The devs at yours.network would have you believe steemit is doomed.
At this point, I'm sure some of you are asking,
Hold up, what is, yours.network?
Yours.network is an upcoming social network which is built upon the users transacting bitcoins with one another, yours, quote:
"makes it easy for content creators and curators to get paid for their work" *(source)
The idea behind yours is that users all have a BTC backed wallet assigned to them from which they can tip content creators. When a user sees a thread they think has merit, they can tip the thread, paying from their wallet towards the thread (read: it is a pay-to-vote system) Users tips towards a thread go to both the author and to earlier curators.
But why would I pay to upvote an article?
Well, the way the yours developers see it is that,
"Curators are willing to pay for good content because they know they can profit by reselling it." (Yours blog, Apr 19,2016 post)
The potential to be paid by future tippers is intended to be an incentive to encourage users to become curators, tipping articles based on their arbitrary, but honest opinion of what has high merit.
That all sounds quite nice, but I can also curate content without paying elsewhere...
If one's goal was purely to convert time spent curating into the attention of others, free social media already allows them to do exactly that, without paying in a dime. Likewise, if you are attracted to the idea of profiting real value from your efforts at curation, you can do that here on Steemit, again without paying in a dime.
So why do I believe in Steemit then?
The steemit devs made bold decisions that the yours team wasn't prepared to make, most important of which was to create their own blockchain and associated cryptotokens rather than rely upon the infrastructure provided by an established coin. It was a risky move, and it was also more technically challenging than standing on the shoulders of the developers of an earlier blockchain, but the fruits of their labor allowed them to enact custom protocols and tailor the blockchain to the steemit community. Not just that, but steemit having its own blockchain allows the developers to react to problems swiftly, as they don't have to live with the legacy decisions made in regards to the blockchain long before their project started like the yours team will have to.
This is NOT just a hypothetical advantage.
The steemit devs have already proven they can quickly respond to problems on the network.
I'm sure you all remember that very recently (from about a week and a half ago through 3 days ago) vote bots had reached a critical mass on steemit and downvote bots were causing real harm to the community. Well, the devs decided to fix that rather promptly by making changes to how downvotes are weighed.
But the yours team doesn't want you to believe your lying eyes
Yours took the position in pre-development that building a blockchain rather than relying on an existing one was a mistake, and now they are going through a phase of self-justification. In their direct comments about steem, yours posted on their blog,
"Although we are delighted to see blockchain social media a reality, we worry that Steem can’t last. The burden of building not just a community and a technical platform, but also a novel cryptosystem and supporting economy, is extremely high. " (Yours blog, July 14th, 2016)
Frankly, I read that something like "we aren't prepared for that so neither are you."
Eventually we can let the results of both networks speak for themselves....
But I don't think I'm crazy to think that the network that which designed its own blockchain and crytpocurrency to back the idea of a microtransaction income for use will be more succesfull than a project which is essentially pay-to-curate. It can hardly be understated how the average user (the silent lurker/voter) is not going to be drawn to a network which charges them for an activity they have grown accustomed to doing for free.
Luckily for those of you that still believe yours is a steemkiller, when yours.network flops you at the very least wont experience a depreciation of your investment in the network since it is BTC
Yours will struggle to attract non-crypto users as it requires you to own bitcoin and fund your account, great thing about steemit is you don't need any prior knowledge of crypto and you don't have to buy any steem to get started!
Yeah, and I think that will be the attitude that mainstream user has as well.
I wonder how much sleep they loose worrying about Steem's eminent collapse :-)
They certainly have a LOT of ground to cover, and not much time.
@desmonid This post is seriously well thought out and WAY underrated right now.
Excellent and thoughtful analysis, just a couple of points.
The devs here didn't boldly go out and form a new blockchain, it's graphene same thing behind bitshares, because it's team bitshares behind it. However it is on it's own chain so maybe the point is moot and we're both right. Anyways they had the tech before the network and more importantly they already had the critical mass to make it work.
Secondly, the rise of the swarms, isn't going to be impacted by the changes proposed. Any more than limiting people to 4 posts a day, and delaying the time for curation awards to 30 minutes has helped with any of these problems.
Changes of this nature only hurt the people trying to use the system fairly.
As I explained here changes of this nature are addressing a symptom and not any of the causes.
Changes directed at punishing normal behavior aren't going to fix it, but talking to the people who are doing this, asking them nicely to stop and giving them incentives to build the kinds of bots that are useful and helpful will fix this problem.
Remember, what got that swarm to stop wasn't rules, it wasn't starting a counter swarm. It was someone who I won't mention by name, explaining the situation and asking the swarm owner nicely to stop, while trying to give his side of the story too.
In fact I popped in here wondering if I could get permission to feature your "help I'm getting stung to death" post in my next blog where I try to explain the formation of hives and hive queens within steemit and how this is going to be bad and how the proposed changes are going to make this worse, not better. As well as how we actually do stop it.
Back to the topic though, yeah if we have to spend money to upvote we'll upvote less. One possible option to kill the swarms is to charge a small fee per upvote, say 0.01 and a large fee for flagging, say $10.00
This is enough most people aren't going to think twice. But it would drain the accounts of every swarm in a day or two.
So maybe these guys are onto something. However...
They aren't steem and thus there's no reason to bother going there instead. They have nothing to offer that we don't.
Yes, I'm actually aware that steem is based on graphene but that was more technical than the intended scope of the article so I (over?)simplified it to the devs building their own blockchain.
I'm progressing through reading your article on one of my alt-monitors and am actually finding you are making some strong points.
Yes of course you can link to my article(s) either in comments or in your original posts if you feel it is relevant
@desmonid
Sorry wasn't sure if you knew the difference on that graphene thing.
I tend to get a bit technical and prolux sometimes. Apologies for that.
It's not just relevant, it's actually central since you're effectively patient zero.
FYI I'm going to do something different for my next blog post, but it will be the one immediately after. Right now there is a lot of bot hate swarming around this place and I think the bot thing has been done to death at this point.
I am discussing it with @dana-edwards over here though...
https://steemit.com/security/@dana-edwards/artificial-immune-systems-intrusion-detection-and-disruption-tolerant-networks
I'm glad you're enjoying my posts though and keep up the good work!
No need to apologize for throwing out some fatty knowledge bombs :)
My degree is in Management Information Systems so I'm definitely into the technical details, I just wrote this article to a slightly broader audience than techies :P
I wouldn't like to be on the yours.network team at the moment, I really think they have missed the train ... long life to Steemit.com !
Good post explaining both sides!
Nice post. I didn't know about yours.network. I agree it doesn't sound so great.
Thanks very much for the praise and for the upvote as well! :)
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
lol just what I was thinking
On yours.network it's pretty clear where the money comes from: every curator pays to curate, and their payment is spread between the post's author and the earlier curators of that post.
What I'm less clear about is where the money comes from here, on Steemit. I see many posts earning over $1000. Where is that value coming from? Curators don't pay to curate. So who is paying, and why? It's a zero-sum game, and some content creators are taking out thousands of dollars. Who is putting in those thousands of dollars, and what is their motivation for doing so? Will they continue to do so?
Edit: this account was given to me by the guy who registered it. I run just-dice.com, and usually post under the account 'dooglus' here. I forgot to log out of 'just-dice' after logging in to change the password.
@just-dice Interesting insight but the money from steemit comes from the same place the money for bitcoin does and the money for the US Dollar does. We make it so by the sheer force of our combined will.
The miners mine steem. Instead of the miner who finds a block getting the entire block reward, a certain amount is set aside in a fixed pool that is distributed to each person who participates each day based on an algorithm that is driven by upvotes and commentary scoring weighted by a proof of stake like system.
Keep in mind though, that even though you might see a $10,000 post. That poster only got $7,500 because 25% goes to the people who curated (upvoted) the content. Also he or she only walks out the door with $3750 of it because half is SBD (steem backed dollars) which can be transfered, sold or converted and the other half is sunk back in as steem power or SP. This gives them more power to curate better content.
The price of steem is driven quite literally by a sort of personal vanity. People want power, they want respect. Here you have the option of either working or buying that power and respect. You just accumulate steem, convert it to steem power and suddenly, you are the man in charge. You get to call the shots as to what sees the front page or not.
This has it's darkside too, but on the whole the system is working. Most people aren't dumping their SBD on the open market and SP cannot be sold. You can only "power down", and powering down is a 2 year process that starts from the day you start doing it. This means you are effectively lending steem to the platform and in exchange you get an interest payment in steem that offsets the dilution effect of new steem being minted.
As new users come to the platform, they will want prestige and power. They will want their voice to be heard, and they will purchase steem on the open market to do so. Furthermore, an entire economic ecosystem is being built around SBD since it is effectively always $1 USD worth of steem regardless of the dollar price of steem at the time. This is about as safe a bet as you can ask for. The pegging mechanism is essentially a smart contract run on the blockchain that is a contract for difference and updated and adjusted automatically on the fly with each block found. Ergo, there is no need for steemit to maintain large reserves like their would be with a pegging mechanism like Tether uses. And there is no need for a bot to try and buy or sell steem on the open market in order to try and maintain the peg like there is with most other attempts to market peg a crypto.
The closest thing to SBD is bitUSD, in terms of pegging because they are from the same team and you can see on coinmarketcap that bitUSD has been pretty stable for quite sometime for the same reasons SBD will stablize again soon.
Ok I hope that answers your questions about "where the money comes from". It comes from the value of our content and the desire for others to come participate with us to earn money and drive the conversation where they want to.
This is literally the best explanation to the question "where does the money come from?" I've seen yet!
You should write an article about it if you haven't already.
First of all, thank you for your input, I really did hope for and intend for some people to come out and either play devils advocate or sincerely advocate for yours so thanks for being that guy who actually contributes to the discussion.
I don't necessarily disagree with you on the point of 'where is the money coming from?' I just think that the fact that steemit is essentially free to use is going to make it more used than yours independent of the actual merit of the projects from whatever an objective view would be, because people are more likely to be somewhere with less barriers to entry.
This steemit pretty simple , lets say we doing cloud mining , if you post contents some people will upvote your post , if whales upvote your post then your mining power increasing bigger .the more people upvote your post the bigger amount of rewards you get , just like 12 hours mining power . i hope this comment will make you little clear.
But better get whale to upvote your post.
This is block chain thingy everythjng must connect to each other i think .
Sorry for my bad english .
Great post on how steemit will rule the world! Hivemind
Yeah, I read your post about Zapchain, it was really well wrote and informative as well.
I pretty much agree with you see my post here https://steemit.com/steemit/@theperfect2/steemit-has-competition-on-the-way-but-will-remain-on-top-or-will-thet
Glad to see the consensus is in :)
Great post man
They're not the only ones trying to hop on the SteemTrain...
http://paymeabit.com/
#Steem4Life
@calva upvote