The Sustainability of Steem - Is Freemium Broken?

in #steem5 years ago

What is Freemium?

In short, freemium business model means that you get a service or a product for free while someone else pays for the costs of developing it and providing it to you.


source

You probably know the most prominent examples such as Facebook with its social network, Google search, and Steemit with its social media network. All these services needed huge investments into development before even coming to the stage where they would be able to provide users with their service. Now they “only” need resources for operation, but these are also not negligible - they need many servers just to run and big teams to keep them running and keep improving your user experience.

Somebody has to cover all these costs. So the question is, who is it if it’s not me - the user? Who wants me so much to use the service that they pay for it? There is a saying: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."

Who Is Paying It?

For most internet businesses the answer is simple: Advertisers. For me ads are a controversial topic: 10 years ago, I hated ads because they were just a source of distraction for me. They were basically stealing my precious attention, and once I found out about ad-blocker I immediately started blocking all ads. I was happily using the internet until Facebook found a way around ad-blocker and put ads into my feed.

I was angry at first, but then I noticed something’s changed. Facebook had been learning about me the whole time and started giving me ads which were much more relevant. So I realized that ads are not pure evil as I originally thought. The problem was not with ads in general, just with the ads which were not targeted well and thus too irrelevant, spammy to me. I thought it was actually pretty clever - use AI to find out what I like and get paid for showing me the ads which have the highest chance of being useful to me.

Is Freemium Broken?

That was before I realized this is not how it works. There is nothing there which would hold facebook back from showing me ads which I totally don’t care about if it’s more profitable for them. They just need to ensure the ads don’t decrease my time spent on Facebook much, but otherwise, they optimize for something completely different than what I want.

But my goal was not to attack Facebook here, it’s just an example. Google and other “free” online services have the same problem: The incentives in the freemium business model are just fundamentally broken. And the reason is that the one who is paying for the service is different from the one using it.

So What About Steem?

You might be wondering, how does Steem fit into this topic? There are no ads on Steem... But you can still create an account, post, comment, and vote. You can even earn rewards without paying a dime upfront! So who is paying for all that?


source

Who Is Paying for Steem?

You could say nobody and everybody. Both are wrong, but at the same time there is a piece of truth in each. In short, everything is paid by inflation. But the devil is always in the detail - because if everyone’s stake were inflated by the same amount, nobody would earn anything. In reality everybody pays something, but some people get something in return. So who pays what?

You could say people who are inactive are paying for the activity of others. To be more specific, everybody gets diluted by approximately 9% per year, but holders of liquid STEEM pay the most as they don’t get anything in return. Then there are holders of Steem Power who don’t vote. They also have the 9% inflation as everybody else, but they get approximately 2% back, so that’s 7% per year.

About a third of all existing STEEM is kept liquid and almost a half of Steem Power is not being used for voting. By being inactive the owners of these allow all other active voters to distribute 3 times more rewards (over 21 million STEEM per year) than they could if everybody powered up and voted (7 million).

Ok, What’s the Problem?

I see two big problems we are currently facing. We, the users of Steem, have been relying too much on the rising crypto markets and on the speculators (holders of liquid STEEM) and the long term investors (inactive large SP holders). We got too used to the rewards we get from them without even knowing where these were coming from. Now with the big price decline, this business model starts failing as we see on the example of Steemit Inc, who is the largest owner of liquid STEEM and inactive SP.

The second problem is quite deeply connected to the first one. The incentive for normal users to power up is broken. Originally the main financial incentive for powering up was curation. But this currently isn’t working because the reward distribution is not working. Only a small fraction of good content gets good rewards.

Why is that? There is like 20 thousand new posts created on Steem every day. But with no content discovery mechanism people are unable to find good pieces. And if most of the good posts never reach their readers, nobody will reward them. Then in turn, if good posts often don’t get good rewards, there is no incentive to search for them and upvote them (other than purely altruistic). In this situation there is just no reason why people should power up.


source

Are We Doomed?

There is a new project - @steeveapp - that tries to change this situation for the better. I think it has a great potential to succeed, but I will not talk about it here, as I am a part of it. Just one thing to add: It won’t be free. Because nothing of value is actually free.


View this post on Steeve

Sort:  

A post from hr1, I just had to read! I've never seen you other than with those upvotes that seem to reach everyone.

So, from reading the steeveapp post, would the form of payment would come via a cut from curation votes on good content found by Steeve?

Nope, the idea is to take a cut of the vote. The curation rewards will be actually higher than usual for regular users if the upvoted post will be rewarded by Steeve's vote. They could be actually higher than the cut we will take.

Posted using Steeve

Lmao same

Posted using Partiko Android

Wow, now I understand why the bandwidth demands(and now resource credits) vary.

So what you are saying @hr1 is that we will eventually get to a point where the system comes to a halt?
Let's say if prices spikes and a large number of people come running back to steemit.

As the community seeks to better understand what has happened and how to improve the ecosystem to get on track, I think these talking points you share with us could be a great foundation to build a upon. If we extract value, they why can we not pay for it, right? Especially when we can created value ourselves to build the community and the projects it is composed of. I am intrigued to learn more and follow the project. Thanks for sharing!

Posted using Partiko iOS

Thanks for trying it out! I think we will have to experiment much more in general on Steem..

Posted using Steeve

I spent over a year trying to push the discussion and offer solutions about curation being broken. The best response I got was that SMTs and Oracles could actually fix a lot of the issues I have and I believe they can still. The problem is that for STEEM to be the utility token that holds value to run all of these dapps we either need much smarter projects here on the chain or we need much simpler ways to do the things that need to be done (SMTs and Oracles). As long as STEEM as seen as the reward and not the fuel or oil that makes the machine go, we will always be living on a speculation bubble with no real value. The people and the communities are the value, but when most of them don't even know how the chain works and have no incentive to power up, they just see it as free magic internet money to throw away for fiat or other crypto. Hopefully SMTs and Oracles doesn't get completely derailed by these layoffs, but as of right now the best functional use case I see for our chain is Steem Monsters as they actually created a tokenized economy with a burn mechanism. It is what it is, I've already placed my bet there, but I really do hope this current situation is a wake up call to raise awareness of some of the glaring issues we have with our economic model.

Oh I agree Steem Monsters are a genious idea and they may point to the direction where SMTs will take us. But I think they are quite tangential to what Steem has been trying to do for authors and curators.

Posted using Steeve

It's not like I completely understand how SMTs and Oracles are going to change the game, but I have a feeling it is not the wisest thing to just bet everything on these to solve all our problems. I can tell you that usually when you are like, yay, this is going to happen in the future and change everything, you are then unpleasantly surprised that things didn't exactly go the pink planned way :-)

It's not like I am trying to be a pessimist, though ;-)

Posted using Steeve

I agree. Banking on theoretical developments that haven't been implemented isn't really my style, but the fundamentals of what they are doing will help address the biggest issues. We need price discovery for content that isn't completely broken. We need incentives for curators to actually promote quality content and have an organic "trending" feed. We need actual burn cases for the tokens to counter inflation and create some kind of scarcity. There have been so many suggestions that ways to go about doing these things that just get completely ignored that it's unreal. SMTs should in theory make it easier to tokenize value and create price discovery for the content by not paying people in STEEM. Dapps need users and will have to use their STEEM to create accounts and give RC to "normies." Oracles allows for content moderation to get rid of all the spammy bullshit and keep the DAPPs or Communities clean. All of this can already be done with some top notch coding, but we either don't have that many devs that can actually code these dapps that well or they have no incentive to actually do it as they are simply in it to make the most fast cash as possible. Probably some combination of the two. These are just my thoughts on the situation and no I don't think SMTs and Oracles are a silver bullet to all of our problems, I just think they will give better resources to make creating communities with tokenized value and content price discovery easier.

@steeveapp is totally planning to address these issues. You can read more about it a post that is a followup to this article actually:

https://www.steeve.app/@steeveapp/steeves-business-plan

Posted using Steeve

Awesome I'll check it out!

Ok, I read up a bit on SMTs and Oracles. Sounds pretty much like "We messed up, but we will give you a mechanism to fix it, but it's super complicated and you will need a rocket scientist to get it right" :-)

I am really wondering who will get enough funds and brains to pull this out...

Posted using Steeve

I think the vote selling on Steem is causing active harm as it creates an arms race to pay more and more to promote posts onto trending. That causes some people to give up as they don't have money to buy Steem for votes. I choose to not play that game. You can earn here by building connections with people rather than bots. I see accounts that only buy votes and never comment on other posts. Their lack of replies indicates that few are reading their content.

I find good posts via the people I follow.

I will look into Steeve, and not just because we have similar names. There are other attempts to expose good content, but new users may not see those. Seeing the trending page first creates wrong expectations.

We can't stop people buying votes, but we can engage with them and point out the alternatives.

You are right, the trending page is a very artificial barrier. For no reason all the attention of the whole community should be focused on some self-selected top X posts. To change that is really our biggest goal with Steeve - we want to get more interesting posts under the spotlight. But you can never do that with trending, it just doesn't scale. The recommendations simply must be personalized, each user should get what they are interested in.

Posted using Steeve

"I will look into Steeve, and not just because we have similar names"

Lmao

Posted using Partiko Android

What do you mean there are no ads? The reason why I stopped looking at the trending and promoting pages is because it’s full of posts containing ads. Why would a company pay Steemit for advertising if they can just make an account and promote their own garbage to the trending page?

Holy cow! I always thought hr1 was a bot. You used to be my biggest supporter! Thanks for that. Your votes made a huge difference for me. I just looked at Steeve and WOW! You guys are smart! Steem definitely needs something like that. I really hope that with all the work that has been put into Steem applications, the team at STINC doesn't flush it all down the toilet. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Thanks!

You can keep your fingers crossed or you can use them to find some interesting content on Steeve :) I will be happy for the first, but if you really wanna help, you should do the second :)

Posted using Steeve

I used my fingers to actually try this application out. If nothing else, it is at least another way to access the Steem blockchain when steemit.com is not working.

So far, so good. The interface is very intuitive, quite familiar, loads fast and has all the features we are used to plus more. I haven't yet figured out what the SHOW SPAM switch is for, but I'm guessing it hides low-rep posts? Also, since this is my very first comment, I can only guess that the APPEND FOOTER is the thing that adds the POSTED USING STEEVE footer.

I'm baffled why STINC isn't able to improve their own interface when everyone else can do such a good job. Perhaps laying off 70% of their staff was a wise move and now they can hire outside contractors to make things happen that should have happened a long time ago.

Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface

I run a game on a daily basis and I just used STEEVE to check on my players' activities. I found 2 things that I don't like about Steeve.

  1. Image size is limited by height. This fact shrinks my image to a tiny size that is too small to be able to read the numbers on the player markers. Clicking on the image does not expand the image so that I can see it better. (However I did notice that your interface properly recognizes the closing tag for centering, whereas the steemit interface does NOT and everything after the center tag gets centered, whether intended or not!).
  2. when viewing the SOURCE article, I expect to see the article and all replies on one page (other than deeply nested replies). Your interface cuts off replies after 2 of them and I need to click to see the remainder. This makes it more difficult to see who did what when, which is important because I (as well as the players) need to know who did what before deciding and taking action on the next move.

I don't know how important these issues are for others, but for me, they are quite important. The image expansion would likely be a good idea for any user, however I'm not sure if most people would prefer one long page as opposed to having it cut short.

Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface

Thanks for the feedback! I created two issues in our issue tracker and we will see what we can do :)
Option to show images in original size
Option to show all levels of comments at once

Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface

Sweet! Thank-you so much.

This is really well written, and clear to even the layman like me.

I was sad not to see Steeve in the analysis i did earlier, hopefully next time.

Does Steeve accept mcdonald's hot drink tokens? It's about all i have of value at present :)

You can create an issue in the issue tracker... ;-)

Posted using Steeve

I'm not sure my issue of an empty wallet is suitable for your issue tracker, but I've bookmarked the link.

Tomorrow, some Steeve action, scouts honour.

Man, you study the data way too much! It's not healthy, I know that from the first-hand experience :)

Posted using Steeve

I focus on finding the positives these days, it helps put/keep me in a much better frame of mind!

Exactly, let's take this chance and change Steem for the better

Posted using Steeve

Let's assume that there is no crypto-speculation.

One may ask why anyone should buy the token and power up in the first place. Curation? Curators get 0.25*(1-0.1-0.15) = 19% of the total inflation. So, to earn STEEM faster by curating than it is diluted requires that you are much better at curating than the average curator. On average, buying STEEM and powering up in order to curate on Steem would be a losing proposition (if it weren't for irrational crypto speculation). The only way that could keep the external price of STEEM from crashing is for a continuous stream of new wannabe curators to exist who grossly overestimate their ability to curate more effectively than most other curators. Most of those who try curation on Steem as a way to make money will fail which will make them stop, power down and sell their STEEM and some point. The only economically rational buyers are those who accurately estimate their curating ability to be much better than average. You won't find an ever increasing fresh supply of overconfident wannabe curators sufficient in numbers and/or obstinacy to support the price of Steem Power. Even under the most optimistic theoretical scenario, the world would run out of people. The pyramid would come crashing down at some point.

If the crypto winter continues, what will happen before long is that Steemit Inc will run out of money to cover its costs. To continue to cover them it will have to pull away its delegations from the apps, power that SP down and sell the tokens. Then the only apps left will be those that stand on their own financially, that is, are capable of covering their costs and pay for their Steem Power out of their own pockets to be able to have the Resource Credits to claim accounts, empower new users with RC and to reward their users. To do that without sitting on a massive supply of mined SP like Steemit Inc, they will have to have adequate fiat revenue streams in place. Currently the only app like that is SteemMonsters, the true gold standard of a Steem application at the moment.

There is no escaping the fact that without irrational crypto speculation buyers of Steem Power must have reasons to buy it other than outearning other buyers of Steem Power by a very large margin. There will have be some kind of financial benefit in doing so. In fact, the white paper of Steem spells this out by saying that the value proposition of Steem is to become a global advertising and promotion network. Its value proposition is exactly the same as that of every other freemium Internet service out there: advertising and paid promotion made profitable by having eyeballs on the content, be it eyeballs belonging to registered users or people who just consume the content without having an account.

What makes Steem better than its centralized alternatives is the fact that the content producers have full ownership of their content and the openness and adaptability of the platform enabling anyone to develop apps that use it. But there is no way it can survive as an elaborate pyramid scheme for long. Getting people to join Steem is very hard because most people correctly identify it as an elaborate pyramid scheme its current state. But according to the white paper it was never intended to be that. Paid promotion and advertising are an inevitable part of the future of Steem. If too many of the current Steem account holders can't stand ads, then perhaps a good compromise would be to show targeted ads (based on keywords on the page they're reading) only to those users who haven't registered or have registered but have Steem Power below some threshold. That threshold could be adjusted according to the how much support the price needs.

Thanks for such an in-depth response!

I agree with your point that as a curator you are betting on overperforming other curators. What you missed though in your analysis is that the curators must be weighted by their SP. If you factor that in, suddenly it's much much easier for smaller SP holders to overperform the average, because the more SP you have the harder it is to earn more curation.

Regarding your idea with adds - I think it could work. But I would prefer to just base the business model on subscriptions. The incentives would suddenly be much more aligned compared to using any adds system.

Posted using Steeve

Yes, it's easier for small SP curators have much easier time overperforming the average. But that incentivizes large SP curators to sell, creating selling pressure on the tokens.

A subscription model is one possibility. You could think of buying SP as a kind of subscription fee. One selling point of SP could be not the profit you can make but the fun of having influence over which of the content creators get rewarded and how much.

I think we need every possible incentive to purchase SP. I think commercial promotion should be made as lucrative as possible. That's because witnesses have ongoing costs that need to be covered for the network to even survive. I, for one, would love it if, say, some camera manufacturer bought a load of SP to promote its camera gear in a community of photographers on Steem. They could organize a photography contest and fund the prizes. That would be sure to generate a lot of positive attention and motivate Steemians to creating high quality content, thus increasing the value of the whole network. The camera manufacturer would benefit from increased sales. There is a lot of potential for mutually beneficial interactions with commercial actors like that.

It incentivizes curators to maintain the level of SP which is profitable to them.

Of course people will start powering down at some point, but that doesn't mean they will power down everything. The more SP you have, the more responsibility you get and the short term profits shouldn't matter so much to you, you have to care about the community more and about the health of the whole ecosystem, as this will be more profitable to you as your stake increases.

Posted using Steeve

It incentivizes curators to maintain the level of SP which is profitable to them.

The average of which is negative. Nearly all high SP users have gained most of their SP by mining it in the spring and summer of 2016. We are talking also about why anyone would buy large amounts of SP and not just not power down if they have a lot of SP.

Of course people will start powering down at some point, but that doesn't mean they will power down everything. The more SP you have, the more responsibility you get and the short term profits shouldn't matter so much to you, you have to care about the community more and about the health of the whole ecosystem, as this will be more profitable to you as your stake increases.

Without speculative bubbles there are no long-term profits.

The question is also about incentives to power up. If it is profitable to power up at all only because there are high SP users who behave altruistically, that model can't be sustainable.

For Steem to be sustainable, paying for Steem Power with fiat must enable the payer to gain access to fiat revenue streams. Paid commercial promotion does just that. Remember the photography contest example where a camera manufacturer buys or more likely rents Steem Power to be able to reward the contestants. If priced right, paying for SP can be a financially rewarding proposition under that scenario. This, in fact, is the actual value proposition of Steem according to the white paper.

If don't see clear signs of growth in the number of users in the years following HF21 and acceptance of paid promotion and advertising on Steem as a way to fund it among prominent stakeholders, I will power down and sell everything at the peak of the next speculative bull run and never look back.

I have no clue about any of this @hr1. I barely understand crypto whatsoever. I am a weight loss coach trying to help obese people lose weight naturally. Somehow I got here and steemit has been a Godsend in many ways.

I just saw you posting and came to thank you for your many upvotes for me, and for my son @bxlphabet for I do not know how many months. You have no idea how encouraging this has been for us. I know many other people how feel exactly the same way.

Whatever works - lets do it. I want steemit and all the associated platforms to succeed. Tell me what to do and I will do it. But do not expect me to understand it. I've been here for a year and a half and everything is clear as mud. I hope I will still be here in another year and a half and that we all succeed together. But I probably will still not understand it.

I do find good posts all the time and vote for them. I am only limited by my weak power.

Many thanks to you from the bottom of my heart.

You shouldn't give up on understanding! But I appreciate your tenacity.

If you like to upvote good content but feel like you don't have enough power, then you should check out this post. There is a plan how to fix that.

Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface

Thank you I will look. In my case it is not an RC issue. But a 2 cent vote can only be split so many ways :)

Very interesting thoughts, I do believe that more curation and better feeds are what Steem needs.
Thank you for sharing.

Posted using Partiko iOS

Steem requires a steady and stable flow of money to keep working. We cannot rely just on investors anymore, we need clients. And those clients could be advertisers.

The curation system is broken and I think HF20 got the things worse. Steem Inc and witnesses decides to reduce curation windows from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, because the expiration time of posts is short. But the cause of this is the short time of the curation window, so the problem is getting worse. Of course it is not the only problem the curation system has, bid bots are a big issue too.

I will take a look at Steeve, you got my attention.

Advertisers are one possible source of income, but what I tried to argue in the post is that we probably don't want that. Advertisers would bring their own set of incentives and they would be different from those of our users, for sure. I would prefer subscription based model to ads if all else fails.

Posted using Steeve

You really do have a point, who's paying for everything we are extracting from Steemit.

Meanwhile, if your new project will be user friendly and a rewarder of content creation, then count me in.

Thank you for your support on this platform all the while, right from when I was a newbie till date, we sure need more people like you on the blockchain.

Glad I could help!

Steeve is already online, you can give it a try and see for yourself whether it's user friendly :)

Posted using Steeve

You've peaked my interest, I'm going to check it out!

Ah, that's well said. And so true about the distribution of inflation. As a user of Steeve, waiting to see what you have in store for it.

Posted using Steeve

Facebook had been learning about me the whole time and started giving me ads which were much more relevant. So I realized that ads are not pure evil as I originally thought.

This is completely true. I actually found the perfect Christmas gift for my best friend thanks to an ad I was served on Facebook just yesterday. It was for a product I would have never even considered, much less known to search for. I don't mind the ads so much anymore either, especially when they subsidize my activity.

By the way, thank you so much for the support several months ago when I was just starting out. Your upvote doubling the payout of my very early posts was a real motivator for me. I always wondered who was behind this account. I will check out Steeve for sure.

Amazing plug 💪 I’m actually quite intrigued.

I always wondered if this account was active 😅

Posted using Partiko iOS

At least somebody took the bait! ;)

I've been always active. But usually more behind the scenes :)

Posted using Steeve

That’s a pretty good looking project at a glance 👍

So behind the scenes... development? Anyways taking the opportunity to thank you, your support has been appreciated!

I’ll check out this project a little more in-depth and drop a review post 💪

Posted using Partiko iOS

Glad I could help! And glad you like Steeve ;)

Posted using Steeve

First thought I love how clean it is on mobile 👍

Posted using Steeve

Yeah, there was a pretty funny joke about not being sure whether @hr1 is a human or just a very clever AI bot. Seems to be a human :-)

Posted using Steeve

I think that is what makes it the most interesting 😅

Posted using Partiko iOS

Exactly the same thinking here.
Seems like a human account now :)

Posted using Partiko Android

Either way I appreciate all the support I have received 💪

Posted using Partiko iOS

I have also got upvote a several time on my post. It is still mystery to me how my few posts got that. Later I visited the profile and found no recent post. I think I am reading first post from him (or her)

Posted using Partiko Android

it looks like I have some serious reading to do over the next few days. First of though thank you so much for all those votes over the last year and several months. I look forward to learning more about the steeveapp, and I can not believe I missed a few important post from people I follow about the steeeveapp.

I can't believe that, too! I hope it will happen less often if you start using Steeve :)

Posted using Steeve

Why is that? There is like 20 thousand new posts created on Steem every day. But with no content discovery mechanism people are unable to find good pieces. And if most of the good posts never reach their readers, nobody will reward them. Then in turn, if good posts often don’t get good rewards, there is no incentive to search for them and upvote them (other than purely altruistic). In this situation there is just no reason why people should power up.

I think you're absolutely right. I think if more users used interfaces like Steeve.app and SteemPeak (which allows users to browse posts curated by curation teams, the situation would be a lot better. I also think Steemit is partially to blame, as they had plenty of time to implement something to help improve the situation. Of course, many of us relied on them, and that was a mistake. Now we're moving to other interfaces. But a large number still use a platform where it's very difficult to discover good content, and that's a problem.

First of all we have to decided why do we use on steemit and what for ? As a blog platform or instagram - twitter? Because i think this platform consists blog article , but many article can not get upvote. Then have a problem and this platform don't used right by users. First, governance have to solve this problem.

I agree with your opinion. Thanks

Yes, the governance and reward distribution isn't working well, currently. That's what we are trying to improve with our new plan for Steeve.

Posted using Steeve

i read yet and interested it, joined discord, i wanna learn more

You got a 16.22% upvote from @minnowvotes courtesy of @cryptoewp!

There was the Promoted posts section too. Essentially people could burn STEEM to get a spot in the Promoted feed. Burning STEEM indirectly pays everybody because it's deflationary. But, Promoted is basically a useless feature - it's optional on the steemit.com UI and there's no direct incentive for the third party apps to use it.
BTW: I love what Steeve is aiming to do.

Yeah, I know. But doesn't work because people don't read the Promoted section and there is no reason for the posts to be relevant..

Btw thanks for your kind words :)

Posted using Steeve

Yeah, how Steemit did it sucks totally. I think that the only way you can get anybody to see anything promoted is to mix it with the rest :-) I mean, who would be like, yeah, let's just go through all the promoted posts since I have nothing better to do!

Posted using Steeve

Which is exactly why people use paid voting services: trending has more traction.

Not sure that would really save the day. I think that just putting something on the front page doesn't really mean that the front page makes sense or brings any value...

Posted using Steeve

Because, well an example:
"Download my amazing app: It's Steem without the annoying promoted posts!"
There is no direct incentive for UI developers to make their app worse by including the promoted content. Work on this issue and you might have something.

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

If an app excludes promoted posts it makes it better -> less paid spam.
WRT: changing the steem homepage to promoted posts.
Yes, it would make promoted posts more attractive, but it doesn't make steemit more attractive to users. If a new user coming first sees promoted posts and then has to click to get trending or their own feed then that's a turn off.

Already using steevapp looks like a great project

Cool! :)

Posted using Steeve

i like steveapp :)

Woaah when @hr1 makes a post you know it is serious times.

checking out @steeve now.

And you don't even know how long he had spent gathering data, researching and then putting it all together into this article. You actually don't want to know I think... :D

Just kidding, many thanks to @hr1 for pulling this out.

Posted using Steeve

:) :(

Posted using Steeve

Great work! Already in it.

Posted using Partiko Android

there is a lot of good posts and discussions since yesterday. there definitely is more structure or easier discovery needed, whether that is "communities" or some other idea. it's like people go to discord to chat, but shouldn't such chat/messaging be incentivzed here too? some many ideas... but yeah, people need to get some piece of the pie when they get here, and if they don't stay maybe that gets recycled back to a pool. something easier for the average person to grasp and say "hey, that's cool... i want to try this decentralized shit out !" peace

It would be supercool to have a chat directly on Steeve! We'd love to have that, but we will see if we can get sufficient support from our users..

Posted using Steeve

Wao muy cierto tu post, me alegra poderlo leer a tiempo 😊
Es verdad las cuentas mayores con gran cantidad de SP deberían de votar para encender a los nuevos usuarios e incentivarlos para que publiquen contenido de calidad, muchas gracias iré a leer sobre @steeveapp 😊
Saludos desde venezuela ❤

Muchas gracias por tu comentario :)

Posted using Steeve

wow I think you have explained it great and I share your opinion, good posts are never very rewarded and the incentive every day is lost more, greetings from Venezuela friend @hr1

I am curious to see if we can make Steem actually work..

Posted using Steeve

I also have the same curious friend, if you have any idea and need help I am available. I have also been thinking about some ideas.

What kind of ideas? :)

Posted using Steeve

in a moment I thought of ideas to try to improve the method of promotion, but then I thought we should try to withstand the fall as much as possible trying to accommodate all those generators of good content to avoid the massive abandonment that steemit has been suffering. Although I am relatively new here but I would like to try to understand a little better the whole process and your ideas about it.

Hello @hr1 excellent post thank you for sharing your learning and knowledge

Insightful

Posted using Partiko Android

Thanks for this nice chain of thoughts.
At the moment there are no ads on Steemit. At the moment, we are not the product. But this can change any time, as there is complete transparency here, and all the things we do on the blockchain are readable for everyone - which is by far worse than with FB, so say it frankly. Imo, it's just a matter of time (and user numbers) before the ugly tools are coming.

Thank for sharing @hr1

Posted using Partiko Android

wow, your 4th post ever?! ;) Thx 4 everything so far!

I had no idea you were a human.

Am I? :)

Posted using Steeve

It's hard sometimes to tell on here who's a "who" and who's a "what'.

Congratulations @hr1!
Your post was mentioned in the Steemit Hit Parade in the following category:

  • Comments - Ranked 10 with 83 comments

I'm starting to give a shit about Steemit less and less and I honestly don't see things getting better

Did you check out Steeve's post from last night? I think there is hope..

Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface

I always thought you were some bot lol!

I have gotten upvotes from you in the past.. SO weird. You are human.. perhaps that's another problem with STEEM

That 'view this post on steeve' link doesn't work

Posted using Partiko Android

In what way? It works for me..

Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface

It's working now, in morning it did not work.

Posted using Partiko Android

Good :) thanks for pointing it out

Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface

Congratulations @hr1! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You got more than 400 replies. Your next target is to reach 500 replies.

Click here to view your Board of Honor
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:

Saint Nicholas challenge for good boys and girls

Support SteemitBoard's project! Vote for its witness and get one more award!

Congratulations @hr1! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You made more than 300 comments. Your next target is to reach 400 comments.

Click here to view your Board of Honor
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Support SteemitBoard's project! Vote for its witness and get one more award!

@motoengineer This is good post. That is ultimately an ad for a new project. Which may be worth looking into.


@hr1 nice to see you posting vs resteeming and as far as I'm aware, randomly upvoting [me]

Do you think steemit is dead? dying?
What about steem?

cheers

Please upvote one of my post

Posted using Partiko Messaging

 5 years ago  Reveal Comment

So you think partiko is free? Why are they asking people to delegate them SP? And all software development costs money, or at least the developer time/energy, it just depends who pays for it.

Posted using Steeve

Sometimes (or maybe always) not all costs are clearly defined in the deal. If those who create the free apples pollute your environment by pesticides, than the "free" apple is not that free for you anymore.

Posted using Steeve

Leaving the air aside, these things are not free as in that they don't cost anybody anything, right? If you are an open source developer, you just make OSS because you enjoy making it, or someone is paying you to make it. Others are then free to use it, yes, but the added value does not come out of thin air.

Anyway, it is all said in the article...

Posted using Steeve

You could say nothing is free and there's something in it for the creators. In the case of something like @dtube they take rewards, in the case of something like Steepshot or other addons to this platform whilethey may not directly charge, the attention and notoriety and power they get helps buildtheir accounts andthey can sell that steem. nobody does something for nothing

I guess my point is there's almost always a motive or reason for doing something.Not saying that's a bad thing its just human nature.