Have you seen the price of steem lately. It is brutal and only short away from the all time low around $0.20. Granted we have a lot more coins today, so our market cap is still a bit higher than at that time.
Should we not do something to make steem value grow like our users and content keeps growing? I see that the steemit team has done a lot to make things better, but I think lately the improvement have done little for the price.
I have just the idea to make the price go up again: Bounties
Please read and provide some feedback. To show you how it works, I am putting a $200 bounty behind this idea for the comments that give the best feedback. 70% of that payout will be decided by me and the rest by the amount of votes the comment generates in SBD. If anyone wants to support this idea by adding to this bounty send SBD or STEEM to my account with the comment "bounty". I will add this to the bounty and let you decide how to distribute your part of the bounty. If you don't trust me and want an escrow or want to sent the money yourself, let me know and we will find a way. The bounty will be paid out some time after one week from now on Tuesday Oct-18 at 23:59 please also read my original post how bounties could work: https://steemit.com/steemit/@knircky/the-potential-of-bounties-an-improvement-proposal-for-steem-to-double-its-value
The problem with the steemit eco system: Constant downward price pressure
Steem has solved a key problem of the internet by revolutionizing how to monetize content. This is done by diluting the existing ecosystem and given the value that is diluted to content creators, curators and witnesses via printing of new money constantly. This is a genius solution, however it creates a bit of downward price pressure, because every day currency is floated on the market. This is required because we need to reward content creators and since the business model is to not use annoying ads or subscription the dilution is necessary. It does however creates this weird dynamic with the price. In addition the constant printing of money creates a natural inflation that simply just supports this downward trend.
The solution: Give people a true reason to buy, invest and join
We need a way for outside money to join the eco system without advertisements, subscriptions or dilution. We can do this by allowing, not forcing, users to put values behind topics and questions allowing them to reward content creators directly and in addition to the existing reward structure we have. This can be done with bounties. A bounty on a post puts value behind it, which users that will comment on it will receive. The distribution of the bounties is bound by time and votes commentators receive from users. The payout distribution of accounts that have contributed to the bounty will be of higher weight so that people who contributed to the bounty also get to decides who has come up with the best content. This works perfectly if you have a question or want anyone to find an answer for you. Just ask the question and put a bounty on it. Now the world will compete to answer the question for you. The bigger the bounty the more effort will be spend on the answer.
Bounties can be a great marketing tool
Bounties can also be put behind certain hashtags. In that case the payout of the bounty does not go to comments but to the top level post that carry the hashtag. Consequently this can be used to incent certain topics in the steemit community. For instance if you think there are too many "cat" topics on steem and you want to see more content about dogs you could sent some money to the "dog" bounty and everyone that writes about dogs now competes for votes in general and your vote in particular since your vote will have special weight when the bounty is distributed.
Bounties can be crowdsourced
Anybody can sent money to any topic or post, which means that many people can crowdfund a topic or question and thus the people looking to promote a topic, for an answer to a question or solution to a problem can work together for better results.
Bounties will bring new users
Bounties will form a new reason for people to join the site. Before the only way to make money as a new users was to write content that other people like. Some people don't want to blog or post stuff in general as a way to make money. But what if someone wrote a question that you have the perfect answer to? Now there is a reason to sign up and collect the bounty? What if you had a specific question that was worth money to you if the answer was good. Now there is a reason to join, ask your question and put up that bounty.
Bounties will increase the price and bring new money into the eco system
Bounties provide a new way to bring money into the steem economy. If you want to put up a bounty you will have to buy into the steem ecosystem. This could be made simple with the existing blocktrade rail so that even bitcoin users could contribute if they are no user yet. This is great because people leveraging bounties will buy something with steem or SBD that is valuable to them. This is much better than existing monetizations that exist on the internet (ads and subsriptions) and much more direct than investing. If bounties become a thing this will create new demand for steem in general and also provide a way to pay content creators without the need to dilute the stakeholders. This I believe is the most important economic aspect, because longterm we need a way to bring outside money into the ecosystem in order to grow it (without cutting into its value by dilution).
Of course the functionality still has to be built. I am hoping to bring some awareness to this topic with this post and the bounty I am putting up personally. I believe in steem and the power of the steemit team behind it, but I think the efforts that have been spend lately could be invested more effectively. I think with bounties steem would be unstoppable.
I have written a more comprehensive post about bounties and how I envision them here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@knircky/the-potential-of-bounties-an-improvement-proposal-for-steem-to-double-its-value
Please also give it a read, but provide your comments here, so I can give you the bounty.
Thank you all for reading and giving me feedback and have fun chasing after the $200 bounty, heck maybe some people will chime in and make it even bigger.
Please also don't forget to vote and follow. I follow back and am an active voter.
What you are proposing is basically "Quora on steroids" or "Stackoverflow on steroids". Those communities are built on top of this type of question <-> answer dynamic. Based on their evolution so far, I can only speculate that this idea will work on top of Steemit too.
But.
There is a but.
It will be different than the Steemit we know now. If anything, it will be a spin-off on a vertical niche.
It also solves only one part of the problem: the one about people already knowing what they're looking for. But there are a ton of other potential readers that they don't know specifically what they're looking for, or their definition of what they're looking for is more fuzzy (looking for humor, entertainment, motivation, education, etc). These readers have to be served somehow.
My first proposal will be based on the "long-tail" content. Right now, you get rewards on Steemit only on 2 time levels: the first 24 hours and then the next 4 weeks (please correct me if I'm wrong). But there's a lot of evergreen content that may be consumed over many months or years . I have posts written in 2009 that are still getting 70-80 unique users each and every day. That may seem very little, but over a month it adds up to 2-3000.
This first proposal will be to extend the amount of time over which you can get rewards. Maybe for ever. That will encourage writers to submit more evergreen content instead of "news-like" bits that gets obsolete in a few hours. And that will attract, in time, more readers that will contribute value.
My second proposal will be related to content discovery. If you consistently vote articles which are tagged "business" make the platform offer you more business related content. That will increase affinity and will solve the problem of users not knowing what they're looking for.
And the third proposal will be related to affiliates. I know the functionality is already built into platform. You can append "&r=username" to any link from Steemit and if somebody signs up using that link, it will be counted as a referral for you. I don't know if there is any other stuff going on with these affiliates at the moment, but I suspect it isn't. My proposal will be to link a part of the new steemit supply "printed" in the market to the number of active referred users. In other words, the more active referrers you have (I will define "active" in a second) the more Steem you get. An account who drives in more people should have more Steem, for the entire lifetime in the platform of the people he /she drives in. "Active" means somebody who is constantly voting and commenting on articles on a ratio of at least 20:1 (20 votes for 1 comment) in a given timeframe (let's say a week).
Let me know your thoughts on these.
Thank you.
I really like your proposal. I've had similar thoughts regarding more appropriately incentivizing what you call evergreen content.
Thanks :)
Also, what about a real bounty on mean people who downvote to the point of criminality? That's what I thought this post was referencing...
If you have an idea how to make this bounty idea work then spell it out.
An account would be paid in steem to downvote a bully perhaps? A so-called "taking them in"?
I say we go corporate, it's a way to have our cake and keep the lights on. Hear me out first, we use the bounty system for all that @knircky is talking about. It's a great idea for small individuals needs like a question and big scale group needs. But we need big and small businesses to invest in steemit to help keep the value stable. So the bounties can be used by businesses to advertise products. A company would advertise a bounty for someone to write articles on its products. It's a great way to have a user write about a product and a company can release the bounty and up vote a post to help the author. We would need trusted people to judge the bounty, a special class, they would run a campaign just like witnesses. My only problem is how do we limit people from writing biased post intended to get money. I think people who write reviews for websites are working for free, this could be a great market to entice them. Steemit is a great place to encourage good quality and competition to be creative.
Another idea is to have business offer bounties for how good a gear review is. IE I buy a drone and the company has a pre existing bounty that if my post about the drone gets 100 upvotes they will pay X amount of steemit $'s.
YOU deserve a bounty for your passion and thoroughness. It will take me much time to understand this community as much as, and in the way, you do.
Thank you. Lets see how this will go :-)
One thing that was a little unclear after reading your post, is what are you offering up this $200 bounty for? Is this post a bounty? How do we participate?
Good question. I am looking for feedback on the bounty idea.
I personally will value an evaluation of the idea as well as improvements and ideas on how it can be a reality or made better.
You are right, I should have made this clearer. Now I will only decide 70% of the $200 bounty and Rest I will disperse according to votes received. So any comment qualifies.
I think bounties are a great idea! I am highly in support of them. (I'm actually running for top 19 witness, so I can use witness money to fund more bounties.) I think one of the main hurdles though is that very few people want to pay for the bounties - lots of people want to receive them. Other than that though, I think that having an official bounty site (ideally with a link from the Steemit homepage) is the main thing that is needed to get them going. In the meantime, I think users doing what you are doing - and just creating bounty posts - is the next best thing to having a bounty site.
That's is a very good question. I would think that bounties would work very well actually, but maybe I am misjudging. I personally like to pay for quality, so I would be using bounties all the time and can envision a very strong economy developing as long a community and website exist that facilitates the exchange. I wonder how much it would cost to implement.
I know @ned was offering a bounty to create the bounty site :) .. I can't remember off the top of my head how much it was though. A few thousand I think.
yea but @ned idea was to use bounties for developers. i thought that his idea falls short of the potential of what bounties can do for the platform.
Replying here due to the nesting level.
It's an interesting point. I wonder if the tool he is hoping to have built would be able to support additional types of bounties like you describe. I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to expand it once the site was built.
Voted for you as witness.
Cool, thanks!! :)
Excellent idea!
I am interested to see what becomes of it!
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Ok, maybe not a big idea, but...
These days, Steem price is very low AND some people who invested in Steem and powered it up, would like to leave. On the other hand, lots of people believe in Steemit's long-term potential and future price evolution, so these days they are wondering if it's the right time to buy Steem and power up. So...here is a market: let's set up some escrow mechanism allowing a safe resale process for Steemit accounts with high SP. I would then expect an account with e.g. 5000SP to sell at e.g. 50% of market value for the same amont of liquid steem. This would be a bit like a futures market ;-)
Obviously, buyers will be required to pay with liquid STEEM
flagging is making people leave faster then they are arriving.
I know that this doesn't qualify for your $200 reward, but I have another idea that could bring a lot of interest to Steemit:
A Free to Download and Play, World of Warcraft Type of Game that Uses Interchangeable Stats Between Itself and Steemit
This game can be 3-D or 2-D and doesn't need to be as big or complex as WOW3, but it must, of course, be fun to play and have the same type of "feel" (open world MMORPG).
Your SP, Steem, and Steem Dollars on the Steemit platform determine your health, defense, attack and magic stats within the game. Furthermore, people are rewarded SP in game, when they accomplish certain objectives - the payout is determined by how much the daily game post receives for that given day.
Perhaps a bounty can be offered to make this game (of, say, $50,000.00)? The bounty stipulations would have to be clear and it would be wise IMO to make it a requirement that the developer(s) keep the Steemit community up to date with weekly/ bi-weekly posts on the progress, with screen shots of game footage when they become available. This way, we can get a feel from the community about whether it's worthy of continued investment (via up-vote distribution and the vibe of the comments that it receives).
This is a really marketable idea. Think about it: how many TV commercials have you seen for free online games? They're paying Arnold Schwarzenegger to advertise for one such game, right now, in the states! Now consider the excitement and anticipation around a free online game that earns you money. Pretty good, eh?
Of course it is - it's actually GENIUS.
The problem is finding a way to get it done. There are plenty of brilliant programmers, even game programmers, currently using Steemit. Perhaps if we offer up enough of a prize, one of them or, better yet, a collaboration of many, will get it done.
The other problem is time. It could take two or three years (or more?) to make this game from the ground up. Will Steemit still be breathing at that time? I don't know, but I'm positive that if this game could be made, and if it's even half way decently done, that it would ensure the future prosperity of this platform.
I think steemit need to create buy pressure allowing companys and startups to buy ads space with btc in steemit and use it in a transparent way to put buy orders at an equilibrium price, i think it is actually the best way and can be implemented without too much pain.
Not too shabby! Maybe Steemit could also offer its members an option to pay a small fee in order to hide the ads (ad free Steemit), of, say, the equivalent of $0.10 per day ($36.50 per year).
I think this is a great idea and would be another wonderful way to have outside money coming in. We could pay authors of the post and steemit could keep a little as well.
This bounty here however is about the bounty idea specifically. So if you want to make some money please review that idea specifically, provide feedback or ways to improve it. Criticism is also valuable of course.
I have an idea that can possibly give growth to the value of Steem and possibly bring more users. I had just left a comment tonight here https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@freshfund/who-accepts-altcoins-as-payment-that-is-the-real-question#@cryplectibles/re-freshfund-who-accepts-altcoins-as-payment-that-is-the-real-question-20161013t023836789z and I am thinking is to get into an established marketplace like OpenBazaar, use Shapeshift to have your sales get converted into Steem instantly, make sure you advertise on your shop that all sales are converted to Steem, and now any music or art sales that Steemit users sell to Bitcoin users on OpenBazaar are bringing more value to Steem in a very direct way.
I think a way of fixing this downward curve would be reducing the whales vote value and increase the minnows voting power a little, also limit the power ups to just a certain percentage. I am not to deep into how Steemit really works so maybe I'm giving an opinion where I shouldn't but anyway as it's the first comment maybe I can get something going.
I think it is actually not that easy. There is a real reason why whales have so much power. I think the curation could be improved, however i do think that rich people having more voting power is a good thing.
I don't disagree, but if the whales are just voting for their buddies, real talent will start leaving, I mean the people who write real good, informative, well thought out articles, I for one don't care, I am not much of a writer so my expectations are very limited. Still I would like to see Steemit succeed.
Good one, pal.
At this point there are no bounty that could help. I bought this account on the beginning in Slack when that was only way to get in. Then I bought STEEM on Trex and Polo. Then I put fiat money and energy in creating billboard and I got was downvote from @dantheman.
What we need is an effective marketing campaign.
I think simply describing Steemit as "Reddit, Tumblr and Facebook combined, but with quality content and quality people" is the key to finding users. Especially users who want to make Steemit better.
Steemit has done well with its "Get paid cryptocurrency for blogging", but now that that has been used, we need something else, something more lasting.
And that's the tagline I said before.
Steemit is social networking where quality matters.
If you believe me, send me that delicious SBD bounty!
~Kitten
I hate to say this: 103% inflation... can't keep the price up, no matter what.
Right, but the market cap has been going from 400M to 50M. So the inflation does not explain the price, there are other selling pressures as well.
well, why would ppl buy steem? u need a shitton of it to be a whale and make money voting. the only way to use steem is to write stuff, get paid, withdraw. the only ppl keeping steem are the ones that have a shitton of steem power.
I guess that the only way to keep the price up would be to use it for everything. to create a system where people get steem and pay for stuff with steem. you would basically need steem to be a national currency to keep it up, and even then it probably wouldnt work.
That is a valid point. The only reason to buy steem today is to invest in steem and power up.
If you wanted to use steem currency for commerce, one would rather buy steem dollars.
K, that's it. Will figure out payout tomorrow.