Ad Free is one of the things that has set's Steem apart from all the other platforms.
Yes, it is the one thing that we don't have here: revenue. And that's the one thing that will continue to allow only downward pressure on demand and prices.
Thanks to the adverisers wanting to ban/censor social media creaters on Youtube, FB, and Twitter > Steemit is reaping the benefits > driving 100s of thousand to Steemit. I find this hilarious to hear talk of wanting to fall into the same fiasco.
How can advertisers ban or censor users on Steemit? Please tell me how they can accomplish this, other than by the users themselves selling out to the money...which can happen with or without advertisers...and already happens now.
This sounds great until the advertisers decide to Power Down because Steemit doen't censor certain speach or ban members for topics.
Why is this a bad thing? Do you want advertisers to stick around who are trying (and failing) to pressure people into doing what they want? I don't understand the argument here.
It seems to me that you're claiming that Steem/Steemit is different but you believe that the simple act of advertising will somehow make it just the same as the other platforms you mentioned. Either it's different and genius, or it's the same and just as stupid/bad as the others. If you understand that Steem/Steemit is "censorship-resistant" and that users would retain full control over what they publish/see, then how is any of this detrimental to growth or user/platform integrity?
Everything you've written feels like nothing but fear-mongering to me. We will see marketing and advertising on this blockchain or its interfaces if the social media platforms succeed. There's no getting around that. So, we can either figure out ways to benefit from it and control it via blockchain protocols, or we can continue to have no revenue generation where it can be easily implemented.
You're doing great work here. I feel that maybe not everyone here would like to see Steemit succeed - as we do have competition. But we all agree that the current model lacks revenue streams and that should be priority for every company to fix. Steemit Inc is no different.
How can they censor? Being flagged by a 10 million Steem Power profile seems like an pretty easy way to suppress anything you don't agree with. Seems like censorship to me...
Sure. But as we have seen, accounts of that size that flag catch a lot of heat for it. Are you sure that a company like Samsung or Canon would want to flag users like that...for the explicit purpose of trying to censor them? What do you think that would do for their image? And do you think that other users would not aid in upvoting such posts? How about their competitors, who would love to take advantage of the situation?
There are always remedies for bad actors. You need to trust this system a little more.
maybe. overall I agree advertising is probably one of the experiments that must be done.
But I'd wish the revenue problem could be solved a bit more creatively than this.
Ads seem like such a huge step backwards.
As long as we're talking shares:
what about a crowdfunding branch that puts up STEEM funding, effectively buying shares in the startups.
When profitable, these shares should pay a dividend the shares themselves that go into a blind escrow account or something and the dividends must be converted to STEEM.
By taking real sales and converting them to illiquid steem, it would have the same effect of injecting capital, although through the markets and not the reward pool directly.