When the Steem Teem introduced Subjective Proof-of-Work it was a brilliant paradigm shift for the world of cryptocurrency. They had created a way of distributing tokens that the average non-technical internet user could participate in, thus introducing Steem more widely more quickly than any cryptocurrency before it.
Unlike most other altcoins, this Steem Dreem Teem :) also 'closed the loop', by giving steemholders a place to invest their steem - into raising their clout and influence on Steemit. Another brilliant stroke that other crypto projects may copy in the future.
Eventually though, Steem is going to have to break out of this meta-ecosystem. There need to be other places to earn and spend Steem. Some efforts have already been made in this regard (Steemmarket), and this is why today I am introducing steemoverflow.com
SteemOverflow proposes to be a Q&A site where questioners can offer bounties denominated in Steem to incentivize responders to provide timely, exhaustive replies to their queries.
Question and answer sites have a well-proven utility as demonstrated by the popularity of Quora, Stackexchange, Stackoverflow and Yahoo! Answers. This sites appeal to a broad segment of the population because they can bring together people with all kinds of interests. There is seemingly no limit to the types of questions people will ask, and more surprisingly the efforts others will go to to answer those questions, as demonstrated by the thousands of niche-oriented discussion forums online. Anyone who has repaired an old car or undertaken some maintenance job around the house can testify to the utility of these sites. Currently though there are no sites (that I know of) that have been successful at allowing users to place and earn micro-bounties for asking and answering questions.
With steemoverflow.com I've created a basic Q&A site using open source software as a jumping-off point for this discussion. It has all the common functionality needed to host a regular Q&A site, but none of the Steem integration. I think the Steem integration should:
-allow users to post bounties denominated in Steem from any fraction up to a maximum set by the site admin
-allow the site admin to take a percentage off the transaction
-hold bounties in escrow until the questioner picks the preferred answer
-place an admin-configured time limit after which the questioner must pick an answer if at least one has been provided, or forfeit the bounty
-handle all transactions off-site. By that I mean the Q&A site should neither hold nor collect the bounties (there's an API for that, isn't there?).
-be opensource and easily added to any Question2Answer (the platform on which steemoverflow is running) site so that non-technical users can create their own niche Q&A site and expand the Steem universe to millions of people who have never heard of Steem before.
Unfortunately I don't have the skills to complete the integration. If the community thinks this is a good idea (please provide feedback in the comments below and resteem) and if someone capable steps forward, I would be happy to work with that person and maybe even provide some funding. Or if you simply want to take this idea and run with it on your own I'm fine with that too.
That's one of the uses cases, some of us were talking for months now...Great to see you start implementing it... Keep it up!
PS. Let me know if I can be of any assistance to bootstrap or help with integration.
It's php/MySQL.
The suggestions you, fabien and abit have made about deeper integration with Steem blockchain sound awesome but are way, way beyond any capabilities I would have. That definitely sounds like the preferred way to move forward though.
@jesta recently released steemphp library (https://github.com/greymass/steemphp) and @arcange was working on steemsql (http://steemsql.com/) where I think with combination of 2, you can inject Steem. Start exploring what can be done...
In the post you link to I see there is mention of a Steem-powered Disqus. That was going to be my next post! Do you know if someone is already working on this? I think it would be a killer-app for mainstream adoption.
I think few people working on similar ideas, haven't seen any announcement/progress yet. Steemconnect I believe also working towards having easy to plug widgets
Steem voting needs to change then, to allow no time limit, not 24h, not 30d max. People can judge answers for all time, not just 24h or 30d.
This requires payouts to change as well.
And also comments need to change. You can't provide another answer after some time, as comments are disabled.
Otherwise, in terms of knowledge and answers, valuing answers, I would not use a system that limits to 24h or 30d for recognizing knolwedge about a question.
But great site! Way to go!
you are right @krnel... Some discussion is going on here and here, hope we will reach some consensus on that.
So am I understanding this correctly: anyone can build an app or site that integrates with the steem blockchain and pays out steem to users of that new app, based on various rules regarding creating, voting, commenting etc.? (I realize this is probably a pretty dumb question!)
I think it would be much easier and better to build the integration without the upvote and reward like steemit, and instead users should deposit steem or sbd to pay for the answer to their question
Yes, ultimately, you will be paying out to users of Steem (the blockchain). Checkout steemtools.com for the projects.
Interesting thoughts. Continue brainstorming.
Actually it fits the Steem blockchain perfectly.
Some thoughts:
json_metadatato do deeper classification (credit: @good-karma) so you can play with them on your siteThis is definitly something that would make sense to build on Steem blockchain. I would agree with @good-karma, questions and answers should be on chain so anyone could use this data.
If you have any question about SteemSQL, feel free to contact me on steemit.chat
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