originally published: on cent
I can say that I am pretty impressed with this cent platform in general. I've been searching for a blockchain blogging platform for a while, but haven't found anything of substance.
As a writer, there are specific things that I look for so I can establish myself. So far I am a Medium writer, on which I can say I am not satisfied because there are other avenues that Medium has not explored as much, and also the idea of publishing your content on someone else's server not owning it 100% could be a scary thing. Here I wrote about the things I didn't like about Medium: What Scared Me About Medium
I recently tried out Hive.blog, it was interesting at first, but then as I dug deeper I saw a lot of things I didn't like: I wrote about it here: Why Hive Blog Will Amount into Nothing.
Then I came across mirror.xyz, though it is similar to cent, and has other things that I like on there which cent doesn't have. So here I am going to list and explain some features that as a writer, I believe will improve and attract more people to this platform.
Put food on the table.
Truth is everyone is in for the money, unless if you are a Buddha, Mother Teresa, or Jesus Christ. Jump up and down all you want, but this is the simple fact that determines success in anything. So what does this mean to Cent? it simply means the system should be able to sustain a person on the financial level.
That means each and every person should have the potential of generating enough income as long as they put their effort into creating valuable content. I have seen a lot of developers abandon their projects simply because of this. And a lot of projects fail because of 'It doesn't put food on the table' syndrome. So the earlier we deal with this situation the earlier we will attract good content creators.
Pay people by mileage.
With the money problem out of the way now let’s talk about how we can implement this issue. I know now there are several ways a user's content will get cents through different ways, however, we have to consider the fact that some people might forget to pinch that tip button, or seed button or whatever, then the content creator is discouraged. What I suggest is to pay people based on how much time a user spends on their content.Say for example a post's reading time is 7 minutes.
Then if a user comes and read all of it, then if a rate is 1 cent per minute then regardless of tips or upvote or whatever the post should generate that 7 cents per person, and if that person decides to tip then it's more. Because If I spend two days researching a well-written post that is over 12 minutes read, and another just posts a random post of less than one minute the rate should never be the same. So whether it is a video or an article they should be paid based on mileage. You simply can't open a cupcake, eat all of it then decide you didn't like it.
Subscription model.
I believe a proper way for any platform to generate income is through subscription. Like medium, there should be premium content that is exclusive for premium subscribers and the general public. When you publish a post we should have a choice to make it exclusive for premium members or regular members. This will encourage content creators to create more authentic and original content. This should be easy because it can also be subtracted from the generated income. So users won't worry about using money from their pockets.
Referral program & Sharing.
A better way to make a platform like this grow is an automatic referral program. Here there are two ways that should be implemented. First is a referral link, A program where if a user shares a link of any of their content on any other social media account, they get rewards, if an incoming link is from a potential new user, they would get a referral reward if the user registers.
The link should be automatically embedded with a user referral link.The second one is that of sharing rewards. That means all other links from this platform shared by any member on other social media accounts should reward users based on the incoming traffic. What I mean is if a content creator is willing to reward readers who share their content So if I have created content, I can check "reward incoming traffic shared by users" Then verified traffic will automatically reward users who shared my content. So, then money generated from a reader of shared incoming traffic if will be split between the content creator and the person who shared, either out of the platform or inside like [reblog] or something like that.
Coauthoring.
One of the cool features I like about mirror.xyz is the ability to co-author a post with another user. This is a very cool feature because, one could be an editor and another one a publisher, where two parties can decide how to split the generated income. Even Amazon has not been able to do this. Through collaboration, both parties will walk out happy after the project is done. This will invite professional editors who are not content creators but can edit and proofread content and get paid for it.
Sponsorship & Boosting content.
A lot of people are annoyed by ads. So based on the content's category, a user can decide to sell 'ad space or related content on their published post. So if someone is a new user who doesn't have lots of followers can pay to promote their content on those who have lots of followers.
NFT - Royalties.
Besides just selling your NFTs, wouldn't it be nice for them to be paid if users decide to embed this NFT on their post? Think of a site like Pexels, Pixabay, and unsplash. A lot of people embed images from these sites, if they were getting paid even a small portion or there was a way to tip them from the posts then it would make their life easier.
Publishing books. I know we can already mint our posts, and sell them to someone, but would be nice to be able to publish an entire book and issue a limited amount for people to be able to buy and resell them. And maybe publishers could be paid based on mileage again. On top of that, a book could be co-authored for split pay and royalties.
Tags & #tags.
Don't underestimate the power of tags, I am not sure what is the future roadmap of this platform, But it won't survive without tags. Tags where users can tag other users for various purposes like, tag them on the post, tag them as coauthor, or contributors where people can tip them.Hashtags are as important because besides, following specific hashtags, organizing content, and bringing relevant content, they can also be used to raise funds, competitions, or challenges, donations, charity, events. So when a special hashtag is generated, if it is a challenge or donation a special wallet is created for a limited amount of time or forever where people can donate by using these tags. If it is a challenge and a deadline is met the funds will automatically be sent to the winner based on the votes.
Reactions and Curation.
Sometimes the best way to moderate content is through the users, instead of spending a lot of money and resources to find plagiarism, NSFW, spam, and such, why not leverage users to do this for the system. So if someone finds out that the content is not useful, it is not suitable for children or everyone, they can just curate content by using reactions, where these reactions can also be used to rank the relevancy of content.
Conclusion.
I believe there is a lot of room for improvement, these are just my ideas, the question remains if these things are possible to implement and whether they are practical to make the platform grow to its glory. By the way, how can I import my post from Medium as an XML file? and anything to do with the author's profile, can we link up our social media accounts?