I see a two-fold strategy for that: support account growth and retention for creators who are already here and participating, and recruit valuable creators from outside with the promise of an easier path to ownership and rewards than they would have coming in without assistance.

There's no end of work to do on that. But it's springtime on Steemit, and if we nurture our saplings, growth will come. I've been pleased to discover that there are many foresters here, with many different methods.

Spring Trees at Hallgrimskirkja.jpg
Spring trees outside Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavik, May 2016.

I've been thinking of this post for a while but I wrote it today at the suggestion of @abh12345 in this post. You can see other posts from this initiative here.

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Great stuff.

I did a little analysis a while back comparing Steemit to Quora and Medium and the results were quite positive. https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@just2random/steemit-vs-medium-vs-quora-competitive-analysis

The only thing holding us back from a breakout moment is more quality content.

And your post has been a great reminder of that.

I think user training would also be helpful and more promotion and I'm not talking about paid promotion either.

That's a great point to make, I was overwhelmed at the amount of learning I had to do just to understand Steemit. User training would be invaluable.

Yeah you might want to sign up with @dustsweeper once you get your first earnings. I'd upvote your reply but right now it would be a waste.

It looks like a really good initiative from what I've read, I just need to wait for my first SBD now and I'll join it.

Wow...@tcpolymath, your whole post is a shameless effrontery.

You say within your post:

"Steem isn't a money tree, it's a money sapling. It needs nurturing to become its best self, and I see that as both personally and financially rewarding."

The same time you are writing this, you're buying upvotes big time for your post, that otherwise would only have got the value of a few bucks. Which I think would be totally equitable.

Abusing the platform and honest authors that are putting up great quality content and then you writing about how to help steemit grow and whatever is such a bad kind of hypocrisy and double attitude that I MUST condemn. # I hope that some whale sets in and flags this post with most voting power he has.

You are not helping the platform grow, "nurturing" (how ridicolous is that), not in any kind of way , instead people like you destroy it.

That's a great article. I'd thought mostly about Medium, because it seems like our style of content is a more direct competitor to them, but Quora is interesting. My partner is regularly a top answerer there, so I'm more familiar with it than I am with Medium. It might be nice to see a Quora-ish frontend for Steem. I'm down for answering random questions but it's not super-easy to find that sort of thing here.

there is a tag: question

This post has received votes totaling more than $50.00 from the following pay for vote services:

minnowbooster upvote in the amount of $225.94 STU, $381.33 USD.
danzy upvote in the amount of $0.65 STU, $1.09 USD.

For a total calculated value of $227 STU, $382 USD before curation, with approx. $57 USD curation being earned by the paid voters.

This information is being presented in the interest of transparency on our platform and is by no means a judgement as to the quality of this post.

Interesting. Danzy in this case is a Smartmarket vote but apparently also an independent bot itself. I did not know that.

Steem has so much potential is crazy how the majority does not realize that.

great points @tcpolymath!

No, they don't. Steem isn't a money tree, it's a money sapling. It needs nurturing to become its best self, and I see that as both personally and financially rewarding.

haha love that: a money sapling...

i love your point that we need to nurture this community. i think your post and @abh12345's contest are doing exactly that! great job!

Figuring out how to be an effective nurturer is itself quite a learning process. I've found a few new posters I'm ruthlessly experimenting on (mostly by upvoting them, so I think they're fine with that) and watching some of the more established organizations and how they go about things. I figure in a few months I'll have developed some useful forestry skills.

haha love it! (keep that analogy going lol, as a homesteader i love it ;)) ... cool. i'll stay tuned to hear about some of your techniques, i'm all for tending this blockchain sapling til it produces fruit for many!! <3

:) do share those

Steem isn't a money tree, it's a money sapling. It needs nurturing to become its best self

I love this...so true!! Too many join with the prospect of becoming an instant millionaire, but like anything good in life, it needs to be nurtured to remain successful, and that includes creating and maintaining your community here :)

Thanks for a great entry!

Keep grinding, forester.
Oh, and good post, btw.

I'm really enjoying this metaphor.

Tim the Forester has a nice ring to it.

I have very strong feelings about trees.

Thanks to you I learned about @steembasicincome and that is a wonderful way to nurture newcomers while also rewarding yourself. This makes it a whole lot easier to make some of my youtube buddies to jump over and actually stay active here. :)

Nicely written. I was actually suggested to steemit from a friend of mine who didn't realized that I blogged. When he found that out, he strongly suggested I join this community. I am so glad I did. Not only am I finding communities that interest me, I can choose to stay away from the drama from other social media networks like Facebook. And the incentives of possibly being invested in is a perk as well! I just got my acceptance about 4 or 5 days ago and I am already amazed by the steemit community!

As a published author and writing coach and instructor, I get great joy and satisfaction in helping other writers. But as you so clearly stated, @tcpolymath, all the effort I poured into "social media" through the years has perhaps grown a bit of "brand awareness" for my businesses, but that's about it. Paltry to say the least.

Steemit on the other hand, has given me a fresh new platform and I'm thrilled about that! I see a very long-term relationship in my future. I'm convinced others in this Steemit community feel the same way.

That's some of the direction I come at this from too; I was a short science fiction editor back in the day, when established authors avoided the internet and I had to build up my writers from the younger and bolder folks who saw value in publishing online. I get a lot of the feeling here that I had then, and while I got out of it early, it's certainly done well for short sff publishing.