I think we've enumerated all of the general benefits of Steem. They include things like censorship resistance, zero transaction fees, existing community. Stuff like that. We know the benefits and many of us can elaborate even further on an individual basis. People who aren't in crypto can recognize these benefits but might just end up saying, "So what?"
In a way, it's like when the laser was first invented in the 60s:
Can you imagine trying to market the original laser to the general public? "Hey, we found a way to make helium atoms get excited so that when they return to the ground state, they emit the exact same wave length of photons all at once!"
That's unmarketable. And also, can you imagine the engineers being frustrated with the general public for not being interested? "Hey, let's fiddle with the inner workings of our invention so that it works more efficiently, then it will be marketable." That's not how marketing works. Sure, you make it more efficient so that objections can be addressed. But if nobody cares in the first place, removing hypothetical objections won't matter.
The invention of the laser ended up being implemented in many niches since then. And innovation continues.
So, maybe we need to expand the scope of marketing. Not "instead of," but "in addition to." Not to give up on general marketing, but to also realize there are specific marketing segments that appeal to different domains of expertise.
In fact, if we can get these smaller segments to understand the platform, maybe it can "trickle up" into the general case as well.
So here are a few segments I think would really benefit from being on Steem:
Segment: Speed Running
This is a very niche sub-community of gaming. Their main focus is on finishing games quick. They have an ongoing need for verification. They're very detail oriented.
One example of speed running is to complete Super Mario Bros. in less than 5 minutes.
Speed Running also has its own sub-community called TAS (Tool Assisted Speedrun). This is the practice of using external tools to complete games even more quickly than a human could without tools.
In the beginning, Speed Runners would take a dim view of TAS. But often, a TAS can find glitches that humans can perform without tools. You can think of TAS as the group that identifies potential states that benefit Speed Running in general.
The main platform features Speed Running (as well as TAS) can benefit from:
- Condenser/Nitrous
- steemit.com - twitch/youtube live/embedding
- steemace.io - general gaming tribe
- splinterlands.io - if there's a way for to speed run that, it'll be found eventually
- vimm.tv - for live streaming
- d.tube - for archived footage
In addition to these specific benefits, Speed Running would also benefit from censorship resistance. For example, Nintendo is notorious for placing copyright strikes against speed runners, even though the footage typically falls under fair use.
There are also situations where a speed runner cheats. Now, I'm not saying blockchain technology could directly help with this, although that'd be a cool "what if" scenario. But when a cheater is caught, sometimes they lash out and abuse the YouTube terms of service to get their accusers in trouble. Having a stake-based system to deal with this would be a nice alternative to YouTube's system.
Segment: Alternate Reality Games
According to Wikipedia:
An ARG (Alternate Reality Game) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
Each ARG has their own story, challenges, and decisions across many real-world modalities.
This segment would service people who enjoy Alternate Reality Games in general. Not a specific Alternate Reality Game. All of them. People who are enthusiastic about ARGs would share information they've collected in a live game or archive facts about old games.
- tokenbb.io - for collaborative research, group problem-solving
- actifit.io - for urban quests, treasure hunts (going outside)
For the people in this segment, one of the most compelling aspect would probably be researching and collaborating about new games that have just launched. Basically a rumor mill.
Segment: Scam Baiters
This is a group of security minded individuals who look for scams to take down. Did you ever get a phone call because your Windows PC was "pinging" Microsoft? You know, one of those phone scams. Tech-minded people can usually identify the scams and avoid them. But the scammers are relentless.
Scam Baiters document the process and sometimes go full Nancy Drew. It's a vibrant group.
Segment: The Cult of Personality
It's not really a specific segment, more like several fanbases that share a similar structure. How awesome would it be if the fanbase of a cultural influencer became literally invested in Steem? But not just because they have STEEM Power. Yes, that'd be cool. No, the reason they're literally invested in Steem is because they own some of the tokens issued for the fanbase.
Online Cultures
All of these sub-communities pride themselves on having a vibrant culture of their own. Humans just naturally do this. It often manifests on general purpose platforms, but sometimes these sub-communities gravitate to the platforms that service their niche.
These communities sometimes even have existing rules and consensus of their own, albeit based on trust and/or authority. Some of these rules and consensus could benefit from being formalized into soft consensus, second layer consensus, or even by adopting true Steem consensus.
Ultimately, the Steem platform can service them all with an expanding list of products.
Yes, these are great ideas!
Once we have tokenbb in a more usable state we plan to get into a few niches that benefit from the forum structure. But I expect this to take a bit 😅
Getting many niches invested will help tremendously in getting everyone else in, as people pull in their friends from other niches
That'll be cool. One of the things I used to do on chainbb was write digest posts including excepts from forum discussions I liked. I did this because although chainbb did create root posts, often people still didn't know about the alternative front-ends.
I would also set the beneficiaries to the original authors. It's probably worth revisiting the idea since there's plenty of discussions that goes unnoticed.
That is a great idea! It might even be worth offering such a functionally in the interface.
I don't like automated digests that much, but a user collection of good topics with automated summary and automatic beneficiaries would be a nice incentive. I add that as a nice to have :)
yes @chainbb and @jesta @cryptooctopus back then helped me learn about beneficiary rewards, and yeah giving them to original author even 5% is so cool, makes steem so much more valuable and useful
imagine if we could give beneficiary reweds to people WHO DONT EVEN HAVE STEEM accounts liek a REDDIt user, via BANJO and the INV token idea i wa stalking about
No? not god enough explanation? hah ok here CHECK THIS OUT!
We have BANJO set to receive beneficiary rewards... BUT HOW do we tell WHo the rewards are actually for? WE HAVE A CODE system, or just set the LINK in your post to the reddit or twitter user name (For this example lets imagine we have a new feature that lets you add reddit and twitter accounts as beneficiary rewards,
of course it 100% relies on you doing all teh work :smile: but still i can think of ways to make it easier for you, and I think youd love to be able to post someones reddit or tweet on steemit, and set THEM as beneficiary reward benefactor, from 1 5 to 90% depending on how much work you think you did to repost it..... NOW HOW will someone WITHOUT a steem account redeem beneficiary rewards? WELL....... You would just set BANJO as the beneficiary, and in the post simply add the reddiut or twitterusername eitehr in body title or the tags, maybe using a system like redditackza for my reddit account ackza, or leave LINK to the reddit account reddit.com/u/ackza IN the body of the post, maybe at the very end, Banjo picks it up, and HERE STHE HARD PART... Inertia would have to get banjo to be able to have a reddit and twitter account so it can send DMs. (If bots arent allowed to send DMs i would suggest banjo can mayeb accept them and reply when someone requests the steem their post earned? ) But if banjo can send a DM to a twitter and reddit user, with an INV invite Link, and the liquid STEEMp their post earned. banjo can eitehr make someoen wait for a post to power down, OR do what likwid does and accept risk of holding SP to give out steem, for a fee, and banjo can take a lot doing this...
Ok i admit it can work multipel ways, banjo can eitehr DM the reddit or twitter user and give them a link to signup to steem, IF their post makes enough liquid steem to actually pay for 1 INV oken, around 1 steem each,
tldr; if banjo can send DMs over reddit and twitter, and if banjo can sort liquid beneficiary rewards given to it in a post reposting a tweet or reddit post, with the username written in tag r body, , to later DM that user on reddit and twitter, THEN Banjo coudl accept beneficiary rewards for NON steem users on reddit and twitter, and then DM those users with a Tip in Steemp (Which banjo can hopefully automatically convert from its STEEM rewards,.. and keep teh SP as the fee for teh service :wink: )
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I think that's a pretty good idea to implement subcultures (gaming) to the blockchain to negate cheating. How hard would it be to code that? How long would it take?
A partnership with Twitch would be truly game-changing. So many different genres there that could find a place on #newsteem.
To negate cheating would be pretty ambitious right now. The main thing we're equipped to do is help balance retaliation if a) the community already uses Steem to communicate and b) community leaders were staked appropriately. So, that's a big hurdle, even now.
But if those were in place, this kind of thing could be mitigated:
Update: Looks like they really need a blockchain-based solution, right now. The above video just got pulled. Details here:
Damn!
And now the video is back. It looks like YouTube did the right thing for once.
Yes, true.
Together with implementing achievements from steam or something like that? Or maybe you could showcase your favorite Games? Show your game statistics on a (gaming) tab that is crafted only for that reason? A lot of gamers love data and stats when it comes to games. Would be a nice to see that.
Wow. These are all fantastic insights into the platform and ideas on how we cab develop and push it in niche topics!
I left you a upvote and I'm going to start following you as well!
For speed runners a on chain ranking history would be interesting. Right now they maintain it fairly muteable without much transparency in regards to history
At the moment, chain-based ranking history would just add additional complexity with a relatively small benefit.
If all they do is broadcast records as
custom_json, they'd still need to keep a copy of those records in their own database. The small benefit would be that the records could be reconstructed from chain data, if need be.A better solution would be to have a smart contract running in Steem Engine, so that the data could be queried by API, thereby reducing the need to have a copy of the records. Unfortunately, Steem Engine doesn't allow arbitrary contracts yet.
I was thinking about the custom_json part yes.
You could make it a linked list so you could even query it from the chain quickly (each new posted record references the block and tx id of the last record).
That wouldn't require for them to store it in a DB and wouldn't require smart contracts.
That's a good point. And actually, all you need is the referenced
block_numand you can infer that it contains at least one related transaction. You would avoid storing thetrx_idto save oncustom_jsonop size, which is pretty cramped right now.I guess the only problem with that is if you write records asynchronously with more than one thread. Even if there's only one thread, if that thread crashes after successfully broadcasting a valid record, but before storing the current state, that valid record will become an orphan in the list.
Yeah, the only problem is parallelism. You'd have to enforce serialization on the server which does the writing.
You don't even have to use the tx_id, you could use the tx number in the block.
@inertia is your post about speed running? or is it at analogy for speed running like using multiple tags, making more money, speed running through the blockchain? https://steemit.com/steem/@inertia/segment-marketing-vs-general-marketing i honestly thought thats what you meant when you started talking about TAS , tools to help players speed run a nintendo game "Speed Running also has its own sub-community called TAS (Tool Assisted Speedrun). This is the practice of using external tools to complete games even more quickly than a human could without tools." i thought you were gonna go off on how we can help users speed run throiugh getting rewards faster :smile: