im a lil late to the party but @crystalandbones, @fourfourfun do you really think that steemit content is in any way being taken seriously the way it currently is?
Even myself as an early adopter cannot take Steemit seriously until more professional content comes to the platform. Currently I'm afraid to pitch steemit to my friends because I know if they were to look at the platform currently they would view it as a pyramid scheeme
I know as someone who disagrees with the political message of infowars that its hard want to share the platform with them. But their viewers and associates are the exact demographic that blockchain technology was designed to help. If we ignore people because they hold unpopular opinions than what are we even doing promoting a decentralized platform aimed towards circumventing online censorship?
Steemit has some challenges. If you spend any amount of time on here, you pick up on the frequent discussions on bot usage, loopholes to game the system, the reliance on single large entities to assist with rewarding users (on this, I've heard an argument that distribution is fine because all Steem ends up on the market in some shape or form, but that's like arguing that it is ok for people to be thirsty as long as someone else in the world is drinking water).
Some serious users will have ethical questions about using the platform. It is easy for publishers of misinformation and those who engineer incredibly negative agendas through subtle and incremental social compliance to find themselves rewarded and emboldened. You don't really want to be sharing a platform with them through choice. There is also no mechanism to address negative content beyond flagging. Ned has publicly stated to Polygon that this is the control method for the community and it has frequently been demonstrated to be as useful as pissing into the wind against power users. Nutshell is - if you have enough power, you are a) guaranteed that your voice is heard and spotlighted, b) able to slap down dissenting opinion at a whim.
That's all directed at the core fundamentals of the system and with no sense of recognition that there is anything that needs to be done, we can only assume that this is how it will be forever.
Outside of this, there are the functional uses with some of the apps. For disposable content with a short shelf life, dTube, dLive, Steepshot, Zappl... these are all fine. But what about the creation of something that is a slow burner? Music, film, books, art. You've got 7 days to earn everything you can, and then that is that. dSound already has competition from Musicoin--which pays per play--and this will be joined by its EOS based successor Emanate in the near future, both offering more for the target audience. Also, speaking of 7 day time limits, the idea that you cannot edit post-payout is not suitable for some media. You're trying to entice in creators but essentially they only have control over their content for an incredibly limited amount of time.
I also have big questions over IP. You're a one man band owner of a vinyl only imprint, proudly in control of your catalogue and everything to do with it, doing little more than breaking even but happy with your ecosystem. Some bod comes along and rips a stream of your tracks and uploads it to dSound/sticks it in a mix. You look across and think "hey, you're earning money off the back of MY work". Where do you go to address this? Everything I've seen again loosely points towards the sentiment that the community *may *do something about it with flagging. That's not really good enough. Start off talking about controlling content on Steemit and you're into the big war of censorship and it becomes a stage to go and wave ideologies around for an infinite amount of time.
In terms of the development that IS happening, SMT's sound like they are going to have a difficult time getting off the ground for smaller entities. As far as I can see, your ability to adopt it is centred around the amount of SteemPower you can throw into the pot for your users. Where are enthusiast platforms going to get that sort of money? Then add in all the issues with regards to actually moderating the content that goes onto your site as laid out above, and it becomes a really messy principle. Let's put it this way - enthusiast hobbies are plagued with terrible people who maraud around as gatekeepers, users whose past time is to idly tie up discourse with bad faith argument, or even those who spend their time belittling the very people who create the thing they like in the first place. Sites are now more about debating how they can *remove *comment threads rather than implement a gameable and unmoderated wild west into their site. "Don't read the comments" they say about YouTube. "Just remove comment sections" appears to be the solution.
All I see at the moment is huge push to replace every single social media platform out there but without any form of housekeeping to get the basics in order first. I'm heartened by the communities on here who are trying to push things towards the utopian vision of the site, but it increasingly feels like fighting against the stream.
Instead, if the front page continues to be an advertisement dominated by bot promoted trash, drama of the day, or even devolves into a hotbed for the conspiracy misinformation nuts, then people are just going to hold their hands up and walk away.