Introduction to Moore's Chasm:
Any new technology or start-up faces a serious challenge at the start of it's life. After an initial launch, adoption will suddenly start accelerating - the long anticipated growth has finally arrived. But soon after the user numbers plateau. What happened? Did the market suddenly lose interest?
The answer is that the initial market, 'the early adopters', has been saturated, and the mainstream market are not yet interested or satisfied by the same offering. This phenomena is commonly observed in all industries, and there are several strategies for overcoming it.
The problem lies in recognising the different desires and drivers of what are essentially two different markets. Early adopters may join because they are excited by the technology or want to be the first involved in what could be a visionary new idea. They usually have a high tolerance for product problems and bugs, and highly complicated user interfaces, and are able to deal with these. On the other hand mainstream users are only interested in adopting something which meets their current unmet needs better than alternatives. They won't accept bugs or complex UI, and will wait until these are fixed before joining.
Crossing the chasm between these two different markets is so difficult because it often requires a complete change to the product offering in order to achieve it, and when done badly can fail and even risk alienating the original early adopters. A common strategy is to target a very specific user group of the mainstream market who's needs are particularly badly met by current alternatives, and to make the leap by targeting the product specifically to these.
3 Specific Challenges for Steemit:
The concentration of current users interests and voting power. It is going to make it hard for new mainstream users joining the platform, who may share very few of the current user bases interests (for example many top posts are about cryptocurrency and Steemit itself). While these topics are interesting for many early adopters and technology visionaries, they won't appeal to mainstream users. Equally the interests of mainstream users may not appeal to the current user base who hold voting power. But as evidenced by the slowly changing topics on the trending and hot articles lists, this problem is slowly already starting to dissipate, and there are several independent efforts to deal with this.
Lack of comfort with cryptocurrency. For example, the complexity of steem power which can only be converted after 2 years and 104 transactions, or even the simple fact that at the moment steem can only be bought in Bitcoin will put off anyone who is not in the cryptocurrency space already. To really go mainstream Steemit needs to reach a point where you need to almost not know there is a blockchain involved. The UI is already on the way there, but the fringes still need some thought. That comes with time.
Finding the 'chasm crossing' sub-market to target. The network effects from existing platforms and social media are extremely strong, and while being able to earn from content will draw some early users, it likely won't be enough alone to cross the chasm. A specific mainstream group of users who are very dissatisfied with the current system they use / work with needs to be identified and targeted. Working out who these are and attracting them to Steemit is the biggest challenge the platform now faces!
There is a chasm. No doubt. Crypto currency is perhaps in this phase of development. Content creators will come here because it's familiar territory, with a near troll free environment, and they get paid, and because they get paid they will suffer the admittedly steep learning curve.
Great article.
I think the one thing developers should focus on is to polish the GUI. It needs to start feeling like a mature social network site, with all the bells and whistles. Once that's accomplished, hold onto your hat, original content creators will be busting down the doors.
Great explaination. Thanks