Steem needs a simple quick to develop platform with an instant mainstream appeal. Steem is doing well in 2017 and so is Steemit reaching over 300,000+ users this year alone! But, Steem needs more. What Steem needs is a hit record. A hit record is what a music artist needs to break into the mainstream market, like Steem. We (steem community) need that one thing which will expose steem’s worth to the mass market. Steemit is great, but its growth is slow because social networks take time to build. Social networks are highly valuable platforms and are well worth the effort, but still, they take time to build.
Snapchat was founded in September 2011, and it took them years of growth to develop into a mainstream social network in 2017. Therefore, Steemit may be developing fairly quickly, but a blogging platform/social network takes time to reach mass adoption. Thus, a steem platform which can reach mass adoption quickly is needed.
This is why I’m initiating a new open source project to my fellow Steem community which I know we can build together. This project is one of the first projects to fully utilize utopian.io from start to finish.
This is why I’m initiating a new open source project to my fellow Steem community which I know we can build together. This project is one of the first projects to fully utilize utopian.io from start to finish.
Note: this may be a good time to buy Steem.
The Problem
For years contributors of online platforms have committed hours of time, energy, and effort into building up platforms which generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue without paying their average user(contributors) fairly (usually not at all).
A huge example of this injustice is the Urban Dictionary who’s existed since 1999, almost 20 years. In the Urban Dictionary’s lifetime, they’ve generated 100s of millions of pages, views averaging 1 million visits per day in April 2010!
“In April 2010, Peckham stated that "1 million people visit Urban Dictionary every day, and in the last 10 years, almost 5,000,000 definitions have been sent in,”( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dictionary)”
After realizing how much advertising the Urban Dictionary did, I attempted to find their financials. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find much information, but based on their page visits I am sure it is a substantial amount. In spite of this massive success the users who contribute and vote for these definitions spending hours of time in the process receive a big fat $0.00. Look below, over 2,000 people voted for a single definition in less than a week of this screenshot and not one contributor was paid a penny. This is not the Steem way.
Notice the well-placed advertisement generating them plenty of revenue, revenue for hosting a website which has barely been innovated upon in years. With the low labor cost, they must be living large!
Why don’t Urban Dictionary contributors get paid? Because Urban Dictionary considers them volunteers even though they generate all their content. Meaning the users generate all the content for Urban Dictionary and Urban Dictionary LLC receives all the revenue.
That does not sound fair! But wait, there’s Steem now! : )
The Solution
With steem, content creators are paid for contributing content to the steem blockchain. Thus, I propose Slangtionary soon to be known as the Urban Dictionary killer be built upon the Steem blockchain. We can achieve this by means of an open source project hosted by GitHub and coordinated through @Utopian-io.
Slangtionary will clearly be the better platform attracting a community of MILLONS. Through Slangtionary, users will finally be able to contribute while being paid fairly for the contributions thus incentivizing them to contribute more (It’s a vicious cycle).
Slangtionary soon to be known as “The Urban Dictionary Killer” will be a market dominator. It will not be a long slow death by any means. This spectacle will be quick, and it will be loud.
Battle of David and Goliath
From this defeat, Steem will earn its rightful respect and mass adoption by a community of contributors whose been robbed of potential earnings. But wait! There’s more.
The Urban Dictionary is the 474th top ranked site on Alexa rankings. If a steem based alternative conquers this position first, steem will receive a large amount of mainstream attention. Think about what that would do for all the member steem applications. Think about what that would do to the price of steem! As the saying goes...
Slangtionary - The Vision
My vision is for Slangtionary to be the multilingual decentralized slang dictionary where users are rewarded for contributing words with accompanying definitions via an up-vote using the Steem blockchain. Below, I took the liberty of composing a Slangtionary open-project proposal for the Steemit, Steem, and greater tech community to hopefully come together through technologies such as Utopian.io, GitHub, Telegraph, and more to build a visionary, innovative fair decentralized slang dictionary.
Market Opportunity
Urban Dictionary’s Wikipedia page state,
“At the start of 2014, the dictionary featured over seven million definitions, while 2,000 new daily entries were being added. In November 2014, the Advertise page of the website states that, on a monthly basis, Urban Dictionary averages 72 million impressions and 18 million unique readers.[3] Anyone with either a Facebook or Gmail account can make a submission to the dictionary, and it has been stated that entries are reviewed by 20,000 volunteer editors.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dictionary)”
18 million unique readers a month is a great deal of traffic which can soon be on the steem blockchain instead of some central server. These 20,000 volunteers can be 20,000 fairly paid steemians contributing valuable content to the steem community. This means MILLONS of new steemains contributing valuable content, voting, and more while earning steem for doing what they already do for free.
Steem Growth Opportunity
The potential millions of new steemians flooding steem because of Slangtionary will positively impact the community as a whole. The mass migration from Urban Dictionary to Steem’s Slangtionary will attract a signifcant amount of attention. This influx will drive up the currently undervalued price of steem (SBD). To what numbers? I cannot say, but you can do your own estimates for what millions of new steemians could do to the price of your steem.
The three factors which make this opportunity particularly worthy is: the high amount of consistent user interactions through steem, the amount of search traffic this will bring steem through Slangtionary results, and the added longevity and cultural relevancy.
One: The only way steem is going to attract more content creators is by steem providing them with the largest audience possible. Since July 2017 I’ve used steemit daily and noticed top posts usually receive between 500 – 1,000 up-votes with some posts recently breaking 1,000 up-votes. These numbers are great, but if we want the best content creators on steem then steem is going to need a larger audience.
This is where I see Slangtionary attracting the mainstream younger audience who generate gigabytes of content daily. I think steem is really lacking the cool factor that Slangtionary will bring. I must stress the importance of attracting the youthful audience because of their high amount of online activity. Therefore, the cool factor is what steem needs to prosper.
Two: A slang dictionary will bring a very high amount of search traffic to steem through Slangtionary search engine results. For example, when people search for slang on using places like Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. usually Urban Dictionary is the top result.
When Slangtionary is launched by the community, a steem based alternative will be receiving these lucrative search positions. A well-designed SEO platform is a great way to attract new steemians and I believe Slangtionary is the easiest most effective option for steem.
Three: Slang existed since the advent of language and seems to have a long life ahead. Urban Dictionary has seen steady growth and consistent relevance throughout its almost 20-year history. It is not their continuous improvements which cause the recurring visits adding to their millions of page visits. The reason for Urban Dictionary’s continued dominance is simply because their product is needed and few are competing against them.
A slang dictionary will always be necessary for understanding variations in language. Therefore, if a steem alternative secures the leading position, steem will maintain a consistent culture relevancy throughout Slangtionary’s life.
Slangtionary Functionality
The Slangtionary must allow users to post words with accompanying definitions easily using a simple, intuitive interface. These words must then be capable of being sorted and filtered by word, date, popularity, and “hotness”.
When a user clicks a word, they should be able to view an index page listing all other words with the exact same spelling as the word clicked. On this single-word index page, each user's submitted definition should be displayed. The index page should be sorted by the number of up-votes with the most voted post being first.
Slangtionary must include an up-vote and down-vote button for submitted definitions. I will go more in-depth with the other needed features for Slangtionary in follow-up posts on Utopian. If you have any ideas for features be sure to submit them using Utopian-io so you are paid for your ideas.
Slangtionary Interface
I think the User interface is one of the most important parts of any platform. An interface must be simple, but fully functional. Many people fail by doing too much of one or the other. When one can balance the two, great things are made. This is what I am hoping the community can design and build for the Slangtionary.
I have a basic background in web design, and I was actually a little surprised at how simple the UI was when I first viewed it. If you’ve never visited Urban Dictionary or you just need a refresher, I’ve posted screenshots for you below. Check them out.
Urban Dictionary Homepage Ex 1 + Define A Word Button, etc.
Urban Dictionary Homepage Ex 2
Slangtionary and Urban Dictionary’s interface will vary depending upon the color scheme and GUI additions from steem features. I hope you front-end developers will put your best effort into contributing using the Utopian.io platform. This is your time to show off your skills, I know the steemit community will be rewarding for it.
I want to stress the importance that steem’s empowering features being integrated well into the interface, not to clutter the GUI. I believe we can achieve this, although I am looking for the more experienced developers to give the final judgment.
Here are some more screenshots of the Urban Dictionary for you to reference.
Urban Dictionary Homepage Ex 3 + Trending Word Section
Urban Dictionary Suggest A Category Feature Page Ex 1
Urban Dictionary Review A Random New Word Feature Page Ex 2
Urban Dictionary Review A Random Word Feature Page Ex 3
Urban Dictionary New Word Form
Developing Slangtionary
This is where I need the majority of help from the experienced developer community who I respect so much.
I want this platform to be as decentralized as possible allowing users to self-moderate the platform. I want development to be as open-sourced as possible using @utopian-io where feasible. For code hosting, I am looking to GitHub as it is integrated with utopian-io and the most well-known option. For all other project communication, I see Telegram being used.
If you are an experienced developer, this is your time to shine. I am excited to speak with you and begin the process of creating a product to change the world positively. I really hope you are beginning to see the value in building Slangtionary.
Marketing Slangtionary
For the marketing of Slangtionary I have a few suggestions we can pursue. Firstly, I must mention for anyone who is familiar with Urban Dictionary, Slangtionary practically sells itself especially if one is an active contributor to the inferior Urban Dictionary.
If one wanted to sell the idea of Slangtionary to a current Urban Dictionary user it would go something like this: Person 1 “Hey go signup for the Slangtionary.”, Person 2 “Oh cool what’s that? It sounds like Urban Dictionary.”, Person 1 “It is but you get paid for contributing.”, Person 2 “What I can get paid just for posting definitions?!” signs up, earns steem for contributing, falls in love, steemian for life.
My first marketing suggestion is to build sufficient sharing tools into the platform. As this will be an open source project, making marketing sustainable is a high priority. Therefore, marketing starts with the design of the platform. Words with accompanying definitions must be easily shareable to social media and attractively formatted per platform. This will give users the ability to market (share) their own Slangtionary contributions aggressively, which they will have incentive to do since they will profit through steem. The majority of the marketing effort will most likely be handled in this manner.
Another very achievable option which I am very confident in is getting Slangtionary featured by popular social media personalities, bloggers, and content creators post-launch. A specific example is reaching out to places like HotNewHipHop.com where slang is widespread and the offer of earning money for slang definitions seems attractive.
I have a bunch more marketing ideas, but I will save those for a later Utopian post.
More Soon
With all this being said, I look to you, the steem and greater tech community. I have spent hours writing this post because I believe in this open project. After reading this open project proposal, I hope you believe in Slangtionary too. Please up-vote, resteem, and share so we can create Slangtionary and reap the benefits.
Again, I cannot build this project alone. I need your help wherever you’re capable. Please leave a comment telling what you can contribute.
I will be posting more about Slangtionary very soon depending on the response this post receives. Also, I will be breaking this post into smaller parts and uploading each to Utopian.io under the accompanying section. I worked really hard so I hope you enjoyed it.
“Anything is possible, if you’re willing to do it.” – @markhalen just now
If you enjoy my content please up-vote, resteem, and follow. Leave your thoughts below. I’ll make sure to read all your comments so give me something to read. Stay positive people.
Special thank you to @elear, @utopian-io, @heimindanger, @dtube, @dlive, @dmania, @dsound, @ned, and @steemfiles for the inspiration.
The proceeds from this post will go to the creation of Slangtionary - “Profit from your slang”.
Please check out a few of my latest articles.
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@markhalen/my-official-introduction-post-to-you