Is Facebook dying...
...and did Steemit kill it?
Facebook has problems
Facebook started out as a glorified college hookup site. A few shy geeks wanted a way to meet the hot girls, whom they'd been told existed out in the wild, but which none of them had ever seen, not being the kind of guys that got invited to the good parties. Prior to Facebook, something called MySpace existed, and it dominated. Its problem was that it didn't seem to have any real purpose other than allowing people to build their own customized internet vanity site, post songs, pictures and sad, pathetic poetry. Or at least, that's what it looked like to me the two times I pointed my browser there. Since MySpace allowed people to customize the colors and other aspects of their "space", often very garishly, there was no branding or sense of identity. It might as well have been Geocities. Kudos to anyone that not only remembers MySpace, but also knows what Geocities was.
Did I mention MySpace pages were garish? And every single one was garish in a different way.
Facebook, even though it had that one and only purpose that was as vapid and superficial as anything MySpace was doing, had two things going for it. First, it had a uniform look that allowed it to brand itself and be memorable. Second, it had exclusivity. When Facebook began, you could only sign up by having an email address on a college/university domain. Of almost equal importance was the concept of a "wall" with posts. This allowed users to post updates and share content in a way that was a lot more structured than MySpace. And then the Facebook interface was opened up, allowing other people and companies to write apps for it. Simple things, at first, like Vampire Wars, which you could invite your "friends" to play and compare scores, on to the very complex, and yes, sometimes useful Facebook apps we have today. If you can find them alongside the ton of idiotic apps they hide behind.
I don't know if the geeks got laid. At least not before they made their first million. But Facebook started to be a thing. People talked about it. People who didn't have a college email address started feeling left out. Venture Capitalists started to get interested. By the time Facebook was opened to the general public, MySpace was on life support. From having been the darling, it became the nag that showed last.
The geeks, those who hadn't been suckered into selling their shares of Facebook for a few hundred thousand, realized that they had a captive audience numbering in the millions. Captive audiences can be promoted to. So Facebook built a brand, captured eyeballs, increasingly added more features and functionality, and then started making the platform so advertiser friendly that Google's head probably spun like that girl's, from The Exorcist.
What problems does Facebook have, and are they terminal?
In a nutshell:
- High Percentage of Idiotic content - consisting of trite memes demonizing or glorifying the hot topic of the moment. Trump or Hillary, anyone?
- Increasingly Used For Bullying, Hate Speech or Dubious Content - the latest thing seems to be live videos which have, in more than one case, already been used to show killings live; Snuff video has finally arrived.
- Ad Content (Monetizing Users) while Giving Nothing Back - The only real asset Facebook has are its users, but they get nothing back in return for posting all the content that brings people to the site, allowing them to be monetized. I guess people enjoy working for free, making money for billionaires.
These three things, the Stupid, The Hateful, and the Unpaid will, combined, be the death knell of Facebook as soon as there is a decent alternative, which brings us to our final segment.
Enter Steemit
Steemit, a content sharing platform with built-in rewards, sidesteps the 3 main problems listed above. It rewards users posting valuable content monetarily, and it is those very same users who decide which content is of value by upvoting it. This concept will be familiar to Facebook users, and known on that moribund site as a "Like", but on Facebook it doesn't do much more than give bragging rights. The more a post is upvoted on Steemit, though, the more it trends, allowing it to be seen more by users of Steemit, making it more likely to continue to be upvoted. And the upvotes bring Steem rewards with them, and Steem is money. At the same time, this curation, the centerpiece of the Steemit model, also guarantees that the idiotic and the hateful will not be rewarded. People can still post that kind of content, but there won't be any gratification for the writer, and thus no incentive. Not even that rush that Facebook provides these "authors" by allowing them to revel in others' outrage.
Steemit runs on Steem, a cryptocurrency. The monetary rewards handed out daily are capped at a certain amount of Steem. Those earning rewards must keep 50% of the reward in the system for 2 years. This builds a longer term commitment, as well as giving more clout to a voter with a higher balance of stored Steem. The other half of the reward may be withdrawn, turned into dollars, and transferred to the user's bank account, providing a more immediate incentive. This also allows early adopters, those coming in now, to get in on the birth of a cryptocurrency very similar to Bitcoin, but improved. Both share the concept of the blockchain, but instead of Steem being created, as Bitcoin is, by simply solving an equation with no other purpose behind it, Steem is handed out in return for valuable content creation or curation, the finding and upvoting of that valuable content.
Having been on Steemit for all of a week, I have already noticed that the content is of a different nature to Facebook's. No trite, pithy memes. No forwarding of jokes. No people suiciding on live video. Instead, you have well thought out articles. You have entertaining fiction. You have sharing of information. And the good stuff is easy to find, as it's been upvoted. If you find something good, you can upvote it, too, sharing in the reward at the same time as you reward the author.
I was a Facebook junkie. In one short week I've stopped using it as frequently and constantly as before. Hours go by without my checking for updates, and I don't mean while I am sleeping. I mean middle of the day. It's lost a lot of relevance. But neither am I on Steemit all that time, having switched one addiction for another. Steemit doesn't require you to check it every 10 minutes. You can go to the Trending posts, and even filter by topic (tag). Or you can look at new posts. Or you can get a feed of what the users you're following have posted. Content is also longer, and (shock) you end up thinking instead of just mindlessly hitting Share.
So go find a good article here on Steemit. Upvote it to show your appreciation. Or better yet, go write something useful, intelligent, entertaining, or all three. Why don't you? I look forward to discovering it soon...
But before you do that... Tell me what you think below, in the Comments. And thanks for reading! And upvoting. ;)
Good thoughts. I'll share a couple that seem to be relevant.
Facebook, for all its faults, has done a masterful job of making it really easy for folks to integrate. And it's a very intuitive interface, even for folks who remember MySpace (though I never cared). Notification of what's happening in relation to your account are instantaneous. Until someone comes up with those things, I doubt it'll be replaced.
Is Steemit going to do all that? I don't know. But I kind of don't want it to. Some of the features would be nice, but maybe trying to be a Fb replacement would be short-selling it.
A downfall right now is that there's a lot of noise, there are a lot of very popular people making huge sums because of their followings, there are a ton of very poor articles and a massive amount of great content not getting attention. How will this flesh out? We'll see. Of course, poor writers usually give up. Hopefully people will wisen up on not cheapen the Steamit brand by voting for people just because they're popular, forcing them to produce some good content. It's a maturing process. It'll be interesting to see what Steemit grows up to be.
I may have inadvertently muddied the waters. I didn't mean to say Steemit will replace Facebook in functionality. More that it is the future when it comes to content and sharing. There's so much on Facebook that I really don't need to know, or even want to know. I'm with you in that STeemit is just a seedling right now, and can easily wither, but it shows great promise. The faults you mention are there, certainly, but as this evolves, we may find that there's self-correcting going on. The beauty of a system like this one is that it has some structure, but not too much of it. Some of its evolution will be user-driven, and at that point it will depend on the quality of the users, the early adopters being a key part so long as they have some sort of common vision. It can still turn stillborn with ease, but like I said, it does show promise... Thanks for the feedback!
In my world I now spend about 1/10 the time I used to spend on fed book. Check in with my family and then back to STEEMIT for some real content.
One thing FB is starting to do more and more is sensor content that the powers to be don't want to be seen by the general public. It happens to me all the time when I post something they don't like it doesn't get seen but if I post some stupid meme it gets seen. So they're digging their own grave much like we see Twitter doing now.