Hello everyone, I'm Luke Parrish. In many ways just your average nerd. This is what I look like:
I'm pretty excited about Steem, because it seems to be a gamification of monetization of content creation. I've long suspected something like this was possible. I was an early adopter of Bitcoin (had 400 coins at one point -- did not hang on to them, unfortunately!) and I'm glad to see this concept being used for more diverse applications.
So far I like the interface; fairly intuitive to use, with Markdown and so on. (I love minimalism, and am a long time contributor to the RetroForth project.)
One criticism I have for Steemit so far is that the system of tags seems hard to navigate and lots of really obscure stuff is oddly prominent. For example, at the moment there's a tag for 'geoengineering' if you click on the 'Show more topics' page while Trending is selected, with a link to someone's non-upvoted repost of a youtube video about a 'chemtrail attack'. Why nothing about real world efforts to mitigate climate change? And why no tags on that page for countless other topics of interest (for example, 'space' is not linked from there)? The voting system may be helpful for curation, but it's not a substitute for a good index. I'm hopeful that this will get better with time.
My interests include: cryonics, futurism, space, programming, minimalism, economics, and self replicating robots.
I run a group on facebook called Space Replicating Robots, and I've been trying to promote Replicating Robots as a social meme to get people thinking about this fascinating topic with more seriousness. I believe self replicating space robots will change everything very quickly, not too long after robots become capable of substituting for general labor. This is because human labor is the only really major bottleneck in the replication of industry, especially in space where resources, energy, and elbow room are ultra-abundant.
you are welcome!
Thanks for the warm welcome!