I wouldn't count on organic growth. Most Steemians are pseudonymous or anonymous and do not want anyone in the walking world to know about their activities on Steem. Why? First of all, I'm betting over 90% of Steemians are not paying income tax on their Steem income. Everyone in their circle of relatives, friends and acquaintances being able to go to Steemworld to look at the entire history of their financial transactions on Steem would be begging for trouble with the IRS or whatever the tax authority is called in their country. Secondly, not many people would necessarily want their spouses or employers to know about earning some extra on the side. So, forget about most people telling people in the walking world about Steem let alone persuading them to join. In most people's opinion, Steem is way good to be true to begin with anyway. Many people think it must be a scam.
I don't think Steem is done for, however, and that there is no chance for growth. I think if Steem is ever going to have millions of users, those users will be completely cut off from the reward pool and be posting through guest accounts or only having a wallet address (a lite account) at their disposal. They will be players of games like Splinterlands and paying for it. Producing content will always be done by a very small number of people. They will be professionals earning big rewards. Those of us who have been lucky enough to have participated in the beta phase of Steem as bloggers earning dollars on blog posts about our cat or something like that will be able to make money by renting out our Resource Credits to apps that have large numbers of paying customers.
Do people prefer getting banned on Facebook than being on Steem?
The vast majority of people are not getting banned anywhere.
Millions and millions of people.
Where are they?
And what proportion would you really want here? Many of them are kooks you wouldn't want to associate with.
I am one of them. Just ask around. I was banned many places. So many people are writing about it. The fake news is lying to you and you are falling for the fake news, good for you.
I know some people are being banned from mainstream platforms, perhaps many in total. But how many are on Steem? I've been trying to get YouTubers who complain about being shadow banned on YouTube and who know people who have been banned to join Steem (DTube) but all I've got is total silence.
I congratulate you on finding Steem.
Thanks. In the next year, hopefully we will be up to two million accounts for Steem, as of 2020, at least.
I don't know that I agree with all of your generalizations. There are many bloggers and others on Steem who are not anonymous. People who are anonymous can still tell their friends about it without doxing themselves (especially if they have multiple accounts). Apps which become popular may get press coverage and similar forms of buzz which drive growth without paying per user. Etc.
I agree that earning rewards can't be the main draw.
Yes, there are some people on here that are not anonymous. And yes, having one social account under one's real name separated from the money and having multiple accounts for various purposes including delegating to projects, curating etc. might actually become a trend.
I'm glad we're on the same page about rewards not being able to be the main draw. The math wouldn't work if the idea were that the rewards would amount to anything too big. But I would love it if Steem apps with real accounts owned by their users put a stop to the power of social media giants and cause the profits to trickled down back to the masses. I'd really love to see that. But the way people I know from IRL have received these ideas has been a massive disappointment to me.
That's not how social media works.
I should've specified that I meant content that earns anything. Sorry about not being clear.
It's still completely wrong. Fakebook, Youtool, and so on and so forth prove that people participating in social media is the most profitable business model in the world today.
What's profitable about them is the stalking, tracking, collecting of data and creation of profiles for the ad customers.
There is no data collected here a user is not giving away willingly by putting it on the chain. And what they put there is freely visible for everyone. No way you could compare the two models.
People posting family pics aren't doing so to make Facebook money. The reasons people use social media are generally unrelated to ROI, and the focus on monetization has been a mistake on Steem, from the standpoint of onboarding masses of people. It has attracted a particular market segment, and not the mass market, which is not seeking mere economic return from using social media, but more valuable aspects of society.
The models are comparable with trivial facility. The market segments served by social media are difficult of compare, because of the complexity of society, not because of the marked differences between social media platforms, whose differences are relatively small.
I was replying to your statement that social media is the most profitable business model.
There's no question that the focus on monetization for the users was a mistake, and I've always said so. It's not the content providing the value on the other platforms, it's just the vehicle to make people give away their profiles. Content here has no value in itself either. It can bring more eyeballs, but that only creates costs for the interface operators, or some revenue if they manage to sell adspace. But it cannot be used as a vehicle like at other platforms.
Even if steem had an interface appealing to the mass market, there'd still be no money to be made from that for the users.
The only thing giving steem (monetary) value is use cases for the token itself. RC and curation rewards are such, if they create enough demand by themselves is not clear yet.
What is completely wrong? That I claimed that users love those platforms despite them not paying anything to them? That statement is precisely correct. You don't get paid for using Facebook, YouTube or any of the big mainstream social media platforms. And yes, those platforms are hugely profitable - to their owners. The users use them and do not expect to get paid a single cent. The whole concept is so alien to them that when you talk about earning crypto by blogging on Steem to YouTube users or other mainstream people, their eyes will go completely blank - or they'll assume it's a scam.
This is completely wrong. It remains completely wrong even if you moderate it by adding monetary rewards. Steem was but the first social media platform that potentiated monetary rewards, but it is not the only one anymore. The monetization of content by users has just begun.
I already specified that I meant content that gets paid to any meaningful extent.
Why do we have to repeat this?
Monetization of content by users is nothing new. It's been going on centralized platforms for a decade and a half. It's just that on Steem users have benefited from being early adopters in a cryptocurrency project. Bring aboard a couple of hundred million users and you can rest assured very few authors will be pocketing any kind of meaningful income. The math simply won't work any other way.
Facebook is worth about $500 billion. It has about two billion users. The uppermost bound to how much the average Facebook account could be worth is about $500. Take away the value of the infrastructure and you'll be left somewhat less. But that's a very top heavy distribution. The value of an account is probably heavily dependent on how connected it is to a network of other well-connected accounts. What that means is that the accounts of celebrities and major corporations can be extremely valuable whereas the ordinary person posting about his/her lunch and cat will be vastly less valuable. Yes, even something like $100 would be something but it wouldn't allow the average person to generate any kind of meaningful income.