This is something I didn't realize was today, but got a nice little reminder from @steemitboard with an "personal award" and it reads "Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 2 years!". This date would have passed without me even realizing it so thanks @steemitboard.
2 Years is a long time to stay committed to something. Most people can't stick to something for weeks...forget months or years. In those 2 years there has been some interesting things that have happened and I've made some friends along the way...and an enemy or two I'm sure. I've even had to experience the loss of a friend made here on Steem to cancer, miss our chats @wolfhart.
Being that I wasn't really prepared for this event, but want to mark this milestone with a post this will be short. More so I can look back on my thoughts as of today in the future to see how things played out vs my thoughts and use it as an outline for some detailed posts to come.
Social
To bring on the masses and make STEEM a truly social media site we need to think about a few questions
- Can you quickly find your friends on Steem?
- Could you explain in 10 minutes to an "average" person with no knowledge of blockchains how to use Steem (Keys, RC's, VP, Downvotes, Voting Windows, Curation, Reward Curve, and so forth)?
- Can you show someone how to sign up and start posting, voting, commenting as a normal person would on any other social media site without costs?
Until we can start making these all YES answers this will never appeal to the masses. Do we want the masses...or not? If so major changes must happen.
Free Downvotes
@tarazkp wrote an interesting post today about this topic: Growth and pollution on Steem. His thoughts are very optimistic about the potential of the free downvotes...and I really do hope he is correct in how this plays out over the long haul...not just short term.
The numbers say downvotes are happening based on @abh12345's findings. Take a look at his post from yesterday:Downvoting due high pending rewards and a lack of engagement?. The post highlights the increase in downvotes and is talking about potential downvote posts based on lack of engagement...wonder if fake comments will start up if this idea takes hold.
I have reservations about the free downvotes as it's extra ammo for the bullies. Time will tell on this one, but think it will be an interesting change for the long haul. Good or bad it's worth testing for sure.
Quality Content Creators Needed
There is some debate if we need more content creators or content consumers...but it's kind of a which came first the chicken or the egg type of debate. My thought is truly high quality content would drive the content consumers to come to Steem.
The issue is when I've talked with a few content creators is they are used to creating content and then earning on it for the long haul. The 7 day earning window is a serious hangup. Quality content takes serious time to compile and as such the creator needs to be able to earn a real amount of income from those efforts.
I would propose a 7 day window followed by 30 day windows forever. I'm sure there are added expenses to doing this, but with the RC system it can be adjusted for these added costs.
Potential
The technology behind STEEM is amazing. Some stupid kitty app cripple ETH and the volume of transactions was something STEEM could handle without even a hiccup. That volume wouldn't even come close to testing the upper limits of STEEM.
The speed, costs, and overall strength of the actual blockchain are amazing and this in itself is enough reason that people should be investing in STEEM.
1 Year Prediction
For fun I'm going to toss out a few predictions for what will happen over the next 12 months. For the stupid person that wants to blame others, this isn't financial advise.
Steem Price will increase and have a run up of over 4x to around $0.80 USD as SMTs provide options to a few quality ideas that bring in some new demand for Steem. This will be the start of good things to come and as prices increase Steemit Inc and other Devs have reduced selling requirements to pay their bills reducing supply. As supply reduces price can continue to increase and FOMO will kick in at some point. Lots of people will be kicking themselves for not buying more Steem at these prices and at least making themselves minnows (seriously people only need about $90 to reach minnow)
The change to the vote curve will get increasingly more pushback from the masses as they realize that no matter what intentions the witnesses may have had large account holders aren't going to start investing their time and curating posts from people they don't know. It will be business as usual and the circle voting will continue, massive bid bot delegations will continue and instead of the good intentions of the witness the reality will be a huge majority of people are being taxed so the few can earn even more. The Reverse Robinhood Curve as will called as will die a slow death.
Have more thoughts, but my Wife is telling me to wrap it up as we have an early morning tomorrow...and I said it would be a short post...so sorry for the abrupt ending to the post, but that's a wrap for now.
Congrats on the anniversary, @thedarkhorse. Glad I could catch this post.
I noticed your predictions are pretty positive, and I hope you're right.
There's a whole lot of work that still needs to be done, and we'll need to make sure people don't drop out before we reach that.
Here's to a year of positivity and growth
!BEER
I feel like positive times are around the corner. We aren't there just yet...but it's coming IMO.
I hope you 're right. Can't get any worse, right?:0/
I'm not sure how this token thing works... just a try out
Let's try again
!BEER
Damn you, stupid beer token.... lol
I owe you one, @thedarkhorse!
Happy Birthday!! Great predictions. I guess we'll see.
You mentioned this
I completely agree. Even though they can just pick a topic and go from there it truly isn't going to happen. Then this was a thing today...
https://steempeak.com/curation/@theycallmedan/who-are-your-favorite-content-creators
It seems that this @theycallmedan hopefully is doing just that. Sadly if you look at the listing, again it's another 'popularity' contest. Yes there are some amazing content creators being mentioned, but some to me eh. It boils down to, what one person thinks is great another person may not agree.
One can hope!!
@theycallmedan is by far one of the best on Steem. He is putting up money and his time to help bring people to steem and keep them here. If a few other whales would put in the efforts like he is things would improve around here fast IMO.
I agree. He has a proven record and has done wonders to keep things going and rally the platform. I believe him when he says he is going to do this.
Happy Birthday/Steemversary mate! Glad you stuck it out and keep soldiering on with us, I know its not easy sometimes but clearly there is something special here that keeps us around, those who see a vision for this place and show up every day
I'm keen to see how this place unfolds in the next 2-3 years with all the propsed development on it. I also think that people are still looking at ICOs and ETH dapps with the fake volume and seeing what we doing and looking at it as a small time.
Numbers arent taken into context in crypto. Hope to see you around for more years to come :)
2-3 years from now I think we will all be very happy with where things are compared to today. ETH can't even come close to the volume that Steem can handle and not sure why anyone would invest in it. Assuming that SMTs happen as it looks like we can start taking some of the thunder away from ETH in my opinion.
I also think SMT's are going to be great, having them traded on our internal market will open up a lot more possibilities. I think ETH just has good reach because it was the first programmable blockchain and ICOs were run on their ERC 20, they also have companies like Consensus that bring in institutions to run their business on ETH as Google and Amazon has for their cloud services.
So there is a fair bit of money flowing in that STEEM could totally get a piece of
Congrats!
Happy steemitversary the 2nd @thedarkhorse 😉 you are one of the great steemians I knew on this platform and I learned a lot from you.
I still remember many discussion a year ago about steem price and SMT with some friends who are leaving or Probably on hibernation state (they'll comeback I wish) and as the final statement I said, if I haven't seen the fruitful days of steem.. then I will stay till the day it falls (though I hope it will never falls or shuts forever)
About the free dv, I think I'll keep my dvp just for the right time and right post, I can't bear the retaliate while my own post not really on good engagement stage too. Will see for a couple more months😀
I don't downvote often, but when I do it's very deserved. I prefer to help nuke accounts that are plagiarizing as that is one of my pet peeves. Hate content thieves.
When the price increases you will see people return. The ones that have their accounts sitting dormant will likely be back trying to earn steem once they feel it's worth the effort.
Sorry, you don't have enough staked BEER in your account. You need 6 BEER in your virtual fridge to give some of your BEER to others. To view or trade BEER go to steem-engine.com
You need to stake more BEER (6 staked BEER allows you to send 1 BEER per day)
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Hi @thedarkhorse!
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Late happy 2nd birthday @thedarkhorse :)
Great to still have you around buddy