It's Called Yours
And you can take a look at the developer homepage here and a short YouTube video in which one of its developers describes an early beta version of Yours right below:
How it's Like Steemit:
Yours has a paid up-vote and curation reward system built inside of it. Users may upload any type of content that they wish; from typed blog posts, to videos, to pictures or sound files. The more up-votes user content receives, the more financial compensation that user gets in return. Members that up-vote the content early also get rewarded by getting a greater stake of future up-vote rewards.
How it Differs from Steemit:
The developers of Yours opted against creating their own token (crypto-currency) to use as a payment system. They chose instead to stick with bitcoin, leaving the actual means of payment and costs of transactions on the members themselves. So, instead of being rewarded with a few "free" tokens and given the option to buy more and/or earn more through content sharing, such as Steemit has done in this early beta stage, members of Yours are required to either earn bitcoin through their content sharing service or transfer bitcoin from an external wallet into Yours' internal wallet.
Each up-vote will cost them their own bitcoin and accrue a small transaction fee that will all come out of their own wallet. The incentive to do so comes from Yours' curation reward system that apparently (if I understood the man in the above video demonstration) cuts the pay-out of each up-vote in half (after the first up-vote), allotting half the reward of the current up-vote to the content creator and some proportion of the other half to all members that had previously up-voted it . The earlier one votes on any given content, the higher the proportion that they will receive from future up-votes.
Why Did they Opt Against Making their Own Crypto-Currency?
In the words of one of Yours' lead developers:
Some well-meaning people advocated that we make our own blockchain, since then we wouldn’t be stuck with bitcoin’s legacy choices, would have full control over our blockchain’s technical properties to suit our community’s needs, and could profit from speculation. While these are valid arguments, we believe they understate the difficulty of building a new blockchain from scratch and scaling it to reach a mainstream audience.
By leveraging bitcoin, we can take advantage of the largest blockchain technical ecosystem including open source software, documentation, standards, and APIs, as well as the largest blockchain social ecosystem including companies and experts. A new blockchain either has no ecosystem whatsoever, or, if we copy bitcoin, has an ecosystem only insofar as it overlaps with bitcoin. Building on bitcoin, though not easy, is easier than doing it alone on a new blockchain.
https://engineering.yours.network/
Taking a Jab at Steemit
Here's what that same man had to say about Steemit:
A new project, Steem, has taken the very approach we determined wouldn’t work. They have built their own blockchain and customized it to suit the needs of their community. They’ve grown significantly and now have one of the most valued cryptocurrencies measured by market capitalization. And as best we can tell, it’s actually working — content creators are being paid.
...and now the jabs come...
Although we are delighted to see blockchain social media a reality, we worry that Steem can’t last. The burden of building not just a community and a technical platform, but also a novel cryptosystem and supporting economy, is extremely high. Security and scaling problems with their blockchain have a smaller team of experts incentivized to solve them, so solutions will come slower. Companies and services such as wallets and exchanges will be fewer in number and less featureful. When they encounter regulatory issues, they will have fewer allies.
https://engineering.yours.network/
Is Yours Too Late to the Party?
From what I can gather, Yours won't be ready for beta testing by early members until this September, at the earliest. With Steemit rising to over 56,000 members as of the time of this post and growing at a steady pace of well over 1% of total members per day, it may be tough for Yours to gain momentum out of the gates. Even with a hypothetical big public relations (PR) push, without offering unique features that distinctly separate it from Steemit, I don't see what angle would allow it to gain traction, especially when their system requires putting up one's own hard-earned bitcoin for up-votes.
Who Will Be the Winner? Time Will Answer
Although Steemit's current features, the timing of its release and its growing adoption rate seem to favor it as the medium to succeed in bringing social media to the next level (providing content/ curation rewards to its members), over future-comers like Yours, it's impossible to foresee what Yours and other potential future competitors will ultimately bring to the table.
As it stands, Steemit has hundreds of thousands of posts made by tens of thousands of members, who've collectively made over $1 million, and Yours is little more than a concept with a rough interface and a lot of testing to be done. Steemit will likely have above 100,000 members before Yours invites its first for beta testing.
Yours either has to offer something big and game-changing that not even Steemit offers, or pump a lot of money into advertising their product, or likely both, if they're to stand any chance of being more successful than Steemit in the long-run.
Let the Games Begin!
As with everything, the market will ultimately decide who's the victor.
Interesting idea, but I don't see it working. The incentive/payment structure doesn't seem like it would attract people in mass. A voter would now have to pay to curate content with the hope of getting that money they paid, plus more back. If I understand it correctly, I wouldn't touch "Yours" with someone else's hand.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat with you. On Steemit there's really no risk whatsoever associated with curating, whereas on Yours you always risk losing whatever the micro-payment associated with an up-vote is (the example in the video used 5,000 "bits" - is that 5,000 satoshi?).
1 bit is 100 satoshi, so 5,000 bits is 500,000 satoshi
Gotcha. Thanks for the info.
I guess at least there will not be so many "where does the money come from?" posts there, as it seems the money comes from the users themselves, redistributing it.
I'm of the opinion, based on the admittedly little that I know about Yours, that pointing out the clarity of how the system works, making it appear like the simpler application to get into and start earning money, is about the only angle that Yours can take that might give it the edge with the mainstream over Steemit.
Obviously, it's far too early into this experiment to know for sure how each "side" will approach the competition and how it will pan out.
Competition is a good thing. It is only a matter of time before Steem-thereum is created on the Ethereum blockchain. Ultimately, the competition will help drive innovation and shape the future of social media.
I am excited for competitors to come on board as well.
Bitcoin community is strong-minded & better-funded set of folks, as demonstrated in ETH-ETC 'civil war'. Obviously, these folks would be supporting the YOURS project.
Then, ETH community, is flexible-minded & hyper-optimistic set of young bloods, as demonstrated in TheDao ICOs. 'Steem-thereum' could easily be the 'next-highest-funded' project (?).
Steem Devs then must move fast, resolve user issues, beef up security issues, etc etc.
Competition is the best thing! :)
Competition is very much a good thing. I just want to make sure that I'm invested in all of the different offerings, because you know darn well that one of them is going to be a grand-slam with the mainstream.
An interesting read. Only time will tell if their opinion on creating a cryptosystem and supporting economy are too big of a burden to sustain.
Interesting stuff.
They're right about the strain on the lead devs.
Creating a brand new system ... with all that pressure, and people's expectations/hopes ...but I think that will be solved by the community contributing - and we can clearly see that happening, and also other Steemit offshoots developing healthily from the new blockchain.
Good luck to them, I say.
Each to their own.
Love Peace & Freedom.
I upvote U